What We've Become

Name: What We've Become
Price: 31.95 AUD
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ISBN: 9781324117667

Living and Dying in a Country of Arms

Jonathan M. Metzl (Vanderbilt University)

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Paperback

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English

WW Norton & Co
12 December 2025

Violence in society; Human rights; Civil rights & citizenship

When a naked, mentally ill white man with an AR-15 killed four young adults of color at a Waffle House, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl once again advocated for commonsense gun reform. But as he peeled back evidence surrounding the racially charged mass shooting, a shocking question emerged: Did the public health approach he had championed for years have it all wrong?

Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free.

In What We've Become, Metzl reckons both with the long history of distrust of public health and the larger forces-social, ideological, historical, racial, and political-that allow mass shootings to occur on a near daily basis in America. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation-and the meanings of safety and community-when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography.

This brilliant, piercing analysis points to mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We've Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance forging, racial reckoning, and political power brokering we must take to put things right.

By: Jonathan M. Metzl (Vanderbilt University)
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 211mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 298g
ISBN: 9781324117667
ISBN 10: 1324117664
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 12 December 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. Metzl has written extensively for scholarly and popular publications and is the author of four books. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Reviews for What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms

""We’ve arrived at this critical moment, when we seem willingly to bear the lost lives of many thousands so that a minority of our citizens may buy, carry, sell, trade, exhibit, gift and shoot lethal weaponry... [Metzl] acknowledges the crosshatch of laws that keep guns flowing across state borders. He casts a wide net."" -- Rachel Louise Snyder - The New York Times Book Review ""I know of few other thinkers who so consistently diagnose what ails America. This is the clarion call to everyone who professes concern about the state of guns in this country. If we stand a chance in hell of fighting back and remaking American in the image of gun safety, we need this book now!"" -- Michael Eric Dyson, The New York Times best-selling author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America