In last week’s and this week’s Light Over Heat videos, I lay out my Top 10 books on guns in America. This week I cover books #5 to #1.
See below for the list and links.
Books #5 to #1 of my Top 10:
5. Barrett, Paul M. 2012. Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. New York: Broadway Books. https://gunculture2point0.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/book-report-paul-barretts-glock-the-rise-of-americas-gun/
4. Lacombe, Matthew J. 2021. Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press: https://bookshop.org/a/85868/9780691207452
3. Joslyn, Mark R. 2020. The Gun Gap: The Influence of Gun Ownership on Political Behavior and Attitudes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. https://bookshop.org/a/85868/9780190064839
2. Carlson, Jennifer. 2015. Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. New York: Oxford University Press. https://bookshop.org/a/85868/9780190902148
1. Winkler, Adam. 2013. Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. 1 edition. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. https://gunculture2point0.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/review-of-adam-winklers-gunfight-the-battle-over-the-right-to-bear-arms-in-america-the-best-single-volume-treatment-of-guns-in-america/
New “Light Over Heat” videos are released on YouTube every Wednesday, so please surf over to my YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.
Gun Culture 2.0 
Just ordered Citizen-Protectors on Kindle based on this recommendation and your earlier commentary. Will get started on it this evening.
While I appreciate Carlson making the effort of ethnographic immersion, I suspect the ‘citizen-protector’ persona she resurfaced with is actually a preconception she carried with on her dive. It certainly isn’t prevalent in the waters of gun culture in which I swim.
I’m also eager to see how she reconciles her thesis that carrying ‘reassert[s] their masculinity and help them to “reclaim a sense of dignity,”’ with the sizable and growing number of women who carry. (Or if she has a parallel profiling of women carriers.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do think some aspects are what we would call “theoretically overdetermined,” but she has 2-3 unique insights that elevates the book in my ranking. She doesn’t address women gun carriers much in Citizen-Protectors, but she does in a couple of other articles.
LikeLike