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Battleground America

By Jill Lepore

Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.

Russell King, a seventeen-year-old junior, was sitting at a table with another junior, Nate Mueller. King, shot in the head, fell face first onto the table, a pool of blood forming. A bullet grazed Mueller’s ear. “I could see the flame at the end of the gun,” Mueller said later. Daniel Parmertor, a sixteen-year-old snowboarder, was shot in the head. Someone screamed “Duck!” Demetrius Hewlin, sixteen, was also shot in the head, and slid under the table. Joy Rickers, a senior, tried to run; Lane shot her as she fled. Nickolas Walczak, shot in his neck, arm, back, and face, fell to the floor. He began crawling toward the door.

Ever since the shootings at Columbine High School, in a Denver suburb, in 1999, American schools have been preparing for gunmen. Chardon started holding drills in 2007, after the Virginia Tech massacre, when twenty-three-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a college senior, shot fifty-seven people in Blacksburg.

At Chardon High School, kids ran through the halls screaming “Lockdown!” Some of them hid in the teachers’ lounge; they barricaded the door with a piano. Someone got on the school’s public-address system and gave instructions, but everyone knew what to do. Students ran into classrooms and dived under desks; teachers locked the doors and shut off the lights. Joseph Ricci, a math teacher, heard Walczak, who was still crawling, groaning in the hallway. Ricci opened the door and pulled the boy inside. No one knew if the shooter had more guns, or more rounds. Huddled under desks, students called 911 and texted their parents. One tapped out, “Prayforus.”

From the cafeteria, Frank Hall, the assistant football coach, chased Lane out of the building, and he ran off into the woods.

Moments later, four ambulances arrived. E.M.T.s raced Rickers and Walczak to Chardon’s Hillcrest Hospital. Hewlin, Parmertor, and King were flown by helicopter to a trauma center at MetroHealth Medical Center, in Cleveland. By eight-thirty, the high school had been evacuated.

At a quarter to nine, police officers with dogs captured Lane, about a mile from the school.

“I hate to say it, but we trained for exactly this type of thing, a school emergency of this type,” Dan McClelland, the county sheriff, said.

Danny Parmertor died that afternoon. That evening, St. Mary’s Church opened its doors, and the people of Chardon sank to their knees and keened. At the town square, students gathered to hold a vigil. As night fell, they lit candles. Drew Gittins, sixteen, played a Black Eyed Peas song on his guitar. “People killin’, people dyin’,” he sang. “People got me, got me questionin’, Where is the love?”

Russell King had been too badly wounded. A little after midnight, doctors said that they couldn’t save him.

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.

The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.

Men are far more likely to own guns than women are, but the rate of gun ownership among men fell from one in two in 1980 to one in three in 2010, while, in that same stretch of time, the rate among women remained one in ten. What may have held that rate steady in an age of decline was the aggressive marketing of handguns to women for self-defense, which is how a great many guns are marketed. Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people. One reason that gun ownership is declining, nationwide, might be that high-school shooting clubs and rifle ranges at summer camps are no longer common.

Although rates of gun ownership, like rates of violent crime, are falling, the power of the gun lobby is not. Since 1980, forty-four states have passed some form of law that allows gun owners to carry concealed weapons outside their homes for personal protection. (Five additional states had these laws before 1980. Illinois is the sole holdout.) A federal ban on the possession, transfer, or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons, passed in 1994, was allowed to expire in 2004. In 2005, Florida passed the Stand Your Ground law, an extension of the so-called castle doctrine, exonerating from prosecution citizens who use deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have retreated safely; Stand Your Ground laws expand that protection outside the home to any place that an individual “has a right to be.” Twenty-four states have passed similar laws.

The day before T. J. Lane shot five high-school students in Ohio, another high-school student was shot in Florida. The Orlando Sentinel ran a three-paragraph story. On February 26th, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin left a house in a town outside Orlando and walked to a store. He was seen by a twenty-eight-year-old man named George Zimmerman, who called 911 to report that Martin, who was black, was “a real suspicious guy.” Zimmerman got out of his truck. Zimmerman was carrying a 9-mm. pistol; Martin was unarmed. What happened next has not been established, and is much disputed. Zimmerman told the police that Martin attacked him. Martin’s family has said that the boy, heard over a cell phone, begged for his life.

Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest. Martin did not survive. Zimmerman was not charged. Outside Orlando, the story was not reported.

The day after the shooting in Ohio, I went to a firing range. I’d signed up for a lesson the week before. Once, when I was in Air Force R.O.T.C. for a year, I spent an afternoon studying how to defeat a sniper, but I’d never held a gun before.

The American Firearms School sits in an industrial park just north of Providence, in a beige stucco building topped with a roof of mint-green sheet metal. From the road, it looks like a bowling alley, but from the parking lot you can tell that it’s not. You can hear the sound of gunfire. It doesn’t sound like thunder. It doesn’t sound like rain. It sounds like gunfire.

Inside, there’s a shop, a pistol range, a rifle range, a couple of classrooms, a locker room, and a place to clean your gun. The walls are painted police blue up to the wainscoting, and then white to the ceiling, which is painted black. It feels like a clubhouse, except, if you’ve never been to a gun shop before, that part feels not quite licit, like a porn shop. On the floor, there are gun racks, gun cases, holsters, and gun safes. Rifles hang on a wall behind the counter; handguns are under glass. Most items, including the rifles, come in black or pink: there are pink handcuffs, a pink pistol grip, a pink gun case, and pink paper targets. Above the pink bull’s-eye, which looks unnervingly like a breast, a line of text reads, “Cancer sucks.”

The American Firearms School is run by Matt Medeiros, a Rhode Island firefighter and E.M.T. Medeiros is also a leader of the Rhode Island chapter of Pink Heals, a nonprofit organization of emergency and rescue workers who drive pink fire trucks and pink police cars to raise money for cancer research and support groups. Last year, when Pink Heals opened a women’s center in West Warwick, Medeiros held a fund-raiser at the Firearms School.

Unlike many firing ranges, which are private clubs, the American Firearms School is open to the public. Most mornings, federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies, as well as private security firms, rent out the ranges for training and target practice. Classes, from beginner to advanced, are held in the afternoons, and are run by certified instructors.

In many states, to purchase a gun from a licensed dealer you need a permit, which requires you to complete firearms-safety training, not unlike driver’s education. But, even if all states required this, not everyone who buys a gun would have to take a class. That’s because forty per cent of the guns purchased in the United States are bought from private sellers at gun shows, or through other private exchanges, such as classified ads, which fall under what is known as the “gun-show loophole” and are thus unregulated.

At the American Firearms School, the Learn to Shoot program, for novices, costs forty dollars for ninety minutes: a lesson, a gun rental, range time, two targets, and two boxes of bullets. This doesn’t constitute sufficient instruction for a gun permit in the state, but the school offers a one-day, ninety-nine-dollar course that does: Basic Firearms Safety includes shooting fundamentals, a discussion of firearms law, and guidance in safe firearms storage.

The idea that every man can be his own policeman, and every woman hers, has necessitated revisions to the curriculum: civilians now receive training once available only to law-enforcement officers, or the military. A six-hour class on concealed carrying includes a lesson in “engaging the threat.” N.R.A. Basic Personal Protection in the Home teaches “the basic knowledge, skills, and attitude essential to the safe and efficient use of a handgun for protection of self and family” and provides “information on the law-abiding individual’s right to self-defense,” while N.R.A. Basic Personal Protection Outside the Home is a two-day course. A primer lasting three hours provides “a tactical look at civilian life.” This raises the question of just how much civilian life is left.

As I waited for my lesson, I paged through a stack of old magazines while watching Fox News on a flat-screen television. In Michigan and Arizona, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were competing in that day’s Republican primaries. At the top of the hour came the headlines: in Ohio, Demetrius Hewlin had just died. For a tick, the news announcer fell silent.

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I put down Field and Stream and picked up American Rifleman , a publication of the N.R.A. The magazine includes a regular column called “The Armed Citizen.” A feature article introduced David Keene, the N.R.A.’s new president. Keene, who is sixty-six, is a longtime conservative political strategist. Grover Norquist once called him “a conservative Forrest Gump.” The 2012 Presidential election, Keene told American Rifleman , is “perhaps the most crucial election, from a Second Amendment standpoint, in our lifetimes.”

The Second Amendment reads, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Arms are military weapons. A firearm is a cannon that you can carry, as opposed to artillery so big and heavy that you need wheels to move it, or people to help you. Cannons that you can carry around didn’t exist until the Middle Ages. The first European firearms—essentially, tubes mounted on a pole—date to the end of the fourteenth century and are known as “hand cannons.” Then came shoulder arms (that is, guns you can shoulder): muskets, rifles, and shotguns. A pistol is a gun that can be held in one hand. A revolver holds a number of bullets in a revolving chamber, but didn’t become common until Samuel Colt patented his model in 1836. The firearms used by a well-regulated militia, at the time the Second Amendment was written, were mostly long arms that, like a smaller stockpile of pistols, could discharge only once before they had to be reloaded. In size, speed, efficiency, capacity, and sleekness, the difference between an eighteenth-century musket and the gun that George Zimmerman was carrying is roughly the difference between the first laptop computer—which, not counting the external modem and the battery pack, weighed twenty-four pounds—and an iPhone.

