Maybe that’s why I — as a liberal — enjoy them so much? When I am in town and have some spare time, I will visit local community gems like The Bookhouse, Book Ferret, or Bookmarks in Winston-Salem. Any time I am traveling and have some spare time, I will check out bookstores like Lamplight Books or Kinokuniya in Seattle recently. I will occasionally even take a road trip to check out bookstores like South Main Book Company in Salisbury, North Carolina.

I was particularly interested to visit South Main Book Company because I had asked them in June 2024 to consign my book, Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture. They did not respond to my inquiry. Fair enough. There are more books published than can be carried in any bookstore, and more authors who want to consign their books than there is space.

But I was interested to see if South Main carried other books about guns and, if so, what books?

Found: American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson. I’ve reviewed the book in three different places: The Reload, the Wyoming Firearms Research Center, and on my blog/YouTube channels. TL:DR: It is interesting but also what you would expect two liberal journalists to say about the AR-15.

Found: An explicit recommendation of the 2018 book by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. It is a thought-provoking book, no question, but also looks at gun culture from the perspective of The (liberal) Master Narrative.

Found: A recent book by historian Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Carrying this book is presumably acceptable because the gun-toting person on the front cover is (it seems) an historical figure, an African-American woman, and carrying a shotgun not a handgun or an AR-15. I can’t comment on the substance of the book but I am looking forward to reading it soon.

So, South Main Book Company, like bookstores generally, is a liberal cultural institution.

Of course, the recognition that bookstores are liberal cultural institutions does not mean that the books they carry must be in line with liberal cultural views.

After all, as Ezra Klein observes in his book Why We’re Polarized, liberals are (supposed to be) characterized by open-mindedness. In my keynote address to the Liberal Gun Club national meeting last October, I borrowed from Klein in observing that political psychologists find liberals more than conservatives have a basic psychological disposition they call experiential openness – tolerance for threat and uncertainty in one’s environment. That’s why we prefer Whole Foods to Cracker Barrel. That’s why we prefer forward looking hope and change to backward looking MAGA. A book called Prius or Pickup? used a psychological scale called “fixed and fluid.” Liberals have fluid over fixed worldviews.

This is why I thought — erroneously, it turns out — that liberal cultural elite gatekeepers would be among the firearms skeptics who would be open-minded enough to consider my book’s alternative to the dominant narrative about guns in America.

Although I am tragically optimistic enough to think I may ultimately be proven wrong, for now, I have to conclude that most bookstores are run by gatekeeping liberal cultured despisers of guns.

Probably written in May 2023 (note an older title for my book referenced) and saved to a file just rediscovered.

I have been told by more publishers than I can (or care to) count that there is no market for my book on American gun culture, Gun Curious: Understanding America’s Evolving Culture of Firearms. For some, there is no market for books on guns generally; for others, no market for my particular low-heat, balanced take on guns.

This has been frustrating, of course, but it has also led me to reevaluate what exactly I am doing as an author. The famous music producer Rick Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, has been invaluable in this process.

I didn’t set out to study American gun culture to sell commodities. I set out to discover something new about a world I did not know or understand. To draw from the Baruch Spinoza quote that has been on my blog from the start, “I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.” In this case, human actions around guns.

So, what if I took Rick Rubin’s advice and thought of my book not as a commodity whose value is determined in the marketplace but as a work of art that is good in itself? What if I took the process of observing, reflecting, thinking, and writing to be a creative process? What if I thought of myself as an artist?

Liberation.

If nothing else and for better or worse, every word in Gun Curious was my choice – not written for a market that doesn’t exist, or in response to a reviewer or editor whose perspective diverges from mine.

I revisit The Creative Act periodically as I struggle to approach my ongoing work as the creative work of an artist, not as a line worker grinding out the commodities that the market demands.

By early 2023, I had received a couple dozen rejections of the proposal for Gun Curious, enough that I began making alternative plans. While in Chicago for a meeting with the Lutheran Ethicist Network in January, I brainstormed 5 possible paths forward with my friend and fellow sociologist Black Hawk Hancock. Here’s the list from my notes:

(1) Try to publish this version of the book with a university press rather than a trade publisher.

(2) Publish Gun Culture 2.0 as an academic book first, then re-try publishing Gun Curious.

(3) Re-orient Gun Curious to a new framework — but how?

(4) Self-publish Gun Curious.

