With interest in gun control and policy running high and many serious people wanting to better understand the issue, I thought I’d list what, in my judgment, are the best half-dozen books in the field. To make this list, a book must be well-informed, enlightening, well-written and accessible to the lay reader. Even excellent books aren’t included if a reader must be well-versed in statistics to understand them. I have also limited this list to books about gun policy, omitting those dealing with related topics such as the Second Amendment, the firearm industry, or NRA. I list the books not by rank – they all are first-rate – but in reverse chronological order. The title of each book is linked to its page at the Barnes & Noble website.

- Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis (Daniel W. Webster & Jon S. Vernick eds. 2013). This book – which comes from a gun policy summit convened by the Center for Guns Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University’s school of public health following the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut – contains nineteen short chapters that span a wide spectrum of issues, by leading researchers who describe some of their latest findings.

- The Politics of Gun Control by Robert J. Spitzer (5th ed. 2012). Spitzer, a political scientist at SUNY-Cortland, designed his book both as a college text and as a primer and reference for general readers.

- Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy by Dennis A. Henigan (2009). Henigan was vice president for law and policy – and for a period of time, acting president – of the Brady Campaign. Each of his chapters responds to a NRA slogan, e.g., “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People,” “When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.” As someone who engaged in many debates, Henigan understands what general readers want to know. This is a lively, as well as an informative, read.

- Private Guns, Public Health by David Hemenway (2006). Hemenway, and economist and one of the leading researchers in the field, directs the Injury Control Center at the Harvard University School of Public Health. This sophisticated work presents a comprehensive overview of what we have learned about gun policy from the work of all major researchers, including Hemenway himself.

- Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns (2001). Sugarmann is founder and head of the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy organization that specializes in conducting and publishing careful studies. Sugarmann makes an unabashed argument for banning handguns. Although, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court declared a handgun ban to be unconstitutional, this book still provides a clear and concise overview of the gun issue. (Sugarmann is also author of the best history of the NRA.)

- Crime is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins (1999). Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley, and Hawkins, a researcher there, persuasively argue that America does not have higher crime rates than other wealthy nations, but does have far higher rates of lethal violence because of the greater prevalence of guns.

I attended the Syracuse-Georgetown basketball game at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC last Saturday with my wife and some dear college friends. When I went to buy the tickets, I knew that this was going to be the last regular-season game that Syracuse, my alma mater, and Georgetown would play as members of the Big East. Next year, both schools join other conferences. And I surely knew that Syracuse and Georgetown were passionate basketball rivals – or as the Washington Post would soon be describing them – “archrivals,” and even “archenemies.”

But I didn’t appreciate how big a deal this was.

My first clue came when I went to buy tickets at the Verizon Center. The agent at the ticket window informed me that this was a special event and she could not sell me tickets. I was then ushered upstairs to a plush suite and seated on a couch. After informing me how historic this game would be, a salesman laid out on the coffee table a colored Verizon Center seating chart and a list of ticket prices. Next to each ticket price was a second dollar figure. Just to be eligible to purchase tickets to this very special game, which were themselves priced much higher than normal, one had to make a contribution to Georgetown University – my beloved alma mater’s archenemy. “Okay,” I glibly asked, “how much do I have to contribute to be eligible to buy the best seats in the house?” The salesman smiled and pointed to the figure: $250,000. No, I am not making this up. I settled for what I was eligible to buy with a $50 contribution. We wound up sitting behind an end zone (or whatever it’s called in basketball lingo), in the very last row of seats, watching miniature basketball players throw around a bb-sized ball hundreds of feet below us.

The two teams played twice this season. The first game was at Syracuse. While I doubt – considering it’s a truly great institution with laudable values – Syracuse was as rapacious in selling tickets as greedy Georgetown, the New York Times reported that Syracuse found a way to squeeze a few more seats into the Carrier Dome for the last game between the two rivals, setting an attendance record of 35,012.

Shortly before game day, the Washington Post ran an article about the Syracuse-Georgetown rivalry. It was three full pages long. The newspaper also posted on its website a four-part video about the rivalry. Lord knows what the Syracuse Post-Standard did.

All of this got me thinking about the pedagogy of college rivalries.

Oh, sure, college rivalries are fun. But they also serve an educational purpose.

A rivalry helps define a college and what it means to be part of its community. Consider the Harvard-Yale game. Yale is, in part, Yale because it’s worthy of being Harvard’s rival, and vice versa. Or consider the Army-Navy game. Who understands what it means to attend West Point? Other than a West Point cadet, the only other person who truly understands that is an Annapolis midshipman. Rivalries are special because they help us feel special. I don’t mean just in an elite kind of way. Louisville and Kentucky are rivals, and Michigan and Ohio State are rivals too. Each rival implicitly says to other, I recognize we share something in common, something meaningful to both of us, something we take pride in. Someone who declares you his or her rival grants you respect – and all of the faux insults and put-downs operate to emphasize that point.

Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty were archenemies because each recognized that the other was, beside himself, the greatest living genius in the field of crime and criminal detection.

In the recently-produced BBC production “Sherlock,” Holmes’ faithful friend, Dr. Watson, observes that normal people don’t have archenemies. Of course, that’s true. We normal people aren’t great enough to earn archenemies for ourselves. But we can have archenemies vicariously, or derivatively, through our college rivalries. (City team rivalries – e.g., Red Sox v. Yankees – are similar.)

Through irony and transposition, college rivalries teach respect – respect for those who oppose or disagree with us, and respect for ourselves.

Last May, Syracuse alum Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter and producer (“West Wing,” “A Few Good Men,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Social Network,” and many more), gave the commencement address at his alma mater. This was part of what he told Syracuse’s graduates:

Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance—and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it's worth mentioning that you're too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy. Unless they went to Georgetown, in which case, they can go to hell.

In the transcript of Sorkin’s speech posted on its website, Syracuse University was careful to add “(Laughter)” after that last line. And, of course, the students did laugh and cheer. Sorkin, being a master of theatrics, delivered the line deadpan. He did not smile or wink at the audience. That made the line even funnier. But notice how Sorkin used the rivalry to punctuate his point about civility, self-respect, mutual respect, and character – four things that are inextricably tied together. (You can read or watch Sorkin's speech here.)

How did the game turn out? Syracuse, which had been rated as high as number three this season, set a record for scoring the lowest number of points since Jim Boeheim started coaching the team in 1976. Georgetown won 61-39. An historic event indeed.

But over the full span of their time together in the Big East, Syracuse won 48 games and Georgetown 41.

Just sayin’.

UPDATE (March 15, 2013): At the start of his son's press conference following the game described in the post above, former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson Jr. yelled, ""Kiss Syracuse goodbye!"" (John Thompson Jr., father of Georgetown's present coach, was the head coach of Georgetown basketball from 1972 -1999, and is master of the salt-in-the-wounds insult.) You shouldn't have said it, Coach. Syracuse won two consecutive games to earn a rematch against Georgetown in the Big East tournament in Madison Square Garden, and then beat Georgetown 58-55 in overtime in their real, final game as members of the Big East. Oh, sweet, sweet revenge!    

Jeffrey Toobin has an interesting and characteristically well-done, eight-page profile of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the March 11 issue of The New Yorker. It’s well worth reading because the major theme of the piece is Ginsburg’s Burkean jurisprudence. Those who think it's oxymoronic to classify someone as a Burkean liberal should check out Toobin's article; it persuasively demonstrates that no less a great liberal champion than Ruth Bader Ginsburg can, in fact, be a Burkean.