A gun is a machine made to fire a missile that can bore through flesh. It can be used to hunt an animal or to commit or prevent a crime. Enough people carrying enough guns, and with the will and the training to use them, can defend a government, or topple one. For centuries before the first English colonists travelled to the New World, Parliament had been regulating the private ownership of firearms. (Generally, ownership was restricted to the wealthy; the principle was that anyone below the rank of gentleman found with a gun was a poacher.) England’s 1689 Declaration of Rights made a provision that “subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their condition and as allowed by law”; the Declaration was an attempt to resolve a struggle between Parliament and the Crown, in which Parliament wrested control of the militia from the Crown.

In the United States, Article VI of the Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1776 and ratified in 1781, required that “every state shall always keep up a well regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutred, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of field pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.” In early America, firearms and ammunition were often kept in public arsenals. In 1775, the British Army marched to Concord with the idea of seizing the arsenal where the Colonial militia stored its weapons. In January of 1787, a Massachusetts resident named Daniel Shays led eleven hundred men, many of them disaffected Revolutionary War veterans, in an attempt to capture an arsenal in Springfield; they had been protesting taxes, but they needed guns and ammunition. Springfield had been an arsenal since 1774. In 1777, George Washington, at the urging of Henry Knox, made it his chief northern arsenal. By 1786, Springfield housed the largest collection of weapons in the United States. In the winter of 1787, the governor of Massachusetts sent the militia to suppress the rebellion; the Springfield arsenal was defended. That spring, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Among the matters the delegates were to take up was granting to the federal government the power to suppress insurgencies like Shays’ Rebellion. From Boston, Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane wrote to him with some advice for “such a Number of wise men as you are connected with in the Convention”: no more weapons, no more war. “I had Rather hear of the Swords being beat into Plow-shares, and the Halters used for Cart Roops, if by that means we may be brought to live Peaceably with won a nother.”

The U.S. Constitution, which was signed in Philadelphia in September of 1787, granted Congress the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions,” the power “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress,” and the power “to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

Ratification was an uphill battle. The Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in 1789, offered assurance to Anti-Federalists, who feared that there would be no limit to the powers of the newly constituted federal government. Since one of their worries was the prospect of a standing army—a permanent army—Madison drafted an amendment guaranteeing the people the right to form a militia. In Madison’s original version, the amendment read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” This provision was made in the same spirit as the Third Amendment, which forbids the government to force you to have troops billeted in your home: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

None of this had anything to do with hunting. People who owned and used long arms to hunt continued to own and use them; the Second Amendment was not commonly understood as having any relevance to the shooting of animals. As Garry Wills once wrote, “One does not bear arms against a rabbit.” Meanwhile, militias continued to muster—the Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War—but the national defense was increasingly assumed by the United States Army; by the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States had a standing army, after all. Harpers Ferry was the U.S. Army’s southern armory, Springfield its northern. In 1859, when John Brown and his men raided Harpers Ferry, they went there to get guns.

At the American Firearms School, you can either rent a gun or bring your own. It’s like an ice-skating rink that way, except that renting skates when you don’t know how to skate is different from renting a gun when you don’t know how to shoot. The guys who work at the school don’t take any chances. In the twelve years since the school opened, there has never been an accident. “You can’t do anything here without us watching you,” Tom Dietzel told me. “In a swimming pool, there are lifeguards. And this place is a lot more dangerous than a swimming pool.”

Dietzel, who is twenty-four and has long dark hair, is one of the few instructors at the school who isn’t ex-military, ex-police, or ex-rescue. He led me to a classroom, opened a case, and took out a .22-calibre Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. Dietzel studied history in college, and on weekends he gives tours of the Freedom Trail, in Boston. We talked about the eighteenth-century portraits in the new wing of the Museum of Fine Arts; we debated the oratory of Joseph Warren. Dietzel owns a flintlock musket; he’s a Revolutionary War reënactor, with the Thirteenth Continental Regiment. He showed me a photograph of himself in costume: a cocked hat, a mustard-colored scarf of flax. He could have been painted by Gilbert Stuart.

Dietzel is a skilled and knowledgeable teacher, steady, patient, and calm. He had written safety rules on a whiteboard: Never point your gun at anyone. Keep your finger off the trigger. Don’t trust the safety. Assume every gun is loaded.

He explained how to load the magazine. “This is a semiautomatic,” he said. “After you fire, it will load the next bullet, but you have to pull the trigger again to fire. We don’t have automatics here.” Automatic weapons are largely banned by the federal government. “An automatic, you pull the trigger and it keeps shooting.” Dietzel shook his head. “Because: why? Why?”

Gun owners may be more supportive of gun-safety regulations than is the leadership of the N.R.A. According to a 2009 Luntz poll, for instance, requiring mandatory background checks on all purchasers at gun shows is favored not only by eighty-five per cent of gun owners who are not members of the N.R.A. but also by sixty-nine per cent of gun owners who are.

Dietzel rose. “Stand like a shortstop about to field a ball,” he said.

He showed me how to hold the .22.

Every day, Dietzel goes to work and, at some point, has to hand a gun to a perfect stranger who has never used one. He went over the rules again.

We got earplugs and headgear and ammunition and went to the range. I fired a hundred rounds. Then Dietzel told me to go wash my hands, to get the gunpowder off, while he went to clean the gun.

The halls at the American Firearms School are decorated with framed prints: Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”; van Gogh’s “Irises.” A sign on the door of the women’s restroom reads, “Every Tuesday Is Ladies Night. Ladies Get FREE Range Time from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM .”

I opened the door, and turned on the tap. T. J. Lane had used a .22-calibre Mark III Target Rimfire pistol. For a long time, I let the water run.

On March 8th, Trayvon Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, held a press conference in Orlando. “We feel justice has not been served,” he said. He demanded the release of recordings of calls to 911. “Family Wants Answers in Teen’s Death,” the Associated Press reported.

Two days later, the biggest gun show in New England was held in West Springfield, Massachusetts, in an exposition center the size of an airport hangar. (Nationwide, there are about five thousand gun shows annually.) Early in the morning, men with guns lined up to have them inspected at the door: two policemen made sure that every gun was unloaded; a plastic bucket on the floor, half filled with sand, was for dumping ammunition, like the bin at airport security where T.S.A. officers make you chuck your toothpaste. Tickets cost eleven dollars, but there was no charge for children younger than twelve.

Inside was a flea market: hundreds of folding tables draped with felt tablecloths and covered with guns, along with knives, swords, and a great deal of hunting gear. Long guns stood on their stocks, muzzles up. Handguns rested under glass, like jewelry. “Cash for Guns,” the sign at the Tombstone Trading Company read. Ammunition was sold outdoors, in cartons, as in the fastener aisle of a hardware store. At the N.R.A. booth, membership came with a subscription to one of the N.R.A.’s three magazines, an N.R.A. baseball hat, twenty-five hundred dollars of insurance, “and the most important benefit of all—protecting the Constitution.”

I stopped at the table of Guns, Inc., which advertises itself as the largest firearms dealer in western Massachusetts. Guns, Inc., is also an arsenal: a place where people who don’t want to keep their guns at home can pay to have them stored.

In the nineteenth century, the Springfield Armory grew to become the single biggest supplier of long arms to the U.S. Army. It shut its doors in 1968. A National Historic Site now, it houses about ten thousand weapons, most of which are shoulder arms. A sign on the door warns that no firearms are allowed inside. “People ask about that,” Richard Colton, a park ranger and the site’s historian, told me when I visited, “but we have plenty of guns here already.”

The story of the Springfield Armory illustrates a shift in the manufacture and storage of firearms: from public to private. In 1974, a family in Illinois founded a company devoted to arms manufacturing and import called Springfield Armory, Inc. The firm, “the first name in American firearms,” is one of the largest of its kind in the United States. Dennis Reese, the current C.E.O., and his brother Tom have staunchly opposed gun regulation. I asked Brian Pranka, of Guns, Inc., if he had any Springfield Armory guns. He said, “You can’t buy a Springfield handgun in Springfield.” The company does not make handguns that conform to all the gun-safety regulations in states like Massachusetts, New York, and California, and in Illinois they have lobbied the legislature, successfully defeating a state ban on assault weapons. In 2008, the Illinois State Rifle Association gave the Reeses the Defenders of Freedom Award.

On the first day of the Springfield gun show, Trayvon Martin’s parents appeared on “Good Morning America.” On March 19th, the Department of Justice, responding to growing protests, announced that it would conduct an investigation. On March 23rd, President Obama answered questions about the shooting at a press conference. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the President said. Later that day, Rick Santorum spoke outside a firing range in West Monroe, Louisiana, where he’d just shot fourteen rounds from a Colt .45. He told the crowd, “What I was able to exercise was one of those fundamental freedoms that’s guaranteed in our Constitution, the right to bear arms.”

