Reasons for owning, getting into, carrying and shooting guns — topics of my first three posts about the Pew Research Center’s new report, Exploring America’s Complex Relationship with Guns — are good indicators of involvement in American gun culture. But in consulting with the Pew team as they were designing their survey, I also suggested … Continue reading
On June 22nd, while I was deeply immersed in my observations of a 250 Defensive Pistol course at Gunsite Academy, the Pew Research Center released a research report called America’s Complex Relationship with Guns. I was particularly interested in the report because back in February I consulted with the Pew Research Center team about my … Continue reading
Continuing my thinking about recreational gun culture as serious leisure that began with hunting, target/sport shooting is the main reason for gun ownership for a nearly 1 in 10 gun owners, and is a primary reason for gun ownership for as many as 3 in 10 gun owners. In 2004 her book, Shooters, Abigail Kohn … Continue reading
I have mentioned previously that part of documenting the rise of Gun Culture 2.0 is an analysis of changes in the themes present in gun advertising over time. To that end, I have been collecting one randomly selected issue of The American Rifleman per year for the past 100 years. A bunch arrived recently. The … Continue reading
The gun industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, released an infographic this week that appears to document the reality of Gun Culture 2.0. Although the age difference shown can simply be a product of the length of time the individuals have been involved in target shooting (>5 vs. <5 years), the less male, … Continue reading
One of the fun and/or frustrating aspects of doing truly open-ended research — that is, data collection and analysis that does not have a predetermined correct answer — is you never know what you are going to discover along the way. A recent expedition to California is a case in point. I traveled to the … Continue reading
As I have been delving into survey research on American gun ownership recently, I was surprised to find studies back into the 1970s criticizing the dominant approach to firearms ownership as being a subject for the sociology of deviance or criminology. The first two articles I read, from 1975 and 1978, were both published in … Continue reading