(5) Say “fuck it” and scrap the project entirely.

Thoughts in retrospect: #1 and #3 were not really options. #2 brings me back to the reality that I should not have pivoted to trying to write a trade book in 2017. I could have finished the academic Gun Culture 2.0 book in a few years and then used that as a platform to sell the trade book. I did things out of order, not for the first time in my scholarly career. But I was just tired of writing for a small community of scholars and thought I had something to say on the issue of guns to a broader audience.

I was seriously contemplating #4, though not looking forward to it because you have to do or pay for so many things in the self-publishing route that I did not want to do or pay for. The financial returns could have been better, but I’ve always cared more about speaking to a broad public about the issue of guns than about the money. I’ve certainly spent more on this work than I will ever make back.

Since 2023, I have routinely considered option #5. Obviously I have not been able to pull that trigger — yet!

That void has been more than filled by the many everyday people who have benefitted from the book. Like a friend of Sandy’s who texted her:

“Good morning! So David’s book came this morning and, standing in the kitchen, I started reading the acknowledgments and then the preface, then just got on the couch and started inhaling it! David’s writing style is so easy to read.”

Someone who attended one of my book talks wrote to me after the event:

“I don’t know if you realize the impact of your work on this controversial topic but I have to say this . . . You helped me open up the conversation with friends and relatives to realize we can coexist without animosity.”

An acquaintance on social media messaged me:

“Was finally able to get my hands on Gun Curious through Amazon. I have to say its one of the best dialogues on American gun culture that has ever been printed. . . . As a veteran, firearms owner and loss survivor of my brother, I appreciate and commend you for the conversations that you’ve started through this work.”

These kinds of comments are the dreams I had for Gun Curious coming true. If you have some thoughts on the book you’d like to share, please send them my way (guncurious2024@gmail.com) or consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

Positive reviews have been trickling in, largely from gun-friendly media. My favorite one-liner so far comes from Ranjit Singh’s review on Bearing Arms:

In a national environment in which political discourse is passionate, heated, and often angry, Yamane brings a refreshing Bob Ross-like calmness that’s much needed.

Karl Rehn wrote a lengthy commentary on the book and his views of the development of gun culture on his Notes from KR site. More on that review in a later post.

Kat Ainsworth Stevens wrote one of the earliest reviews of Gun Curious for Shooting News Weekly back in June. While I work up a post about that, enjoy this great picture of her beautiful dog baby and my book baby.

The Q&A was terrific. The first two questions asked were: What guns do you own? and Do you have a gun on you now?

As I have been saying, 12 years in the making, 1 night of celebration at The Bookhouse in Winston-Salem last week. For those who could not make the event, I recorded my comments and pushed those out on Light Over Heat last week, with the Q&A portion of the event posting this week. (See also embedded videos below.)

Turnout was better than I could have hoped, over twice as many people as I was expecting. I got to share a moment with so many people who have supported me over the years and meet others who I didn’t know but who were gun curious enough to check out the event.

Please share this post if you know of anyone who would enjoy “attending” the book launch event virtually.

Turnout was better than I could have hoped, over twice as many people as I was expecting. I got to share a moment with so many people who have supported me over the years and meet others who I didn’t know but who were gun curious enough to check out the event.

See below for a couple more face-to-face events coming up in June!

A couple of other upcoming face-to-face events if you’re interested. On Thursday, June 13th at 6:00 pm, I will be at the Davie County Public Library in Mocksville. Public libraries are “palaces of the people” and I’m excited to have the opportunity to talk about my story and the broader issue of guns in a town/county that played a huge role in my becoming a gun owner. More information here.

Two days later, on June 15th at 3:00 pm, I will be heading to the mountains of NC, to City Lights bookstore in beautiful Sylva, NC. Would love to see anyone from Western NC there. More information here.

Please share this information if you know of anyone local to these events who may be interested. Thank you!

Read a brief description of the book and each of the chapters below.

Request Gun Curious at your local bookstore or buy it at these retailers:

Bookshop .org

Barnes & Noble

Exposit Books

Buy on Amazon

Books-A-Million

The Bookhouse

BOOK DESCRIPTION

In Gun Curious, I use the story of my surprising 12-year journey inside America’s gun culture to explain why nearly 100 million American civilians own hundreds of millions of firearms. The book illuminates controversial issues like AR-15s concealed carry, the risk of negative outcomes associated with firearms, and what responsible gun ownership looks like in the twenty-first century.

