I am very happy to report that my second academic article on gun culture was published today in the journal Sociology Compass (my first was on religion and gun ownership). Thanks to a generous grant from Wake Forest University’s ZSR Library and the Office of Research & Sponsored Programs, “The Sociology of U.S. Gun Culture” …
I love whisk(e)y. My love knows almost no boundaries. American, Canadian, Indian, Irish, Japanese, Scotch, Texas. Barley, corn, rye, wheat. Neat, rocks, mixed. To fuel my love I have been reading Reid Mitenbuler’s recent book, Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey. Early on, Mitenbuler introduces the first alcohol distiller among the British …
Chapter 3 of Jennifer Carlson’s book on legal gun carriers in Michigan explores the role of National Rifle Association trainers and training courses in the construction and dissemination of the ideal of armed citizenship she calls the “citizen-protector.” Put briefly, the “citizen-protector” accepts the responsibility of using lethal force in defense of innocent life as …
The problem with averages is that there is no “United States of America” when it comes to guns, violence, and crime, but many Americas. Some of these Americas – like my neighborhood in Winston-Salem – are more like our first world counterparts in the OECD, and some of them are more like the third world …
In light of several self-defense shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I am going to review some points I’ve already made in a few posts, but obviously bear repeating. Despite the concern about a rising number of civilian justifiable homicides, and criticisms of “Stand Your Ground” laws as allowing people to “shoot first and ask questions later,” …
I recently completed the Massad Ayoob Group’s MAG-40 course, “Armed Citizens’ Rules of Engagement,” co-sponsored by Derby Guns of Scottsdale (shout out to Kate and Jim Kreuger!). This is the course Ayoob used to teach under the auspices of the Lethal Force Institute in New Hampshire. (A review of the LFI course written in 1999 …
For the first 42 years of life, I had never even handled a real gun, much less shot one. My experience was limited to shooting BB guns as a teenagers. We would usually shoot at cans, but one day I took aim at a bird that was too far away to hit, pulled the trigger, …
Posting my upcoming presentation at the University of Arizona yesterday reminded me that I should do the same for the paper I presented at The Copeland Colloquium on “The Symbolic and Material Construction of Guns” at Amherst College last March. The paper I presented at Amherst is based on my observations at the United States … Continue reading
Later this week I will be attending a Gun Studies Symposium at the University of Arizona in Tucson, organized by Jennifer Carlson, Kristen Goss, and Harel Shapira. The symposium includes a Who’s Who of scholars who have studied guns for decades, including Philip Cook (Duke), David Kopel (Denver Law), Robert Spitzer (CUNY), Frank Zimring (Berkeley), … Continue reading
Pocket pistols are all the rage today and, as I have written previously, this can give the impression that they are a new phenomenon. But, of course, they are not. To the contrary, they are much older than I ever knew. I learned this recently while visiting the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial … Continue reading
Before there was the NRA Personal Protection Expo, there was the United States Concealed Carry Association Concealed Carry Expo. I attended the expo in 2016 in Atlanta and have posted a number of times about my experience there. This page collects those other posts here for ease of access: Women’s Panel Discussion at the USCCA … Continue reading
I shot two replica muzzle loaders yesterday at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. I am guest lecturing on religion and guns and gun culture in two classes today at the College of William and Mary, so I drove up to Williamsburg yesterday. My host mentioned that Colonial Williamsburg opened a musket range in spring 2016. … Continue reading
This is a brief placeholder post as I look for data on mass murder comparable to Grant Duwe’s for the 21st century. One of Duwe’s points in his book on mass murder in the 20th century is that people often think of it as a relatively recent phenomenon, interest in which was piqued by the … Continue reading
In my last post-Las Vegas massacre post, I distinguished between mass public killings (e.g., the Pulse Night Club shooting, the Nice truck attack, the Manchester concert bombing), mass murders (all of the above plus, e.g., Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Joel Smith, Jason Dej-Odoum), and mass shootings (all of the above plus, e.g., the drive by … Continue reading