In the two centuries following the adoption of the Bill of Rights, in 1791, no amendment received less attention in the courts than the Second, except the Third. As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”

Although these laws were occasionally challenged, they were rarely struck down in state courts; the state’s interest in regulating the manufacture, ownership, and storage of firearms was plain enough. Even the West was hardly wild. “Frontier towns handled guns the way a Boston restaurant today handles overcoats in winter,” Winkler writes. “New arrivals were required to turn in their guns to authorities in exchange for something like a metal token.” In Wichita, Kansas, in 1873, a sign read, “Leave Your Revolvers at Police Headquarters, and Get a Check.” The first thing the government of Dodge did when founding the city, in 1873, was pass a resolution that “any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the State shall be dealt with according to law.” On the road through town, a wooden billboard read, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.” The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona, Winkler explains, had to do with a gun-control law. In 1880, Tombstone’s city council passed an ordinance “to Provide against the Carrying of Deadly Weapons.” When Wyatt Earp confronted Tom McLaury on the streets of Tombstone, it was because McLaury had violated that ordinance by failing to leave his gun at the sheriff’s office.

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times . For most of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm, it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others, lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the 1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.” Furthermore, Jackson said, the language of the amendment makes clear that the right “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” The Court agreed, unanimously. In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters, its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.” It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.

The modern gun debate began with a shooting. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald bought a bolt-action rifle—an Italian military-surplus weapon—for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents by ordering it from an ad that he found in American Rifleman . Five days after Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, Thomas Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation restricting mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles. The N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, Franklin L. Orth, testified before Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

Gun-rights arguments have their origins not in eighteenth-century Anti-Federalism but in twentieth-century liberalism. They are the product of what the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet has called the “rights revolution,” the pursuit of rights, especially civil rights, through the courts. In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. “Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community throughout the nation,” Huey Newton said.

In 1968, as Winkler relates, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the issue new urgency. A revised Gun Control Act banned mail-order sales, restricted the purchase of guns by certain high-risk people (e.g., those with criminal records), and prohibited the importation of military-surplus firearms. That law, along with a great deal of subsequent law-and-order legislation, was intended to fight crime, control riots, and solve what was called, in the age of the Moynihan report, the “Negro problem.” The regulations that are part of these laws—firearms restrictions, mandatory-sentencing guidelines, abolition of parole, and the “war on drugs”—are now generally understood to be responsible for the dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate.

The N.R.A. supported the 1968 Gun Control Act, with some qualms. Orth was quoted in American Rifleman as saying that although some elements of the legislation “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

David Keene, the N.R.A.’s president, is the former chairman of the American Conservative Union. In his office in Washington, he has a photograph of Ronald Reagan on the wall and a view of Pennsylvania Avenue out the window. Keene has white hair, blue eyes, and an air of plainspoken geniality. When he was eight or nine, he says, his grandfather taught him how to shoot by aiming a .22 at squirrels and rabbits.

Keene’s parents were labor organizers. They never once voted for a Republican. “My first political activity was going door to door passing out pamphlets for J.F.K. in the snows of Wisconsin,” Keene told me. In the nineteen-fifties, he said, “Lionel Trilling considered conservatism to be a political pathology.” Keene became a conservative in high school, when he read “The Constitution of Liberty,” by Friedrich Hayek. In 1960, at the Republican National Convention, Barry Goldwater said, “Let’s grow up conservatives, if we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday. Let’s get to work.” Four years later, Keene volunteered for Goldwater’s campaign.

After Goldwater’s defeat, Keene finished college and went on to law school. He became the national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom. “What brought conservatism to dominance was the Great Society,” Keene argues, because Johnson’s vision represented “the culmination of the thinking that you could solve everything with money, and nothing worked.” Keene went to D.C. to work for Spiro Agnew, and then for Richard Nixon.

On Election Day in 1970, Keene was at the White House. Joseph Tydings, a Democratic senator from Maryland who had introduced a Firearms Registration and Licensing Act, was running for reëlection. “The returns were coming in, and someone said, ‘What’s going on in Maryland?’ ” Keene recalled. “And someone answered, ‘I can tell you this: everywhere except Baltimore, there are long lines of pickup trucks at the polls. He’s going down over gun control.’ ”

In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense. Fights over rights are effective at getting out the vote. Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked. Opposing gun control was also consistent with a larger anti-regulation, libertarian, and anti-government conservative agenda. In 1975, the N.R.A. created a lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, headed by Harlon Bronson Carter, an award-winning marksman and a former chief of the U.S. Border Control. But then the N.R.A.’s leadership decided to back out of politics and move the organization’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where a new recreational-shooting facility was to be built. Eighty members of the N.R.A.’s staff, including Carter, were ousted. In 1977, the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, usually held in Washington, was moved to Cincinnati, in protest of the city’s recent gun-control laws. Conservatives within the organization, led by Carter, staged what has come to be called the Cincinnati Revolt. The bylaws were rewritten and the old guard was pushed out. Instead of moving to Colorado, the N.R.A. stayed in D.C., where a new motto was displayed: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”

Ronald Reagan was the first Presidential candidate whom the N.R.A. had endorsed. David Keene ran Reagan’s Southern campaign. Reagan’s election, in 1980, made it possible for conservatives to begin turning a new interpretation of the Second Amendment into law. As the legal scholar Reva B. Siegel has chronicled, Orrin Hatch became the chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and commissioned a history of the Second Amendment, which resulted in a 1982 report, “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” The authors of the report claimed to have discovered “clear—and long-lost—proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”

In March of 1981, John Hinckley, Jr., shot Reagan, the White House press secretary, James Brady, a D.C. policeman, and a Secret Service agent. He used a .22 that he had bought at a pawnshop. A month later, the Times reported that Harlon Carter, then the N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, had been convicted of murder in Laredo, Texas, in 1931, at the age of seventeen. Carter had come home from school to find his mother distressed. She told him that three teen-age boys had been loitering nearby all afternoon, and that she suspected them of having been involved in stealing the family’s car. Carter left the house with a shotgun, found the boys, and told them that he wanted them to come back to his house to be questioned. According to the trial testimony of twelve-year-old Salvador Peña, Ramón Casiano, fifteen, the oldest of the boys, said to Carter, “We won’t go to your house, and you can’t make us.” Casiano took out a knife and said, “Do you want to fight me?” Carter shot Casiano in the chest. At Carter’s trial for murder, the judge, J. F. Mullally, instructed the jury, “There is no evidence that defendant had any lawful authority to require deceased to go to his house for questioning, and if defendant was trying to make deceased go there for that purpose at the time of the killing, he was acting without authority of law, and the law of self-defense does not apply.” Two years later, Carter’s murder conviction was overturned on appeal; the defense argued that the instructions to the jury had been improper.

When the Times broke the Casiano murder story, Carter at first denied it, saying the trial record concerned a different man with a similar name. He later said that he had “nothing to hide” and was “not going to rehash that case or any other that does not relate to the National Rifle Association.”

James Brady and his wife, Sarah, went on to become active in the gun-control movement, but neither the assassination attempt nor Carter’s past derailed the gun-rights movement. In 1986, the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment achieved new legal authority with the passage of the Firearms Owners Protection Act, which repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” This interpretation was supported by a growing body of scholarship, much of it funded by the N.R.A. According to the constitutional-law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law-review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment were “written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the N.R.A. or other gun-rights organizations.” In an interview, former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the new interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

The debate narrowed, and degraded. Political candidates who supported gun control faced opponents whose campaigns were funded by the N.R.A. In 1991, a poll found that Americans were more familiar with the Second Amendment than they were with the First: the right to speak and to believe, and to write and to publish, freely.

“If you had asked, in 1968, will we have the right to do with guns in 2012 what we can do now, no one, on either side, would have believed you,” David Keene said.

Between 1968 and 2012, the idea that owning and carrying a gun is both a fundamental American freedom and an act of citizenship gained wide acceptance and, along with it, the principle that this right is absolute and cannot be compromised; gun-control legislation was diluted, defeated, overturned, or allowed to expire; the right to carry a concealed handgun became nearly ubiquitous; Stand Your Ground legislation passed in half the states; and, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the District’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional. Justice Scalia wrote, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Two years later, in another 5–4 ruling, McDonald v. Chicago, the Court extended Heller to the states.

Nevertheless, Keene says that all of these gains are fragile, because President Obama—who in his first term has not only failed to push for gun control but has signed legislation extending gun rights—has been hiding his true convictions. (From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which funds pro-gun-control advocacy and research.) “If this President gets a second term, he will appoint one to three Supreme Court justices,” Keene says. “If he does, he could reverse Heller and McDonald, which is unlikely, but, more likely, they will restrict those decisions.”

This issue has been delivering voters to the polls since 1970. Conservatives hope that it will continue to deliver them in 2012. Keene, in his lifetime, has witnessed a revolution. “It’s not just the conservative political victories, the capture of the Republican Party, the creation of a conservative intellectual élite,” he said, “but the whole change in the way Americans look at government.” No conservative victories will last longer than the rulings of this Supreme Court.

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

In 2002, Keene’s son David Michael Keene was driving on the George Washington Memorial Parkway when, in a road-rage incident, he fired a handgun at another motorist. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for “using, brandishing, and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.” I asked Keene if this private tragedy had left him uncertain about what the N.R.A. had wrought. He said no: “You break the law, you pay the price.”