Gun Curious shows there is more to guns than criminal violence, injury, and death; more to gun owners than straight white men; and more to gun culture than democracy-destroying right-wing politics.

Most of all, Gun Curious lowers the heat on America’s inflamed arguments about firearms and models the civil discussions we desperately need right now.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. How a Liberal Professor Became an Armed American

The introductory chapter tells the story of how I—a liberal professor who had never seen, touched, or fired a real gun—became gun curious and then a gun owner and concealed carry permit holder in my forties. It places this story in the broader context of a shift in American gun culture from hunting and recreational shooting to armed self-defense. In doing so, this chapter introduces the major themes running through the book: gun curiosity, the normality of guns and gun ownership, and the rise of Gun Culture 2.0.

Chapter 1. Guns are Normal, Normal People Use Guns

Several years after I began my transition into being a gun owner and gun scholar, I was a guest on a friend’s podcast. When he asked me at the end for my big takeaway, I said something that turned out to be more significant than I expected. “The thing that has surprised me most about getting into gun culture these past 6 or 7 years,” I said, “is that gun owners are people, too. If you just read the scholarly literature on guns, you would not know that.” In the years since that podcast appearance, I have further refined my point of view into a motto: Guns are normal and normal people use guns. This chapter elaborates this perspective in contrast to dominant approaches focused exclusively on gun negatives.

Chapter 2. Top Shot and the Human-Weapon Relationship

When I say guns are normal and normal people use guns, I am not merely describing the contemporary American scene. The normality runs far deeper. Using projectile weapons is behaviorally normal for Homo sapiens as a species. Today’s widely owned civilian firearms are part of an unbroken thread of a human-weapon relationship stretching back to rocks in the uniquely evolved hands of our prehistoric ancestors. In this chapter, I unfold a series of unlikely events that resulted in this understanding. These include accidentally watching “Survivor Australian Outback” which led me to the History Channel’s Survivor-style marksmanship reality show “Top Shot.” Years later, I would get to know the Executive Director of the Liberal Gun Owners, Randy Miyan, an auto-didact who showed me the evolutionary relationship between Homo sapiens and projectile weapons. Only then could I see the ultimate grounding of contemporary firearms ownership that “Top Shot” earlier suggested.

3. Becoming a Gun Super-Owner

This chapter explains why Americans own so many firearms by exploring how I built my personal arsenal of 13 guns. America is truly awash in a sea of firearms. But these 300+ million civilian-owned guns are not equally distributed among gun-owning adults. Just 3% of American adults own over half of the civilian gun stock. These personal collections range from 8 to well over 100 firearms. Reporting this finding, The Guardian proclaimed the “rise of hardcore super owners.” For those unfamiliar with guns, these numbers can seem staggering. But gun super-ownership is far from an exclusive club, boasting as it does some 8 million members, myself included. This chapter shows why accumulating a Gun Super-Owner level arsenal can be quite easy and sensible.

4. Living with AR-15s

As one of the most widely owned and strongly reviled firearms in the U.S., AR-15s deserve separate consideration. In this chapter, I dwell on the question: Why do civilians own AR-15s? This question is one I frequently hear when people learn that I study American gun culture. Sometimes the question is motivated by genuine curiosity. But more often it is a statement masquerading as a question: Civilians should not be able to own AR-15s. Even though very little of the gun violence we see today is committed with “assault rifles,” some of the most high-profile instances are, leading many to seek their ban. I have thought about the question of civilian ownership of AR-15s since the first time I shot one early in my career as a gun owner. As I have become more familiar with these rifles over the years—their development and relationship to military weapons, functionality and flexibility, and diverse uses—I have become more at ease living with them. In this chapter, I discuss the history and attraction of AR-15s and explain why so many ordinary Americans, like me, own them.

5. Swept Up in the Concealed Carry Revolution

Not all those who own guns, even for self-defense, choose to carry those guns concealed in public. Those who want to carry concealed today benefit from the dramatic liberalization of gun laws over the past 40 years. We often think of laws as constraining what we can do, but laws also enable behavior. It is far easier for a private citizen to legally carry a concealed firearm in the U.S. today than at any time since the early 1800s. In this chapter, I tell the story of how I and millions of others have gotten swept up in this concealed carry revolution.

