Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

In 2018, there was a mass shooting with an AR-15 at a Waffle House. The racially charged act of violence led Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl, a Nashville-based gun policy scholar and author, to advocate for gun reform. But how can we stop gun violence in a nation that sees hundreds of mass shootings every year? As Metzl examined the crime, he began having doubts about continuing to approach gun reform through the lens of public health that he had championed long before. The killings led him to examine the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the complexities of American gun politics. In his new book What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, Metzl discusses the long history of distrust of public health as well as larger forces—social, ideological, historical, racial, and political—that he argues allow mass shootings to occur on a near daily basis in America and become normalized. What We’ve Become looks closely at the consequences of mass shootings in this country, the me