Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is an American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.

Wills has written nearly forty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books. He joined the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor.

Quotes

• The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t.
  • Wills, Garry (September 21, 1995). "To Keep and Bear Arms". New York Review of Books. 

• So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun.
  The Gun is patriotic.
  The Gun is America.
  The Gun is God.
  • Wills, Garry (June 15, 2016). "A nation captive to The Gun". The Boston Globe. ; Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (November 10, 2017). "Inside the minds of American mass shooters". The Guardian. 

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