The tragedy in Oregon has once again pushed gun control to the forefront of American conversation and the 2016 election.

With the rising death toll from firearms in the U.S. — 33,000 people per year — the urge to prevent future tragedies is strong. But so are the feelings of gun owners who fear encroachment on their rights.

See also: Oregon shooting exposes rift among Democrats on gun control

Forget the dubiously sourced charts, repetitious chants and darkly humorous jokes filling up Facebook on both sides of the debate. What you need is a well-researched narrative — one that delves into the history, and reveals surprising new facts and perspectives on this uniquely American problem.

Here are three books we recommend: two from authors positioned on either side of the debate, and another who stands in the middle. All three bring intellectual rigor and analysis to a policy debate that has for too long been dominated by shouting.

The Second Amendment: A Biography

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, identified three key milestones in the history of America's relationship with guns in this definitive 2014 tome: the passage of the Second Amendment in 1789, the coup that took place within the National Rifle Association in 1977, and the Supreme Court's surprise 2008 decision that reinterpreted the amendment.

The Second Amendment was a relatively uncontroversial provision that interested Thomas Jefferson less than the founding of the U.S. Post Office, and there was barely any debate around it. Every member of the revolutionary generation instinctively knew it referred to militias. In those days, before there was a professional standing army, every man between the age of 16 and 60 was theoretically part of their local militia. The Second Amendment was designed to keep the militia strong by ensuring they had a supply of weaponry. In the 18th century, it was BYO musket.

What we want to know, of course, is whether the framers of the Constitution intended to guarantee an individual's right to own guns outside the militia concept. And there we fall into the great trap that historians keep warning us about: trying to judge the past through a modern lens.

"To the framers, even our question would make little sense," Waldman writes. "To us today, their answer makes little sense."

And that answer would be? "It protected the individual right to bear a gun ... to fulfill the duty to serve in a militia." Militia had been part of the English tradition of the rule of law for centuries; militia seemed as necessary, as democratic, as eternal, as representation in return for taxation. A world beyond militia simply wasn't in their mindset.

So the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld a limited, militia-based definition of the amendment in firearms case after firearms case. The NRA helped write gun control legislation to preserve its position as the sensible defender of gun rights.

That was until the NRA's new leadership began pushing for a wider definition that covered every weapon in every case. Thirty years after the organization suddenly started citing revisionist history, it had become conservative dogma — and the five conservative members of the Supreme Court overturned two centuries of case law.

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

Economist John Lott caused a stir with this book just over a decade ago. Its main contention — based on Lott's study of crime rates and state and federal gun laws — is that crime steadily declines when states pass laws allowing concealed weapons to be carried in public.

Lott is hardly neutral on the subject. The U.S. National Research Council formed a study group specifically to look at Lott's research; it refuted his results twice, six years apart. In fact, they found right-to-carry laws directly resulted in a slight increase in aggravated assault.

Still, the book is an important read even for gun control advocates. Lott's assumptions are worth examining, particularly his concept of an acceptable level of deaths.

Here, for example, is how he refutes the statistical argument that guns make people more likely to shoot other people by accident:

"In the entire U.S. in a year, only about 30 people are accidentally killed by private citizens who believe the victim to be an intruder. By comparison, police accidentally kill at least 330 innocent individuals annually."

In the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we're more aware that those 30 lives have meaning. After Ferguson and a spate of other police killings, we're also extremely aware that the 330 lives lost is a large number, especially when compared to other country's totals. (England, for example, has seen just 55 police shootings in the last 24 years.)

Lott followed this book with The Bias Against Guns, which sought to explain why his opponents couldn't accept the results of his study.

Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America

If you only read one book about the gun debate in America, it should be this one. Gunfight, by UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler, has many conclusions that will confuse and irritate both sides of the debate — which he calls "gun nuts" and "gun grabbers" respectively.

For one thing, Winkler notes that the Second Amendment is something of a distraction when it comes to the right to bear arms. Erase it from the books altogether and you'd still have to contend with state law.

"Today, nearly every state has such a provision in its own constitution clearly protecting an individual right unattached to militia service," he writes.

See also: The gun rights lobby is outspending the gun control lobby 6 to 1 in 2015

And yet at the same time, the Founding Fathers, so venerated by gun advocates, introduced gun control measures "so intrusive that no self-respecting member of today's NRA would support them." Those militia muskets had to pass government inspections and could be removed from service. Some of the earliest gun control laws were instituted in the South. In most frontier towns of the Wild West, you had to turn your guns into the sheriff; there were fewer shootouts than Hollywood would have you believe.

Gun control used to be an extreme right-wing issue and a racially charged one. The Ku Klux Klan began as a racist gun control organization. Even Ronald Reagan passed gun control laws as California governor, largely as a response to the Black Panther movement arming itself.

Winkler primarily tells the story through the journey of D.C. v. Heller, the case that changed the Second Amendment. We learn of the shooting incidents in the 1970s that inspired D.C.'s restrictions on handguns in the first place, and that young Congressman Ron Paul failed to overturn it even when he had the votes to do so. We learn the NRA actually didn't want the case to come to court because it thought it would lose.

Winkler's book brings together the extreme sides of the debate. He argues for fewer attempts to control types of guns. He writes that banning a particular kind of weapon requires defining it, and that leads gun manufacturers to find design loopholes. President Clinton's assault weapons bill banned 16 kinds of guns and exempted hundreds more. Such legislation simply isn't worth the fears of "gun grabbers" that it stokes.

By contrast, more extensive and sensible background checks have wide support, even among gun owners. The private seller loophole — often erroneously described as a "gun show loophole" — needs to be closed. Your local gun store would be an excellent place to moderate a private sale.

This, then, is the low-hanging fruit of the whole issue. If gun control advocates focused on this narrow measure rather than weapons bans, they might find more support on the other side of the aisle.