The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It

Tom Diaz is a former gun enthusiast and an ex-member of the National Rifle Association whose first book, Making a Killing, is widely considered to be the most influential antigun book ever written. Its publication helped to spark a national media campaign around the machinations of the gun industry and the wave of gun violence it spawned.

Picking up where Making a Killing left off, The Last Gun looks at how the gun industry has changed dramatically in the intervening decade, how the nature of gun violence has changed in step with industry trends, and why the time is ripe for a new political effort to attack gun violence at its source: the guns themselves.

In The Last Gun, Diaz offers a chilling, up-to-date survey of the changed landscape of gun manufacturing and marketing, including the disturbing trend toward military-grade, high-powered gun models and the latest statistics on how these more powerful guns have enabled new levels of gun violence to crest. The Last Gun shows how the once-impregnable gun lobby has become a “paper tiger,” reviewing recent legislative and judicial developments, as well as important local case studies, to show that now is the time for a renewed effort to bring a fundamentally corrupt and dangerous industry to heel.

Newtown, Connecticut. Aurora, Colorado. Both have entered our collective memory as sites of unimaginable heartbreak and mass slaughter perpetrated by lone gunmen. Meanwhile, cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., are dealing with the painful, everyday reality of record rates of gun-related deaths. By any account, gun violence in the United States has reached epidemic proportions.

A widely respected activist and policy analyst—as well as a former gun enthusiast and an ex-member of the National Rifle Association—Tom Diaz presents a chilling, up-to-date survey of the changed landscape of gun manufacturing and marketing. The Last Gun explores how the gun industry and the nature of gun violence have changed, including the disturbing rise in military-grade gun models. But Diaz also argues that the once formidable gun lobby has become a "paper tiger," marshaling a range of evidence and case studies to make the case that now is the time for a renewed political effort to attack gun violence at its source—the guns themselves.

In the aftermath of Newtown, a challenging national conversation lies ahead. The Last Gun is an indispensable guide to this debate, and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we can finally rid Americas streets, schools, and homes of gun violence and prevent future Newtowns.

Tom Diaz is a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., a not-for-profit, educational foundation working to enhance gun control in America. His books include Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America (The New Press). He lives in Washington, D.C.