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
Thumbing through the February 13, 2014 issue of Gun Digest magazine, I was excited to see data on a recent survey of first-time gun buyers, attributed to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for the shooting, hunting and firearms industry. Two pie charts, shown below, describe (1) the percentage of new shooters … Continue reading
I have cross country skied before, both for recreation and (one time) to get to work during a snow storm when I lived in South Bend, Indiana. It is surprisingly fun. I have also gone target shooting with a .22 rifle before. Plinking steel, paper squirrel targets, balloons, cans, ketchup packets — having fun is … Continue reading