I asked Keene if any public atrocity had given him pause. He explained that it is the N.R.A.’s policy never to comment on a shooting.

I asked him how he would answer critics who charge that no single organization has done more to weaken Americans’ faith in government, or in one another, than the N.R.A.

“We live in a society now that’s Balkanized,” Keene said. “But that has nothing to do with guns.”

On Monday, March 26th, thousands of students rallied in Atlanta, carrying signs that read, “I am Trayvon Martin,” and “Don’t Shoot!” One week later, in Oakland, a forty-three-year-old man named One Goh walked into Oikos University, a small Christian college. He was carrying a .45-calibre semiautomatic pistol and four magazines of ammunition. He grabbed Katleen Ping, a receptionist, and dragged her into a classroom. Nearby, Lucas Garcia, a thirty-three-year-old E.S.L. teacher, heard a voice call out, “Somebody’s got a gun!” He helped his students escape through a back door. Dechen Yangdon, twenty-seven, turned off the lights in her classroom and locked the door. She could hear Ping screaming, “Help, help, help!” “We were locked inside,” Yangdon said later. “We couldn’t help her.”

Goh ordered the students to line up against the wall. He said, “I’m going to kill you all.”

They had come from all over the world. Ping, twenty-four, was born in the Philippines. She was working at the school to support her parents, her brother, two younger sisters, and her four-year-old son, Kayzzer. Her husband was hoping to move to the United States. Tshering Rinzing Bhutia, thirty-eight, was born in Gyalshing, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He took classes during the day; at night, he worked as a janitor at San Francisco International Airport. Lydia Sim, twenty-one, was born in San Francisco, to Korean parents; she wanted to become a pediatrician. Sonam Choedon, thirty-three, belonged to a family living in exile from Tibet. A Buddhist, she came to the United States from Dharamsala, India. She was studying to become a nurse. Grace Eunhea Kim, twenty-three, was putting herself through school by working as a waitress. Judith Seymour was fifty-three. Her parents had moved back to their native Guyana; her two children were grown. She was about to graduate. Doris Chibuko, forty, was born in Enugu, in eastern Nigeria, where she practiced law. She immigrated in 2002. Her husband, Efanye, works as a technician for A.T. & T. They had three children, ages eight, five, and three. She was two months short of completing a degree in nursing.

Ping, Bhutia, Sim, Choedon, Kim, Seymour, and Chibuko: Goh shot and killed them all. Then he went from one classroom to another, shooting, before stealing a car and driving away. He threw his gun into a tributary of San Leandro Bay. Shortly afterward, he walked into a grocery store and said, “I just shot some people.”

On Tuesday night, a multilingual memorial service was held at the Allen Temple Baptist Church. Oakland’s mayor, Jean Quan, said, “Oakland is a city of dreams.” A friend of Choedon’s said, “Mainly, we’re praying for her next life, that she can have a better one.” In Gyalshing, Bhutia’s niece, Enchuk Namgyal, asked that her uncle’s body be sent home to be cremated in the mountains above the village, across the world from the country where he came for an education, religious freedom, and economic opportunity, and was shot to death.

Kids in Chardon High are back in school. Nickolas Walczak is in a wheelchair. There are Trayvon Martin T-shirts. Oikos University is closed. The N.R.A. has no comment.

In an average year, roughly a hundred thousand Americans are killed or wounded with guns. On April 6th, the police found One Goh’s .45. Five days later, George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. In May, T. J. Lane will appear at a hearing. Trials are to come. In each, introduced as evidence, will be an unloaded gun. ♦

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Essay on PUBG Mobile Game Addiction for Students and Children

500 words essay on pubg mobile game addiction.

PUBG is a term you must have probably heard by now. It is the abbreviated form of PlayerUnknown’s Battleground. Basically, it is a video game which is a multiplayer battle royale game. It is very famous all over the world. However, the entertainment factor does not mean it is all good. The game has become viral and is played by billions of people. The players have become addicted to this game. Moreover, it is hampering their quality of life.

Impact of PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

When the game got released for Windows, it received rave reviews. Further, upon being released on mobile phones, it caught like wildfire. The craze for this game spread amongst all the age groups.

What started as a recreation game has now turned into an addiction. It is severely impacting the lives of the players and also resulting in various crimes. For instance, a boy killed himself due to PUBG mobile game addiction.

The game interferes greatly with the studies of a person. The students who should be studying waste their time on this game. This results in neglecting studies and also in reduced levels of concentration.

It is so because this PUBG mobile game addiction slows down their brain activity. Their ability to grasp things and focus just lowers. Even research suggests that the academic performance of PUBG players is dropping massively.

Similarly, the people who are working are also addicted to this game. It hampers their work and makes them lose the target of their goals. They are busy playing PUBG instead of focusing on their careers. Even more, than the players take leaves or skip meetings just to play this game endlessly. Due to this addiction, they also miss their deadlines and don’t fulfill their duties.

Furthermore, PUBG mobile game addiction ruins the relationships of people. It has even done so as there have been cases of breakups and divorces due to this game. People spend all their time on this time instead of with their family and friends. It strains their relationships and causes pain. Similarly, it has also resulted in many crimes of murder and suicides.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Control PUBG Mobile Game Addiction?

We all know that excess of anything is bad, be it a video game or anything. However, one must also know that we can control any addiction by proper measures. To begin with, try to lessen the time you spend on the game. Leaving it all of a sudden is impractical so set aside a fixed time and try to play it in that specific one.

Similarly, try to divert your mind. Do not always stay indoors. Go out and indulge in physical activities. When you will have other things to do, your mind won’t go towards the game. So, meet your friends and take up other hobbies.

Moreover, try to spend time with your family instead of scrolling through the phone or playing your game. When you will be surrounded by your loved ones, you will not care about anything else. So, utilize your time carefully instead of playing PUBG.

FAQ on Essay on PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

Q.1 What is the impact of PUBG mobile game addiction?

A.1 PUBG mobile game is very harmful. It creates a constraint between personal relationships. Moreover, it also hampers the professional life of a person. Similarly, the youth waste their time and neglect their studies just to play this game.

Q.2 How to control PUBG Mobile game addiction?

A.2 There are many ways to control this addiction. One must set a specific time for their gaming. Moreover, always identify and avoid triggers. Moreover, try to divert your mind from the game and indulge in time with friends and family.

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Why did the Angola Civil War of 1974-75 turn into a Cold War battleground

After a successful military coup in Portugal that toppled a long-standing authoritarian regime on April 25, 1974, the new rulers in Lisbon sought to divest the country of its costly colonial empire. The impending independence of one of those colonies, Angola, led to the Angolan civil war that grew into a Cold War competition. The Angola crisis of 1974–1975 ultimately contributed to straining relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Angola War for independence from Portugal started in the 1960s

Three main military movements had been fighting for Angolan independence since the 1960s. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was a Marxist organization centered in the capital, Luanda, and led by Agostinho Neto. The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), led by Holden Roberto, was based in the north of the country and had strong ties to the U.S. ally, Mobutu Sese Seko, in neighboring Zaire. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), an offshoot of the FNLA, was led by Jonas Savimbi and supported by the country’s largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu.

Following the Portuguese coup, these three revolutionaries met with representatives of the new Portuguese Government in January 1975 and signed the Alvor Agreement that granted Angolan independence and provided for a three-way power-sharing government. However, trust quickly broke down among the three groups, and the country descended into civil war as each vied for sole power.

The United States, China and the Soviet Union picked sides in the Civil War

The crisis in Angola developed into a Cold War battleground as the superpowers and their allies delivered military assistance to their preferred clients. The United States supplied aid and training for both the FNLA and UNITA while troops from Zaire assisted Holden Roberto and his fighters. China, also, sent military instructors to train the FNLA. The Soviet Union provided military training and equipment for the MPLA.

During the summer of 1975, the Soviet-supported MPLA was able to consolidate power in Luanda and oust the U.S.-supported FNLA from the capital, but the FNLA continued to attack. The remaining Portuguese troops failed to stem the violence. When MPLA leader Neto announced November 11, 1975, as the day of Angolan independence, Lisbon decided to withdraw its troops on that day.

Why did the MPLA ask Cuba for assistance in the Civil War?

The MPLA also had long-established relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Before November 11, the MPLA had negotiated with Castro for Cuban assistance. At the same time, UNITA, which enjoyed U.S. support, approached the Apartheid government in South Africa for military reinforcement. Pretoria, with the aim to end the use of Angola as a base for rebels fighting for the independence of South Africa-occupied Namibia, contributed forces that entered southern Angola in October and made rapid progress toward the capital. In response, Castro sent Cuban Special Forces to halt the South African advance and succeeded in drawing attention to the fact that the United States had provided support to a group that now accepted assistance from an Apartheid government.

