“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed

Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.

Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.

How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire’s answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn’t fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.

And then there’s the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.

McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn’t preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That’s the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.

Five Takeaways

•       It’s the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson’s argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.

•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that only becomes visible when the next Sandy Hook or Parkland arrives.

•       No Duty to Retreat. English common law, imported into the colonies, required you to retreat from a public confrontation before resorting to lethal force. Amid the centennial fervor of 1876, American courts began overturning homicide convictions on new grounds: retreat, declared Indiana’s Supreme Court, was not “the tendency of the American mind,” and a “true man,” added an Ohio court, need not fly from an aggressor. The repeating rifle helped make the old duty obsolete — you cannot outrun a bullet — and stand your ground became canon. Every week, somewhere in America, the defense still succeeds.

•       “The Biggest Fraud”: Rewriting the Second Amendment. The founders’ great fear was a standing army; the amendment preserved a well regulated militia — trained and disciplined, not unlimited. Beginning in the 1970s, the NRA underwrote sympathetic scholarship, law reviews, and court cases in a deliberate long game to recast the amendment as an individual right — moving guns from common law, where legislatures can regulate, into constitutional law, where they largely cannot. Warren Burger, the Republican former chief justice, called it the biggest fraud he had ever seen perpetrated on the American people. Now the Supreme Court’s “common use” test — found nowhere in the Constitution — means a weapon popular enough may be unbannable, with AR-15 bans next on the docket.

•       The Death Star Eclipsed. McIntire’s cache of internal NRA documents traces the organization’s path from post-Civil War marksmanship club — cofounded by a former New York Times correspondent — to radicalized lobbying juggernaut, complete with pro-gun Democrats like John Dingell on its board. Today it has been outflanked by no-compromise groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition, which at any given moment is pushing more lawsuits against state gun laws than the NRA. Guns remain the third rail — Beto O’Rourke said “hell yes” to taking away AR-15s and has not held office since. The irony in McIntire’s prescription: gun-safety advocates should copy the NRA’s own generation-long legal strategy.

About the Guest

Mike McIntire is an investigative journalist at The New York Times and a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams, whose work has exposed everything from Russian election interference to the hidden financial incentives of policing. He is the author of Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His new book is Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence (One Signal/Atria, July 2026).

References:

•       Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence by Mike McIntire (One Signal/Atria, July 2026). Jane Mayer: “McIntire is both a superb reporter and storyteller.”

•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson — the recent Keen On guest whose argument about Hollywood and American violence opens the conversation.

•       The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford — the classic anatomy of the American funeral business that lends this episode its central question.