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, …
Although I have not made as much progress on it as some of the other chapters, one of the planned chapters of my Gun Culture 2.0 book will address the issue of risk. Hence, my scattered blog posts about the issue of risk. These include my thoughts about assessing risk in the decision to carry … Continue reading
Early in my work on gun culture, I paid my tuition and attended Massad Ayoob’s MAG-40 (Phoenix, 2012), an NRA Personal Protection Outside the Home course (San Jose, 2013), and the Rangemaster Tactical Conference (Memphis, 2014), as well as a number of concealed carry courses in North Carolina. As my work has progressed, I have … Continue reading
I have been critical of psycho-sexual analyses of guns. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a gun is just a gun. But thanks (but not really) to Tac-Sac (and thanks to Patrick Blanchfield for pointing this out at the Gun Studies Symposium I am attending at the University of Arizona today), I have to admit that sometimes … Continue reading
Despite the havoc America’s alcohol epidemic wreaks on society, my love for whisk(e)y persists. There has been such an explosion of micro- and nano-distilleries in America lately that wherever I travel these days I try to find some locally-produced booze. But imagine my temptation when I arrived in Minnesota for the Combat Focus Shooting Instructor … Continue reading
Seemingly a lifetime ago now, but really just a few weeks, I traveled to south central Minnesota to attend the 10th Annual Combat Focus Shooting Instructor Conference conducted by Rob Pincus and his I.C.E. Training Company. In previous years, the conference combined instructor development sessions for Combat Focus Shooting (CFS) instructors and instructor candidates as … Continue reading
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
