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
