Garry Wills

thumb|200px|Wills in 2015 Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is an American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993. Wills has written nearly forty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He joined the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor. Quotes The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t. To Keep and Bear Arms Garry Wills September 21, 1995 New York Review of Books So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun.The Gun is patriotic.The Gun is America.The Gun is God. A nation captive to The Gun Garry Wills June 15, 2016 The Boston Globe https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/06/14/nation-captive-the-gun/eVN6Kh8hVhodxxMTZnrtBM/story.html; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz w:Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Inside the minds of American mass shooters November 10, 2017 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/10/us-mass-shootings-history The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence." Our Moloch Garry Wills December 15, 2012 New York Review of Books External links Category:Academics from the United States Category:Journalists from the United States Category:Historians from the United States Category:Biographers from the United States Category:Pulitzer Prize winners Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Political authors from the United States Category:Catholics from the United States Category:Critics of religion Category:1934 births Category:Living people Category:People from Atlanta Category:Yale University alumni