According to a gun control group I have never heard of until this media campaign, the companies underwriting the new NRA Carry Guard “insurance” plan, Chubb and Lockton, are actually selling “murder insurance.” And they should stop doing so. (Not sure why Guns Down America is not all over Lockton Affinity for also administering Second … 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
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
Last year I began writing reviews of gun-related books for CHOICE, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries that helps academic librarians find new titles to add to their collections. The reviews themselves are only a couple hundred words long, so it’s tough to say anything substantive in them, but being a … Continue reading
My off again/on again study of the changing themes in gun advertising from 1917 to today is back on again. Thanks to two Wake Forest students, I have finalized the coding scheme and we are currently working on one randomly selected issue of The American Rifleman each year going back to 1917 and one of … Continue reading
To: The Trace From: A Liberal Social Scientist Studying Guns Date: 22 September 2016 Re: Your Antipathy Toward Gun Owners In my Sociology of Guns seminar today, we are reading an excerpt from (Harvard Bachelor’s, Cambridge Master’s, and University of California Ph.D.) anthropologist Abigail Kohn’s book, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures. Published … Continue reading
