Visiting my daughter in Wilmington, North Carolina recently, a local “lifetsyle” magazine, Cape Fear Living, caught my eye. Many cities have these to promote local business and civic affairs. Look at the cover below and it will be obvious what drew my attention. Look at those GUNS! Flipping through the magazine I was actually surprised … Continue reading
That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Reading year after year of The American Rifleman, this well-known passage from the Tanakh ring ever so true. Two examples below are similar to others I have found, … Continue reading
Plugging along with my project of analyzing the changing content of advertising in gun magazines over the past century as a measure of change in American gun culture. Every old issue I examine is remarkable in one way or another. I have mentioned “The Dope Bag” previously (an issue from 1927 in which a husband … Continue reading
In a much longer recent entry I questioned the common narrative that the National Rifle Association was (largely? mostly? considerably?) a-political prior to the 1977 Revolt at Cincinnati. Continuing my stroll through 100 years of the NRA’s flagship publication, The American Rifleman, I came across still more evidence that the fundamental political emphasis of the … Continue reading
I confess that I have always been jealous of historians and historical sociologists because their wide field of vision offers so many insights into the present. Good history helps us see where we came from, and how the present day is or is not different from the past. Total immersion into a previous time period … Continue reading
I am having so much fun with my project systematically analyzing the content of gun advertising in The American Rifleman from 1917 to 2017 . Although my students and I are only supposed to be looking at the ads, it’s hard not to pay some attention to the magazine content, too. (See also these brief … Continue reading
In doing some background reading for my recent post on gun ownership statistics, I came across a very interesting guest column on the New York Times’ “The Upshot” page. It was written by David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research (PredictWise.com), and Sharad Goel, an assistant professor at Stanford University in the School of Engineering. … Continue reading
