2017 was a terrific year for my research on American gun culture. I didn’t accomplish everything I had hoped, but I did more than I could reasonably expect. Although I didn’t quite reach my goal of doubling this blog’s readership in 2017, I came pretty close. I have already written about my personal favorites and …
Last fall I was invited to contribute a short essay to the newsletter of the Medical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. The editors asked me to write anything I wanted to about guns that would be helpful to medical sociologists studying the issue. While some sociologists call for a shift in the national …
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 …
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, …
This is the third of three posts reflecting on the civilian defensive firearms lessons to be learned from Matthew Ford’s book about military small arms innovations. Part 1 considered balancing competing features of weapons, ballistic science and lethality, and Part 2 looked at the implications of how the “battlefield” is defined. This third post considers … Continue reading
This is the second of three planned posts reflecting on the civilian defensive firearms lessons to be learned from Matthew Ford’s book about military small arms innovations. Yesterday I wrote about balancing competing features of weapons, ballistic science and lethality. PART 2 of 3 DEFINING THE BATTLEFIELD Looming large throughout Ford’s book is the point … Continue reading
Yesterday I posted about Matthew Ford’s book, Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2017). I noted that I am not a gear guy, a rifle guy, a military guy, and certainly not a military rifle guy. My interest in reading the book is what it may teach … Continue reading
The cover photo on Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2017) shows a US Navy SEAL carrying an FN SCAR-H (Mk 17 Mod 0) fitted with an AAC suppressor, Nightforce NSX Compact 2.5-10x scope, Insight AN/PEQ-15 laser/ir module, Insight M3X light module, and KAC vertical foregrip from … Continue reading
Among the interesting things Dr. William Aprill of Aprill Risk Consulting has been saying lately are some comments he made about mental health and guns on Paul Carlson’s Safety Solutions Academy Podcast (Ep. 444 from 10 October 2018). One of the challenges of addressing mental health issues, Aprill and Carlson observe in their conversation, is … Continue reading
When I was in second or third grade, I made a drawing in response to a prompt we were given in school. The prompt was: I have a dream that one day. . . My response, which you can just see in the top left of the picture of my bedroom wall, was: I can … Continue reading
Thinking about race, victimization, and violence in response to a post on Dr. William Aprill’s Instagram recently made me realize that I never posted the text of an opinion column I wrote reflecting on the murder of a college student on the campus where I work. Here it is, from the Winston-Salem Journal on 6 … Continue reading