South African involvement in the conflict improved the standing of the Soviet-supported MPLA

The U.S. Government had encouraged the South African intervention but preferred to downplay its connection with the Apartheid regime. However, once Pretoria’s involvement became widely known, the Chinese withdrew its advisers from the region, and the Ford Administration was faced with domestic resistance to the U.S. role in the Angolan conflict. President Gerald Ford had requested Congressional approval for more money to fund the operation in Angola. However, many members of Congress were wary of intervening abroad after the struggle in Vietnam, others wished to avoid the South Africa connection, and still, others did not believe the issue was important. In the end, Congress rejected the President’s request for additional funds. South Africa withdrew its forces in the spring of 1976 and the MPLA remained as the official government of Angola. Still, Jonas Savimbi and UNITA continued an insurgency until his death in 2002.

During the period of the Angolan crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union were still enjoying a brief thaw in their relations, in an era referred to as détente. During this time, Washington and Moscow had reached a series of agreements that aimed to reduce tensions between the two superpowers. However, by 1974, strains on bilateral relations had already compromised U.S. support for détente and the crisis in Angola served to accelerate this trend. From the U.S. point of view, one of the aims of détente was to draw the Soviet Union further into the international system so that Washington could induce Moscow to show restraint in its dealings with the Third World. The Ford Administration believed that Cuba had intervened in Angola as a Soviet proxy and as such, the general view in Washington was that Moscow was breaking the rules of détente. The appearance of a Soviet success and a U.S. loss in Angola on the heels of a victory by Soviet-supported North Vietnam over U.S.-supported South Vietnam continued to erode U.S. faith in détente as an effective Cold War foreign policy.

The U.S. failure to achieve its desired outcome in Angola raised the stakes of the superpower competition in the Third World. Subsequent disagreements over the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan contributed to undoing the period of détente between the Soviet Union and the United States. Additionally, the Angola crisis also ended a recent thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations.

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• Article: The Angola Crisis 1974–75
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Essays on Battle Ground

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Battleground Themes

Battlegrounds

The title of the book is Battleground, and the story is not just about the physical battlegrounds in World War II, although the reader is supplied with a very real sense of place and time leading up to and during these battles. There are more battlegrounds in everyone's life, and this story places many human battlegrounds with the physical battlegrounds as the backdrop.

There is the battle between the branches of the USA military, Army versus Navy versus Marines. The Secretary of the Navy has so little factual information coming from the front line he must employ devious means to assist him in making the best decisions. Within the Navy and Marines there is a battle between the officers and the enlisted men and between career Navy men and the ones who are brought out of retirement. There is an ongoing battle to establish procedures and processes to...

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This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content

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• Memory: 16 GB RAM
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• Storage: 50 GB available space

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Conflict in Literature

This essay about the role of conflict in literature, emphasizing its profound impact on characters and readers alike. It explores various types of conflict, from man versus man to man versus nature, highlighting how these struggles shape characters and narratives. Through examples from classic literature, it demonstrates how conflicts reflect universal human experiences and existential questions. Ultimately, the essay argues that literary conflict serves as a powerful tool for introspection and understanding the complexities of human nature.

How it works

At the heart of every captivating story lies a pulsating core of conflict, a fundamental driving force that sweeps characters into motion and shapes the contours of narrative arcs. Conflict in literature isn’t merely a hurdle for characters to overcome; it is the crucible within which characters are forged, tested, and ultimately transformed. Whether pitted against another character, society at large, natural forces, or their own inner demons, characters’ struggles can hold a mirror up to our own lives, making literature a profound exploration of human experience.

When dissecting the anatomy of literary conflict, we recognize several predominant types, each serving unique functions within storytelling. The most direct and often most visceral is man versus man. This conflict is straightforward but deeply complex in its implications. It’s the clashing of wills, a battleground where characters confront their adversaries face-to-face. Consider the epic showdowns in novels like Alexandre Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo.” The protagonist, Edmond Dantès, faces a myriad of enemies on his quest for vengeance. Each confrontation reveals layers of his character and those of his adversaries, peeling back to expose raw ambitions, fears, and moral complexities.

Yet, not all conflicts are waged on external fronts. Man versus self presents a labyrinthine internal struggle, a dialogue within a single mind. Here, literature dives into the psyche, presenting characters grappling with their own fears, desires, and doubts. In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare masterfully explores such internal conflict. Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal his introspections and debates over moral and existential dilemmas. His internal struggle is a poignant study of the human condition, touching on themes of duty, vengeance, life, death, and the authenticity of action.

Contrasting with the inward focus of man versus self, man versus nature sets characters against the indiscriminate might of the natural world. Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” is a prime example, where the harsh, unforgiving wilderness becomes both a stark adversary and a catalyst for Buck’s primal transformation. This conflict type not only highlights survival but also explores the fundamental nature of existence, stripping characters down to their barest instincts and desires.

The man versus society conflict often sees characters entangled with the laws, norms, and cultural pressures of their communities. Dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” employ this conflict type to critique and examine societal structures. Protagonist Offred’s battle against a repressive regime questions the themes of freedom, identity, and resistance, providing a dark vision of patriarchy and power.

These conflict types are not just isolated silos; they often intertwine within a narrative, layering the story with multiple dimensions of struggle. The complexity arises not merely from the conflict itself but from how the characters navigate these challenges. Their responses, successes, and failures paint a rich tapestry of human resilience and adaptability.

Literary conflicts are more than plot devices; they are reflections of universal existential and philosophical questions. Through them, authors probe deep truths about human nature and societal functions. The conflicts force characters to confront their deepest fears, question their values, and in the process, often reveal profound truths about the human experience. This reflective quality is what makes literature resonate across ages and cultures.

The enduring relevance of these conflicts in literature also speaks to their foundational role in human society. They are timeless because the fundamental challenges they represent—struggles with morality, identity, authority, and existence—are perennial human concerns. As society evolves, so too do the manifestations of these conflicts, but their core essence remains unchanged, acting as a continuous thread woven through the fabric of all human stories.

Conflict in literature also invites readers into a participatory role. As we navigate through the conflicts with the characters, we are prompted to reflect on our own choices and challenges. This vicarious experience can be both cathartic and enlightening, offering us insights into our own lives and the world around us. It is through the lens of conflict that literature achieves its most profound impact, serving not only as entertainment but as a powerful medium of reflection and introspection.

In sum, literary conflict is the dynamo that powers narratives, propelling characters into action and readers into deep engagement with the text. It is a multifaceted tool that writers use to explore the complexities of life and human nature. By examining these conflicts, we gain a deeper appreciation for literature’s ability to delve into the human spirit and emerge with universal truths that resonate with readers across time and place. The exploration of conflict in stories is not just about observing struggles; it’s about understanding the essence of what it means to be human.

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• Essay on PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

PUBG Mobile Game Essay

This PUBG essay in English is all about what the game is, how today’s youths and adults are getting addicted to this game and some tips to control your addiction to the game. The students will also get to know many incidents which will make them realise the height of addiction this game has. This essay will also try to suggest some steps to get their addiction off of this game.

What is the PUBG Mobile Game All About?

PUBG, which is abbreviated as Player Unknown’s BattleGround, is one of the most renowned games played by both youths and adults all over the world. PUBG is a game that is owned and managed by PUBG Corporation. This game is basically an action game focussed on combat. The features of this game, like the war room, graphics, multiplayer experience, and real life-like themes, make the game more interesting and addictive. PUBG mobile game was launched on July 30th, 2016, and since then, it has remained on the top while introducing new features and other interesting gameplay and modes, never letting their players get done with it.

How Do People Get Addicted to PUBG Mobile Games?

Mainly, students and employees are the most affected of all who are addicted to this game. It is better to term them as PUBG players as it also became a trend to be addressed as PUBG players compared to their real-life names. Even the names that PUBG players used in their profile were more famous than their real names. This addiction became more aggressive with the multiplayer experience, playing with all our like-minded friends and having a sense of team in the team matches. This game somehow provoked the players to live in an imaginary world and they also got emotionally invested in it.

The addiction of this game was also given a platform with official PUBG battles being sponsored by many multinational companies and these events became a cricket world cup equivalent for PUBG players, where they were provided with ranks. This addiction to PUBG rose to its height when YouTubers started uploading live gaming videos to make money. Now, those who weren’t playing the game started watching videos and ended up being indirectly addicted to it.

PUBG gives this beautiful world of imagination to its players, which at some point, makes it difficult for the players to differentiate virtual reality from real life. They start finding this world of PUBG so marvellous and full of action that they tend to ignore the real world. The costumes based on different events, different types of guns, and vehicles are all part of this game. The Royale Pass was like icing on the cake for both the owners and PUBG players. These players were even ready to buy special items just to show off to their friends.

What are the Harmful Effects of PUBG Mobile Game Addiction?

There are many harmful effects of PUBG mobile game addiction. Some major ones are as follows:

Research found that the mental ability of students, mainly their concentration power, decreases tremendously if they are one of the addicted PUBG players. 

Also, people tend to cut off from their social life and live in the imaginary world of PUBG. 

Interestingly, Chicken Dinner is something that they become obsessed with and they don’t leave the game unless and until they achieve it, leading to a generation of anxiety and stress among the youths, even in the younger kids.

It also affects the professional lives of the employees as they tend to skip meetings and fail to meet their target, just to play this game. Something similar happens with the students, as they start skipping school, thereby reducing their academic performance.