6. Pascal’s Wager and Firearms

Why on Earth does someone need to carry a gun to get a gallon of milk at the grocery store? Aren’t you more likely to get struck by lightning than to defend yourself with a gun? What are you so afraid of? I have been asked these questions, and more, when people find out I keep and carry guns for self-defense. I have, in fact, asked myself these sorts of questions. Although legally permitted, whether gun owners should carry firearms in public is a distinct and vital question. This decision involves a complex—and ongoing—process of risk assessment. The focus of risk management with guns is not on the probability of needing a weapon, but on the high cost of betting that you don’t and being wrong. As I explain in this chapter, this is the armed American version of Pascal’s Wager.

7. Guns as a Risk Factor for Negative Outcomes

I became a gun owner, in part, to reduce the costs of violent victimization in my home and in public. But in insuring myself against catastrophe, was I actually making myself safer? Or was I introducing more and unnecessary risk into my life? The firearms version of Pascal’s Wager explained in the previous chapter notwithstanding, we need to consider the potential benefits of guns in the context of the downside risks. As my friend and gun trainer John Johnston says, “Before you ever consider any ‘good’ you might do with a gun, consider all of the ways it can go ‘wrong.’” I engage in such a consideration in this chapter by focusing on guns as a risk factor for the kinds of negative outcomes (homicide and suicide) that rightly concern both scholars and citizens.

8. Becoming a Responsibly Armed Citizen

There is an old saying in the gun training community, “You are no more armed because you are wearing a pistol than you are a musician because you own a guitar.”

As I learned early in my career as a gun owner, wearing a pistol and being a responsibly trained armed citizen are two different things. Serious gun training has helped me develop from one to the other over the years. In this chapter I describe how defensive gun training involves not just learning how to use firearms, but developing a mindset oriented toward avoiding situations in which that is necessary. Today I understand more about when and how to detect, avoid, and evade trouble. I know more practically and tactically about how and when to shoot (and not to shoot), legally when I can shoot, and ethically if I should shoot. I have a diverse defensive toolkit that maximizes my choices as a responsibly armed citizen.

Conclusion. What the Professor Learned Dichotomous thinking dominates our polarized political system where guns are a wedge issue. Guns are seen either as the salvation or destroyer of democracy. We can either have gun rights or public safety. If there is a single overarching lesson I have learned in my search for the truth about American gun culture, it is the importance of understanding that guns are not one thing, but many—and paradoxical at that. In this concluding chapter, I stand back from the specific insights of each chapter and offer five major lessons I have learned from my surprising journey inside American gun culture. I hope they move us away from the heat of polarizing disagreement and toward the light of a more nuanced understanding of this fundamental reality of American life today.

Last week, I was fortunate to tour McFarland & Company Publishers’ offices, print shop, and warehouse in Jefferson, North Carolina.

I am not a good videographer, but this short video highlights some of the processes I observed and participated in. I also took home the first copy of my book and helped them box up 150 copies to send to Dallas, where I will be hawking the book next week!

Be sure to watch to the end so you can see the book warehouse hazing ritual I was put through.

Thanks to McFarland staff Kim Hadley (Ops Director), Mike Grubb (Book Factory & Warehouse Manager), Kevin Freeman (Warehouse Specialist), Brittany Trivette (Book Factory Specialist), Rhonda Herman (President), and Steve Wilson (Editorial Director) for the hospitality.

If I have given you some value and you would like to support my work, please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow. You can also RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

Thanks for reading beyond the headline. If you appreciate this or some of the other 1000+ posts on this blog, please consider supporting my research and writing on American gun culture by liking and sharing my work.

I will surely have more to say about this book in the months and years to come, but for now I wanted to highlight something I found on the very last page of the book’s text. And I mean The. Last. Page. After the Epilogue. In the Acknowledgements.

Coming at the very end of the book, for many readers the acknowledgements are an afterthought. But as an author, they are one of my favorite parts of a book to write and I always read others’ acknowledgements closely.

Reading Andrew McKevitt’s acknowledgments was a revelation. Notably, this passage:

This project began a decade ago as a conversation over a drink or two with Brandon Proia, who cultivated the manuscript from a tiny seedling to a book at a terrific press.

When I first read this sentence I thought, this is an enviable author-editor relationship. But I couldn’t stop looking at it, because the name Brandon Proia seemed oddly familiar to me.

