ABSTRACT
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump ignited one of many campaign controversies with words in Wilmington, North Carolina, as the presidential election headed towards its final months. As some pointed out, on the day Trump spoke, forty-one Americans were shot and killed. Whether they were deliberately calibrated to cause offense will never be known, but the ambiguity of Trump's terms was enough to excite the emotions of both sides of the gun debate. Trump is more equivocal regarding guns than this and some other of his recent pronouncements imply. Obama was mocked by those who resist gun control for what some felt were faux emotions. But Trump's response to Sandy Hook was, if anything, just as emotive as Obama's, albeit from a different perspective. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book states that Second Amendment, gun control, and self-defense animate deep philosophical debates that run across time and space.