Personal relationships are also affected and that can be of any family member or even with one’s wife or husband.

Incidents which Prove the Height of PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

Some youths got killed in railway tracks just because they were playing a PUBG mobile game with their earphones plugged in, due to which, they could not hear the sound of the coming train.

A husband was so engrossed in playing PUBG all day that upon being asked by the wife to stop playing, he demanded a divorce.

Even a youth got himself killed as he stopped eating food and drinking water due to playing the PUBG mobile game.

Some Tips to Control PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

It is very essential to control your PUBG mobile game addiction because of the above mentioned harmful effects and the seriousness of the problem. There can be many ways to tackle this addiction. First of all, the person should make up his or her mind that he or she has to get off playing PUBG games and the PUBG mobile game should be uninstalled from their mobile.

Also, start spending time with your family members and friends who do not play the PUBG mobile game, and try to avoid meeting your pro PUBG player friends. Try to build a hobby apart from gaming so that you can divert your mind and attention away from the PUBG mobile game.

An Introduction

PUBG is a term you must have heard by now. PUBG or Player Unknown’s Battleground is basically a multiplayer battle royale video game and is very popular all over the world. Though it is entertaining, it does not mean it is all good. The game has spread viral and is played by billions of people around the world. People have become addicted to this game and it is hampering their quality of life.

Long Essay on the Impact of PUBG 

When the game got released for Windows, it received excellent reviews. When it got released on mobile phones, it caught on like wildfire. The craze for this game has spread amongst all age groups across the world.

The game which started for recreation has turned into an addiction. It is severely affecting the lives of the players and also being a cause for various crimes. For instance, a boy killed himself as a result of PUBG mobile game addiction.

The game greatly interrupts the studies of students. The students who are pursuing school or college are wasting their valuable time in this game, rather than studying. This results in neglecting studies and also in reduced levels of interest in subjects.

It is because brain activity has become slow due to this PUBG mobile game addiction. Their ability to grasp things and focus on studies and classes is lowered. Several researchers suggest that the academic performance of PUBG players is dropping massively, resulting in low scores in exams.

Similarly, the working people are also addicted to this game. It affects their work and makes them lose interest in the target of their goals. They started playing PUBG rather than focusing on their careers. At extreme, the players take leaves or skip meetings just to play this game endlessly. Due to this addiction, they also miss their work and become unproductive.

This game addiction also ruins the relationships of people as there have been cases of breakups and divorces due to this game. People spend a lot of time on this game instead of their family and friends. It hurts their relationships and causes pain. Similarly, it has also resulted in many crimes of murder, suicide, etc.

Playing PUBG for several hours can cause severe obesity and it leads a person to suffer from severe health issues. It weakens the muscles and joints of a person due to inactivity and being in the same place with the same posture for a longer period of time. This can lead to incorrect posture effects permanently, and eyesight will severely get affected due to staring at the screen and reflection of light from the screen while playing it for a longer time. Getting addicted and having an eagerness to play this game will give you a severe headache. The researchers have proven that it leads to aggressive thoughts. It also affects emotions, and this can leave a permanent effect on the brain.

We all know that excess of anything is dangerous, be it a video game or anything. However, one must understand that we can control any addiction by proper measures. To begin with, try to limit the time you spend on the game. Get away from this addiction step by step, as leaving it all of a sudden is impractical. So, set aside a fixed time and try to play it at that specific time only.

Parallelly, try to divert your mind towards other important works. Try to go out and spend time on physical activities, and don't spend too much time inside your house. Try to stay engaged with work. It is said that when you have other things to do, your mind won’t go towards the game.

Spend more time with your family and friends instead of scrolling your phone or playing the game. When you are surrounded by your loved ones, you will not spend time on your phone or games. Utilise your time productively instead of playing PUBG.

Short Essay

When you start to spend more and more time doing one particular activity, it becomes an addiction. This leads to ignoring all the other activities. People get addicted to various things and activities, one such thing is game addiction.  At present, PUBG is one of such games to which most people get addicted.

People start to spend more valued time playing this game and not doing any other activities. The people who are addicted to this game keep on playing this game the whole day. They don’t even care about doing any other business besides playing the game. However, when playing this game, they forget everything around them and are stuck into the false world.

There are multiple ways through which people can overcome their game addiction. One such way to overcome addiction is to spend most of their time with the people around them. By keeping their phone aside and talking to people around, one will start thinking less about the gaming part. Try to limit the time you spend on the game. Get away from this addiction step by step, as leaving it all of a sudden is impractical. So, set aside a fixed time and try to play it at that specific time only. Parallelly, try to divert your mind towards other important works. Try to go out and spend time on physical activities, and don't spend too much time inside your house. Try to stay engaged with work. It is said that when you have other things to do, your mind won’t go towards the game.

Spend more time with your family and friends instead of scrolling your phone or playing the game. When you are surrounded by your loved ones, you will not spend time on your phone or games. It is highly recommended to play board games, which is way better than virtual games. Game addiction decreases by doing other things besides playing PUBG. One can start feeling refreshed and free when the addiction to this mobile game slowly starts to fade away.

PUBG mobile games in countries like India had become so aggravating that even the government of India banned it on account of being a Chinese app. If the youth of today’s world start dwelling on games like PUBG, it will be very difficult to have a Newton, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, or alike in the coming future, and the very being of human emotions and qualities that we possess will be jeopardised. So, it is good if everything is balanced in life and there isn’t any such addiction like PUBG mobile games.

FAQs on Essay on PUBG Mobile Game Addiction

1. How does sleep get affected by PUBG?

Addiction to this game can lead to a lack of sleep in some students and young people. People who really play for a long time may be at higher risks of Insomnia and other disorders, such as obesity and less metabolic health. Seriously, gaming before bed will lead to poor sleep. You will never feel sleepy as the game is not over yet and sitting for long hours looking at mobile screens will make it hard to get sleep even if you decide to go to bed earlier.

2. How does PUBG affect students?

The game greatly interrupts the studies of students. The students who are pursuing school or college are wasting their valuable time in this game, rather than studying. This results in neglecting studies and also in reduced levels of interest in subjects. It is because brain activity has become slow due to this PUBG mobile game addiction. Their ability to grasp things and focus on studies and classes is lowered. Several researchers suggest that the academic performance of PUBG players is dropping massively, resulting in low scores in exams.

3. How does PUBG affect working people?

The working people are also addicted to this game. It affects their work and makes them lose interest in reaching their goals. They start playing PUBG rather than focusing on their careers. In extreme conditions, the players take leaves or skip meetings just to play this game endlessly. Due to this addiction, they also miss their work and become unproductive. This game addiction also ruins the relationships of people as there have been cases of breakups and divorces due to this game. People spend a lot of time on this game instead of their family and friends. It hurts their relationships and causes pain. Similarly, it has also resulted in many crimes of murder, suicide, etc.

The “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)” Painting by Kruger Essay

This artwork is created by Barbara Kruger, an American conceptual artist. A comprehensive summary of her background is formulated on her personal website, where one can find all her paintings. She majored in design at Parson’s School of Design in New York and after that, she applied as a designer to Mademoiselle magazine (“Biography”, n.d.). Then, throughout her life, she worked in several art departments as a chief designer. Such background influenced her artworks because they were inspired by the contemporary shifts in the design industry. The painting “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)” uses a recognizable author’s font on a red background, as well as a memorable woman’s face, divided in half into a black-and-white and radiographic picture (Kruger, 1989). It seems that Kruger wants to underscore the two sides of women’s nature: her beautiful purposeful face and the negative effect manifested in a desire to objectify women.

What is interesting here is the context under the painting. This artwork was printed on fliers and distributed during the 1989 march for women’s equality and women’s lives. The main aim of this march, in which 300 000 people participated, was to defend the federal right to abortion (Caldwell, 2016). The phrase “your body is a battleground” refers to the desires of conservative judges to undermine Roe v. Wade in 1989. Nevertheless, Kruger’s artwork has global meaning because it refers to women’s numerous problems in extremely conservative countries. For example, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, which occurred two years before the women’s march in the US, meant an increased control of men over Iranian women’s rights. Thus, the painting refers also to Iranian women in their struggle for gender freedom.

Biography. (n.d.). Barbara Kruger. Web.

Caldwell, E. C. (2016, July 16). The history of “Your body is a battleground”. Jstor Daily. Web.

Kruger, B. (1989). Untitled (your body is a battleground) . 284.48 x 284.48 cm. The Broad. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, February 27). The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground-painting-by-kruger/

"The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger." IvyPanda , 27 Feb. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground-painting-by-kruger/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger'. 27 February.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger." February 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground-painting-by-kruger/.

1. IvyPanda . "The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger." February 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground-painting-by-kruger/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The "Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground)" Painting by Kruger." February 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground-painting-by-kruger/.

