Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half are suicides. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes out to more than one hundred Americans killed by bullets every day. On that same average day, another two hundered-plus are wounded by guns.

What makes the United States the most violent country in the Western world?
This is the question raised by Spencer Ostrander’s photographic project, Bloodbath Nation. Over a period of two years, the photographer traveled widely in the United States, photographing the sites of more than thirty recent mass shootings. He presents a series of black and white photos of these massacre sites, void of all human activity. From these images of lifeless places, the writer Paul Auster retraces the history of gun violence in the United States, from the country’s “prehistory” up to today. In the banality of these supermarkets, schools, and churches, now deserted, there resonates the terrible recurrence of mass murder in the United States.
The writer’s text, punctuated by “photographs of silence,” as he describes Spencer Ostrander’s work, examines a question of public security–even public health–dividing the country into two irreconcilable camps.

Like most American boys of his generation, Paul Auster grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B Westerns. A skilled marksman by the age of ten, he also lived through the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his grandfather by his grandmother when his father was a child and knows, through firsthand experience, how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence.Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, from the violent displacement of the native population to the forced enslavement of millions, to the bitter divide between embattled gun control and anti-gun control camps that has developed over the past 50 years and the mass shootings that dominate the news today. Since 1968, more than one and a half million Americans have been killed by guns. The numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different—and why are we the most violent country in the Western world?
Interwoven with Spencer Ostrander’s haunting photographs of the sites of more than thirty mass shootings in all parts of the country, Bloodbath Nation presents a succinct but thorough examination of America at a crossroads, and asks the central, burning question of our moment: What kind of society do we want to live in?