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, …
Originally posted on Trigger Control Dot Org:
This could be a first, blog entries on back-to-back days, what is the world coming to? So, let’s define a few things first. “Gun Pretender” = A self-proclaimed expert in firearms and self-defense training who most often doesn’t even carry a gun for self-defense, could be male or…
Chris Baker over at the Lucky Gunner Lounge posted an interesting piece recently on “Five Reasons Firearms Training Fails.” 1. Time and Cost Both of these are relative, so that for some it is just a matter of priorities. For others, the costs of training can actually be prohibitive. The cost of ammo is a … Continue reading
Weekends are a time when I catch up on listening to podcasts. I subscribe to nearly 40 podcasts, of which half are gun podcasts, and so I am usually in catch up mode. This past weekend I was struck by two very opposing views of defensive gun use presented on two different podcasts. The first … Continue reading
Having discussed the rise of civilian firearms training industry, as well as various means of ensuring quality in training services offered, including professionalization, licensing, certification, and apprenticeship, this post will consider one final approach to quality assurance in the gun training industry: BRANDING. “Brands” originally were physical marks put on animals (and slaves, human beings … Continue reading
Two days ago, I used a post by Kathy Jackson as a point of departure for considering apprenticeship as a path to becoming a firearms instructor and a potential way – like professionalization, licensing, and certification – to ensure quality in training services offered to the private sector. At the end of that older post, … Continue reading
As I noted in my last post on apprenticeship as a path into the private citizen firearms training community, Gunsite Academy calls its apprentice instructors “Provosts,” following the founder, Col. Jeff Cooper. The term “provost” here is curious – but significant — because the most common use of the term, according to the Oxford English … Continue reading
Several years ago, the very smart Kathy Jackson published an article on her Cornered Cat website called “How to Become a Firearms Instructor.” Hers is a practical guide rather than an analysis, but is still quite useful for my purposes in trying to understand the private citizen firearms training industry because she distinguishes between “two … Continue reading