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Art Essay on Your Body Is a Battleground by Barbara Kruger

Your Body is a Battleground' is an art created by Barbara Kruger. The image is composed of a woman's face who is staring directly at the viewer. At the middle of the picture, there is a line that divides the image into two parts. The symmetrical face is cut into a positive side on the left and the negative side on the right. The woman's face has black and white color, with the white color on the left and darker color on the right. The slogan specifically addresses the viewer with the words inserted on a red background but written in white print. The white colored words with the Futura bold are borrowed from the press of Yesteryear. The image is medium in size, and the woman's face covers three-quarters of the whole image. The woman's face is split into two, the red, black and white color utilized in the art indicates the inner struggle of good and evil in a female's life. Kruger has emphasized the subject of her work by making the woman stare straight ahead through the images print and the viewer can easily interpret the picture through the gaze and words across the face (Robertson and Craig 87).

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Barbara Kruger used the techniques of the oppressive society to come up with the art which mostly addresses women. Barbara has used vintage images from the magazines which she has been able to portray that a woman's physicality in the world is a battleground. The artwork was designed in 1989 and used as a placard in a women's March in Washington as they protested for rights to decide about child's abortion and birth. Several women organization held the demonstrations on April 9, 1989, over the law that had been passed to restrict public funds for institutions that conducted abortion (Robertson and Craig, 96). The purpose of the photomontage created by Barbara was to attract many people to the event. The woman in the image is from magazines of 1950's. She has a neat hairstyle, perfect makeup and her face reveal a feminine ideal that is contradicted by the division on good and evil.

The beliefs and customs of the white culture were that a woman must correspond to certain aesthetic, moral and political principles. The art signifies that a woman has the right to choose what to do with their bodies. The art has expressed ideas and emotions of how culture expects women to act and how the beliefs and customs affect women differently in the community. Your body is a battleground' represents a woman's body in a way that underlines the superiority of the body to denounce it better. The artist has focused on how the values and ideas of the culture control sexual issues, racial minorities, women bodies and their behaviors.

Barbara Kruger also intends to draw people's attention with the help of a powerful image and words so as to break the calm in which social norms had been imposed on every woman (Robertson and Craig 91). This art specifically addresses women and how the society expects women to behave. It is a direct and individual invitation for the audience to react and give up being passive. Generally, the society has constructed unoriginal image of how a woman should present herself regarding entity of beauty. The positive and negative sides show how men view women as objects that must fight to be noticed in the society. This is the feminist struggle revealed in the art with the two sides meaning women versus stereotypes and women versus patriarchal society.

The image also shows some political significance, the split of the face indicates right and wrong. The ideas of power are mentioned since women are deprived of the option of fighting for their rights in the society. The art raises questions of the place women occupy in law and a male dominant society. The art addresses women rights in childbirth and the manner in which Barbara portrayed the work has a political significance because it was used to fight for women rights. Your body is a battleground' art was a deliberate action by Kruger to support the demonstrations as it attracts many people in the event. Kruger created the work because of the infamous Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade. The art also signifies how authoritative the control figures in a community have the power to control how a woman manages her body.

The artwork by Barbara Kruger clearly illustrates that a woman in the society has to wage constant battles with her image when she had no rights to make her own decisions. As a feminist, Barbara helped fight for women rights and stop the people in power to make decisions that oppress women. The art reveals how the female body is dominated by the standards imposed by men and the rules they set in the society hence becoming more powerful than women. The art led to the reflection of law hence giving women the right to make decisions about their bodies.

Works Cited

Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

"Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)." Society Swallowed Beauty. N.p., n.d. Web.

2 Mar. 2017. <https://lflynn1997.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground/>.

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R.F.K. Jr.’s Campaign Says He Will Be on California Ballot

The state is the fourth where Mr. Kennedy is all but assured a spot on the ballot in November against President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

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By Rebecca Davis O’Brien

• April 30, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be on the presidential ballot in California, his campaign said Monday, having secured the nomination of the American Independent Party, a minor party with a history of insurgent independent candidacies: Its first presidential nominee, in 1968, was the Alabama governor and segregationist George C. Wallace.

California is the fourth state where Mr. Kennedy, who is running as an independent, is all but assured a spot. The secretary of state’s office does not certify candidates until late August, the office said, but confirmed that Mr. Kennedy’s campaign filed paperwork on Monday.

California has the most electoral votes of any state, with 54, and it has particular resonance for the Kennedy campaign. Mr. Kennedy lives in Los Angeles, and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

Where Third-Party and Independent Candidates Are on the Ballot

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Mr. Kennedy’s campaign says it has enough signatures to reach the ballot in six other states, including North Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada. The campaign is gathering signatures using paid petitioners and volunteers in other states, including in New York.

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The American Independent Party was founded in the late 1960s in San Francisco, and its first nominee for president, in 1968, was Mr. Wallace, the governor of Alabama who had built his career on “states’ rights” and opposition to desegregation. The party’s original platform focused on devolving power to the states, law and order, and ending the war in Vietnam.

In a video posted to his campaign website on Monday, Mr. Kennedy explained the back story of his alliance with the party, reflecting on his father’s presidential campaign in 1968, which ended with his assassination.

The party’s new leadership reached out to him, the younger Mr. Kennedy said: “It’s had its own rebirth, even before I came along,” he said. “It’s been reborn as a party that represents not bigotry and hatred, but rather compassion and unity and idealism and common sense.”

The American Independent Party is indeed casting itself as newly rebranded. In a “Statement of Purpose” on the party’s website — adopted on April 27, 2024 — it says “the new American Independent Party connects positive, visionary and independent candidates with California voters.”

It continues, in language that sounds a lot like Mr. Kennedy’s campaign: “It’s time for California to declare independence from the antiquated two-party system.”

A representative for the party did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A 2016 investigation by The Los Angeles Times found that many of the American Independent Party’s registered voters had marked their party affiliation in confusion, thinking they were registering as independents.

The party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees in 2020 were Rocky De La Fuente, a businessman who has made several unsuccessful runs for elected office, and Kanye West, the rapper, producer and fashion designer.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien covers campaign finance and money in U.S. elections. She previously covered federal law enforcement, courts and criminal justice. More about Rebecca Davis O’Brien

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Narendra Modi’s Government Is Falsifying Indian History

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Since coming to power, the Modi government has worked to promote a phony version of history in line with its Hindu chauvinist agenda. From school textbooks to academic research, every form of historical education has become a political battleground.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 9, 2023 in New Delhi, Delhi, India. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)

I am the bearer of a historic document. Last summer, I applied for membership of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in Delhi.

The NMML is one of the most well-stocked and easily accessible libraries for researchers in India. It is of particular relevance for those working on the history of postcolonial India — a period for which declassified official records are scanty if not absent — because of its rich collection of private papers and oral history interviews.

In my experience, it is also one of the most efficiently managed repositories in the country. It is an intellectual oasis in an otherwise fast drying up landscape of systematically mismanaged and chronically underfunded institutions that support serious research in the humanities.

When I paid my membership fees to the cashier of the NMML, I noticed something peculiar about the receipt I was handed in return. The words “Nehru Memorial” in English and in Hindi were struck out and the words “Prime Ministers’” were written over them.

The NMML, so-called by dint of being housed in Teen Murti Bhavan — the official residence of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru — is an institution in transition. It is now helmed by sycophants of the right-wing Hindutva nationalist regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Most of them do not have the necessary academic qualifications.

With their resounding support, however, the museum and library have now been renamed . Nehru’s legacy has disproportionately come under assault for his famed insistence on the secular nature of the Indian nation-state. I was reliably informed by the staff that they would soon start issuing receipts that will have the name “PMML” in print. No more palimpsestic confusion.

Righting Wrongs, Writing Wrong

This is not an isolated occurrence. Ever since the BJP came to power in 2014, history has been under siege. The past has always been weaponized more often than it is studied in postcolonial India. Yet what the BJP has been doing is more sinister. It is attempting to break into a million pieces any coherent and holistic sense of how the Indian republic had come into being.

The BJP would have everyone believe that history began in 2014 with the swearing in of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His professed goals are to rectify historic wrongs, address imagined majoritarian grievances, and end the “distortion” of the past by secular, “anti-national” historians. A former “pracharak” (propagandist) of India’s longest-running homegrown militant fascist movement, the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS), he feels personally about this.

So does the BJP, which has been pursuing these objectives in three major ways over the last decade. By bulldozing public institutions and higher education infrastructure crucial for conducting historical research in India in a typically neoliberal vein. By tampering with prescribed pedagogy and curriculum to plant a conformist and myopic view of Indian history among students. And by fixating popular culture on inane debates about “authenticity” — of names and narratives — thereby undermining any notion of a shared past and obvious hybridities in Indian culture.

The BJP has been liberally deploying policy, personnel, and technology in these multipronged history wars. It has vowed to escalate them even further after this year’s general elections.

Subverting Institutions, Suppressing Thought

Consider the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). It is the preeminent public agency promoting historical research in India. It disburses grants and fellowships, supports the organization of conferences and exhibitions, and publishes books and journals, thereby setting the agenda for state-funded explorations in Indian history.

The ICHR has recently undergone what is being called a “ top-to-bottom ” takeover by the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY), an affiliate of the RSS. It is now manned by people without suitable academic credentials. One of their declared aims is to “save Indian history from the condescendence of Muslim historians.” As allegations of corruption and malpractice have risen against the ICHR bosses regarding the recruitment of staff, funding streams have dried up, and the once-thriving institution has become a shadow of its former self.

