UPDATE: A Facebook follower commented that this Charleston Rifle Club is a rifle club in name only. There is no shooting facility on the site. It is essentially a social club. Although this doesn’t make its rejection of an African American member any more palatable to me, it does mean this event doesn’t tell us … Continue reading
Thinking about race, victimization, and violence in response to a post on Dr. William Aprill’s Instagram recently made me realize that I never posted the text of an opinion column I wrote reflecting on the murder of a college student on the campus where I work. Here it is, from the Winston-Salem Journal on 6 … Continue reading
You never know what you are going to find when you stalk someone online as I have been stalking Dr. William Aprill of Aprill Risk Consulting for the past few years. Aprill’s expertise is, in part, in understanding the psychology of violent criminal offenders and what law abiding citizens can do to make themselves safer … Continue reading
Sociologists are “my people,” but when sociologists talk about guns and gun culture, I often feel a profound disconnect from my own experience with and understanding of the same. At a special session on religion and guns/gun culture today at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Philadelphia, one of … Continue reading
Without directly engaging the issue of police bias or excessive use of force (about which I do not know enough to engage intelligently), I do want to address the issue of people being “unarmed” at the time of their encounters with law enforcement officers. People often declare “the victim was unarmed at the time” to … Continue reading
Following is the text of a paper one of the students in my Sociology of Guns seminar wrote last semester. His thoughts on guns as a “Southern Pacifist and Vegetarian” were also posted here last September. Although not about guns in the first place, the issue of police militarization is one I have learned about … Continue reading
Although I am certainly no expert on “gun violence” (recognizing the term itself it problematic, as I will discuss in my next post), I was asked to serve as a “discussant” for a panel on the topic at the recent meeting of the American Society of Criminology (see session #292 in the on-line program of … Continue reading