A quick search of my email reminded me why the name was familiar. Brandon Proia was one of the (thirty-three) editors contacted by my agent who passed on my Gun Curious book project. He was also good enough to explain his decision to my agent:

 I feel a bit perplexed about the politics of it all– I don’t actually think that there is a substantively pro-gun or gun-curious yet still avowedly liberal audience anymore, so I’m not totally sure how or to whom one would successfully market this book. 

This is a disappointing response to my proposal for a couple of reasons.

First, as I have said already on this blog, there absolutely is a substantively pro-gun yet still avowedly liberal audience for this book.

Second, my proposal made clear that there were multiple audiences for the book, with a liberal pro-gun/gun curious audience being just one segment. Those who are pro-gun/gun curious and other-than-liberal are also an audience. And those who are gun skeptics—readers like Proia himself—are an audience for the book, too. This, of course, assumes that gun skeptics are open-minded individuals, an assumption I cling to, sometimes bitterly, because of evidence to the contrary like this.

Seeing his embrace of Andrew McKevitt’s project and now having read Gun Country makes it clear (to me, at least) that Proia’s feeling of being “perplexed about the politics of it all” is really just him not agreeing with a politics of guns that does not hew to The Master Narrative of Democracy-Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture as McKevitt’s does.

He not only doesn’t agree with it, he denies its very existence. He literally denied it in the form of my book.

So, it felt good yesterday to see the results of a promotion I ran encouraging people to pre-order my book to get a free signed bookplate: Amazon Best Seller.

Granted, it was the #1 best seller in the Law Enforcement category and #2 best seller in the Law Enforcement Politics category. I have no idea who decides on the categories, but considering that John Grisham was #3 in Law Enforcement, I will take it.

And it was also #45 in the sociology category, which I will also take. I am a sociologist after all. And to be in the company of Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, and The Ethical Slut ain’t half bad for a thirty-three-time reject.

So, if intellectual curiosity alone or a free signed bookplate is not enough to get you to buy a copy of Gun Curious, how about helping me prove Brandon Proia and others wrong, one purchase at a time?

Pre-Order Gun Curious

Or request it at your local bookstore like The Bookhouse in Winston-Salem.

All four of us seek to understand American gun culture, so why do they succeed while I struggle? Certainly, it could be the quality of the writing and ideas, but I honestly think it is something more than that.

When I tried to sell my book Gun Curious to New York-based book editors at large publishing houses, I said there were three audiences for my book:

Gun enthusiasts will be a natural audience for Gun Curious because it tells their story fairly and factually. But firearms skeptics will also want to read this book to understand better the motivations of those who cling so fervently to their guns. And interested outsiders—the broad and deep middle, including the gun curious—will appreciate how the book richly describes an unfamiliar but intriguing social world.

These book editors — and other liberal cultural elite gatekeepers like those at the WaPo, NYTBR, Atlantic, and New Yorker — are definitely among the firearms skeptics I had in mind as an audience for my book.

What I miscalculated was the lack of desire of firearms skeptics to understand gun owners and gun culture on its own terms.

I have often said that one of the challenges we have in the U.S. today around guns is that many people only see one side of their paradoxical existence. This week I realized that it is not just a matter of seeing only one side of the paradox. Many people only care about one side and are perfectly happy to play the Chinese finger trap game (h/t Randy Miyan, Liberal Gun Owners).

This certainly applies to both sides of the gun debate, because gun enthusiasts are no more interested in my discussions of negative outcomes than gun skeptics are in the normality of firearms. But gun enthusiasts don’t control the major organs of cultural production in the United States. Gun skeptics do.

Hence, I am coming to the realization that people whose only interest in guns is in their negative outcomes have no desire to read a book that does not primarily address that interest. They only relate to firearms from the perspective of negative outcomes – and they only want to relate to them that way.

This made me think back to comments by editors who rejected my book proposal by saying they might read an article about the topic but not a whole book. They are just not interested in a book-length treatment of the normality of guns and gun owners. I wonder whether they would even read an article.

Although this does still sting, it’s also a helpful realization because it puts me in touch with reality and tempers my expectations. I thought 2024 of all years would be a time for light over heat on this issue, but I’m afraid that people on both sides are much more interested in partisan red meat to chew on.

It’s not just AR-15s that are “a cultural chew toy for angry partisans,” to quote McWhirter and Eilson’s American Gun. It’s guns and gun culture in general.