Allegations of botched-up hiring are not restricted to the ICHR alone. Similar quid-pro-quo transactions and nepotistic connections had been uncovered last year when the University of Delhi (DU) decided to fill up vacancies against permanent academic posts after over a decade of not doing so.

As one of the largest and oldest collegiate public universities in the country, DU had relied on the widespread “Uberification” of academic work. Following practices that have now become standard across metropolitan universities in the West, it had institutionalized precarity and exploitation in the service conditions and work contracts of early-career academics. When the time came to dole out permanent faculty positions in 2023, the university bosses and their collegiate underlings displaced deserving candidates and rewarded political loyalty and caste bias.

The humanities and social science faculties have taken a particularly heavy blow in universities across India. The recently rolled out New Education Policy (NEP) has already charted its course toward minimizing public funding of education and research in the country. Meanwhile, the Union Government has bestowed the status of “ Institution of Eminence ” to a nonexistent private university and has frozen the release of funds for public universities located in those provinces that have not elected the BJP to power.

Furthermore, the National Overseas Scholarship scheme, which supported Indian students from socially and educationally marginalized backgrounds in their studies abroad, now excludes those aiming to enroll in “courses concerning Indian [c]ulture/heritage/[h]istory/[s]ocial studies on India.” The BJP could not have made the writing on the wall any clearer: institutional support and employment opportunities will be routinely denied to those who refuse to view the past through its saffron-tinted glasses.

Saffronized and Substandard

Another public institution the BJP has instrumentalized to propagate its exclusionary view of Indian history is the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT). The NCERT is India’s most influential educational policy-making body. It is entrusted with the regular task of drafting and revising syllabi and textbooks for a majority of school-going students in the country.

This wide mandate makes the NCERT the perfect agency through which the BJP can directly meddle in pedagogical and curricular matters. And so it has, especially in the discipline of history.

Last year, on the pretext of “reducing the burden of students” who had been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCERT “rationalized” its textbooks and syllabi quite significantly. It dropped an entire theme on Mughal history and removed crucial chapters titled “Understanding Partition,” “Rise of Popular Movements,” “Dalit Poetry,” and “Democracy and Diversity.”

The NCERT also chucked out references to the 2002 Gujarat riots , which had taken place on the then chief minister Modi’s watch and all contextualizing information implicating the RSS in M. K. Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Anything from the historical record that does not lend itself well to the BJP’s sense of a malleable Indian past has been cast aside as redundant.

Unpalatable Histories and the Idea of India

The BJP is extremely uncomfortable about the fact that its parent organization, the RSS, sat out the anti-colonial struggle against British imperial domination. The RSS had even been banned for its conspiratorial role in Gandhi’s assassination by the same politician whom the BJP has now sought to idealize and co-opt from the pantheon of Congress nationalists — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Modi’s party repeatedly tries to project many prominent Indian freedom fighters with a contemporary mass appeal like Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose as its political forerunners, even though they had been critical of the sectarian politics of the RSS in their time. It needs the cover of these popular figures from Indian history because one of the most favored ideologues of the RSS, V. D. Savarkar, is widely regarded as a turncoat and colonial collaborator, notwithstanding recent official attempts to politically rehabilitate his reputation.

Savarkar was of the opinion that India belongs to those for whom it is both the pitribhoomi (fatherland) and punyabhoomi (holy land). This was a roundabout way of saying that most non-Hindu minorities in the country, most prominently the Muslims, have a lesser claim to the nation. Consequently, the RSS-BJP would like to see them written out of Indian history altogether, especially from the medieval and early modern periods when Central Asians and Iranians, Turko-Mongols, Afghans, and even Ethiopians dominated northern and later peninsular Indian politics.

In this framework, the Mughals, descended from the Chagatai Turks and the Rajputs (a dominant western Indian ethnic group with whom they intermarried) are singled out as “outsiders” more often than others. This is in spite of the fact that even early Indian history is replete with instances of “foreign” influences and invasions — Hellenic and Scythian, Hephthalite and Parthian.

The BJP has now appropriated the “decolonial turn” in academic history-writing to claim an indigenous status for every cultural development worth its name in Indian history. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence — genetic, philological, archaeological, and textual — to the contrary, it claims an unbroken umbilical continuity between India’s earliest urban bronze age civilization (which flourished in the Indus valley) and the culture that yielded the earliest sacred scriptures of the Hindus — the Vedas .

It seeks to refute the protohistoric migration of steppe pastoralists (Indo-Aryan linguistic group) to the Indian subcontinent and their consequent intermingling with the local populace. The idea that the pitribhoomi of ancient ancestral north Indians in the distant past could have been different from the punyabhoomi of their descendants today is anathema to the BJP’s monolithic idea of Indian history — where all change was endogenous until the arrival of the Muslims.

The Banality of Untruth

Public assertions by Modi and prominent BJP leaders regarding ancient Indian supremacy in science, medicine, and technology are another way in which the idea of an autarkic and glorious pre-Islamic Indian civilization is pushed. Instead of referring to actual mathematical and philosophical treatises of early Indian thinkers, the BJP fixates on “authentic” advances in “Indian knowledge systems” in the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata .

By reading these texts and other aspects of early Indian mythology literally and selectively, a range of ridiculous claims are put forward. These include, for example, the suggestions that Indian flying chariots were precursors of modern aeroplanes, that Indians were practicing stem cell and advanced atomic research thousands of years ago, and that plastic surgery was prevalent in ancient India.

These inanities are widely and routinely disseminated through public speeches and forwarded messages on WhatsApp. The BJP’s in-house digital media team called the “IT Cell” has successfully weaponized this instant-messaging platform to maintain a steady stream of low-intensity but perpetual propaganda. It specializes in curating and spreading disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories on a massive scale.

Indian history is a favorite peg to hang its falsities on. Messages usually begin with the clickbait “Historians/textbooks will not tell you this . . .” and end with some incendiary call to action or the other.

The most oft-repeated tropes are those of the “tyrant Muslim ruler,” “forced religious conversions,” “building of mosques by razing temples,” “violation of Hindu women,” and “forgotten Hindu kings who either fought back or presided over even larger empires.” Ironically, most of these tropes had germinated in the writings of British scholar-administrators in the colonial period.

In spite of its decolonial posturing, the BJP borrows from these dated works liberally and uncritically. Bollywood, India’s most popular Hindi film industry based out of Mumbai, has now joined the fray too, having found common purpose in popularizing these reductive tropes in recent productions.

Indian history is peppered with examples of “Hindu tyrants and Muslim rebels,” “Hindu commanders of Muslim rulers,” and “Muslim confidants of Hindu kings.” Islam did not only grow in the subcontinent as a result of military conquest but also spread through sinews of trade and cultural exchange, especially among historically dispossessed agrarian communities in the east.

Religious structures as symbols of state authority and proxy-treasuries were particularly vulnerable during invasions and regime changes. Wars did not cause misery along sectarian lines. These insights borne out by evidence from Indian history unsettle the BJP’s fabricated narrative of the past. Those who have attempted to point this out have been threatened and persecuted , and in some instances, even killed .

What’s In a Name?

India’s history wars have been continuing apace in yet another way. In the provinces where the BJP is running the government, names of entire towns, districts, and even railway stations are being changed. Allahabad has become Prayagraj, Aurangabad has become Chatrapati Shambhajinagar, Osmanabad has become Dharashiv, and Mughalsarai Junction has been renamed the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction. Aligarh is slated to become Harigarh and Ahmedabad might be renamed Karnavati soon.

The purpose behind such a move appears to be the pruning of visible “Islamic influence” from public signage and civic spaces. It is also an erasure of local history.

Last year, during the G20 summit held in New Delhi, another controversy over a historic name erupted. It all started with a gala dinner hosted in honor of the visiting state dignitaries who received invitations from the “ president of Bharat .” BJP spokespersons took to the television, Twitter/X, and WhatsApp to argue that the name “India” itself was a British colonial ascription.

While it is true that “India” is an exonym (and many countries and continents across the world today are known by what foreigners once called them), it is more than twenty-five hundred years old at least. Persians and Greeks came up with that name for the land to the east of the river Indus.

In the early modern world, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes, and the French used the name for their joint-stock companies and trading outposts in the subcontinent well before the British arrived. Even the first article in the Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950, declares “India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states.”

The BJP does not have a leg to stand on in the history wars it has ignited in India. It knows too well that the weight of evidence is not in its favor. However, the party is not interested in mere academic debate. It wants to win the upcoming elections and the history wars are only a means for it to appeal to the electorate’s emotions and instincts, fears and prejudices.

It knows how to create a mob and a mob does not need to know history. It is best if the mob forgets it all and becomes disdainful of questions. A mob that spits on questions, especially about its own origins, is one that hounds and demolishes .

We have seen this script being played out before, in interwar Europe. With the noose tightening on democracy and pluralism, the question is not what else India will witness during these ongoing history wars but whether the country as we know it will survive at all.