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This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's founders did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms - and that this distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy.. More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers - it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation.. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns: As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy.