In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

Day 4 of my Travels with Sandy took us from Kellogg, Iowa (population 600) to Henderson, Nebraska. This long drive on Interstate 80 took us right through Omaha, which meant I needed to stop and see a gun industry acquaintance from years back, Mike.

I first met Mike 6 years ago, in the summer of 2017, when he was working at Suarez International in Prescott, Arizona. He has since moved to be closer to family and landed at Guns Unlimited, a retail gun store on Omaha’s east side.

The owner Tom Nichols opened Guns Unlimited in 1970 and still comes into the store most days. He introduced himself to me during my visit, in fact. He was also smart enough to buy not just his building, but he owns the entire Sports Plaza which includes a Golf USA store, an Outdoor Living Pool & Spa, and a very cool Irish pub and restaurant – where Sandy and I had lunch at Mike’s recommendation.

The first thing Mike wanted to show me, and easily the most remarkable thing I have seen in any retail gun store is the number of Browning sporting shotguns on hand.

Beyond what is displayed in the Browning shotgun room, the store has a seemingly unlimited supply of Brownings on hand for sale. The picture below shows just some of the boxes of just Browning Citoris. These over/under shotguns come in five different barrel lengths (24, 26, 28, 30, or 32 inches) and five different gauges (12, 16, 20, 28, and .410 bore), so it’s to understand how the stock can multiply. But having literally hundreds in stock is something else.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Guns Unlimited is the #1 independent retailer of Browning shotguns in the United States.

Guns Unlimited has a presence at big events like The Grand American World Trapshooting Championships held annually in Sparta, Illinois at the World Shooting & Recreational Complex. Tom Nichols has an Illinois Federal Firearms License to facilitate the hundreds of shotguns he sells there.

There is a strong hunting and sporting bent to Guns Unlimited. Trap, skeet, and sporting clays are among the most apolitical of gun hobbies. Even those who strongly support gun control rarely take aim at these honest, innocent sporting pursuits.

The store also has an incredible number of Henry lever action rifles, the assault weapon of its day, that you could load on Sunday and shoot all week.

But defensive firearms are also well represented. Like all retailers, they were swarmed during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020 with people wanting to buy handguns especially, including many new and non-traditional gun buyers.

Mike recounted the story of a married couple who came in to buy a firearm. The “husband” was a male-to-female transgender person (a.k.a. a trans woman). The sales clerk needed to indicate the person’s gender (male or female) on the ATF Form 4473. Rather than making a big deal out of the situation the clerk simply asked the buyer what box to check. The buyer, who had not yet had gender reassignment surgery, said male to match what was on her state identification.

Interestingly, even before the COVID gun buying spree, the ATF had proposed adding a third “non-binary” category to Form 4473 for people whose identifications (drivers license, state id, passport) list gender as “X.” This went into effect in May 2020.

Many of these new buyers, especially those who were Omaha residents, were surprised to find out that they could not just walk into any gun store and walk out with a handgun. Not only does Nebraska require buyers to get a pistol purchase permit from their County Sheriff, but residents of the City of Omaha also need to register their “concealable” handguns with the Omaha Police Department.

(Actually, “Omaha Municipal Code 20-251 requires that all concealable firearms inside the city limits of Omaha be registered. Regardless of where a person resides, concealable firearms inside the city of Omaha are required to be registered with the Omaha Police Department.” Fortunately, those who hold Nebraska concealed carry permits or those who have permits from states Nebraska honors with reciprocity – including North Carolina — are exempt from the registration requirement.)

So, a new gun owner who does not have a Nebraska concealed carry permit who wants to buy a handgun from Guns Unlimited is required to (a) go to the Sheriff’s Office to get screened and buy a pistol purchase permit, (b) take the permit to the gun store and purchase the gun, (c) go to the Omaha Police Department to get screened again and register the gun they just bought, and (d) finally go back to Guns Unlimited to take possession of their handgun.

According to Mike, although it does not happen often, it is possible for someone to get a Nebraska pistol purchase permit but be denied registration by the Omaha Police Department, in which case Guns Unlimited refunds the purchase and just keeps the gun which the buyer has never taken possession of.

About 2020 new gun buyers, Mike also made a couple of other observations. First, few of them became repeat customers. Second, and surely related, he is already starting to see some people bringing their panic-bought to the store to sell back. They are surprised to find that, even though they have never shot the guns, they will only be getting about half of their purchase price back.

Wrapping up another interesting stop on my tour of America’s gun cultures, I bought a small gun safe and souvenir cup on my way out.

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.

The episode focused on a recently published study by a group of public health scholars who fielded a national survey of 916 Asian Americans asking about their experiences of racial discrimination and their firearm-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is a lot of anecdata floating around about how anti-Asian discrimination increased during the pandemic (think of people taking the “China virus” and “kung flu” language to the next outgroup level), and that this led to unprecedented gun buying among Asian Americans.

Of course, without historical data, we can’t really speak to “precedent,” but these scholars find that 6.0% of respondents said they purchased a gun during COVID and another 11.2% said they intended to purchase a gun. Of the 6% of COVID gun buyers, 54.6% were first-time gun buyers.

If the survey is accurate and representative, then 3.3% of Asian American adults in the United States became new gun owners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some quick calculations (roughly 20 million Asian Americans, about 75% being over 18) suggests that about half a million Asian Americans became new gun owners.

On the podcast, the authors note that part of the idea of doing the study was a phone call from a gun store owner in Battle Creek, Michigan who was wondering why so many Asian Americans were buying guns all of a sudden. Battle Creek is home to refugees from Burma dating back to the mid-1970s and a couple thousand live in the community today.

According to the abstract, the study found:

Asian Americans who experienced racial discrimination were more likely to purchase a gun and ammunition and intend to purchase more ammunition during the COVID-19 pandemic. AAs who perceived more cultural racism were more likely to purchase a gun. Individuals who reported higher anticipatory racism-related stress reported greater intent to purchase guns.

Examining racism and firearm-related risks among Asian Americans in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic (Preventive Medicine Reports, June 2022)

I was not surprised that the authors are working within The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. This was evident in the podcast appearance if not fully in the associated article. They understand that these Asian Americans are buying guns for personal protection (Point 1 of The Standard Model).

They highlight the frequency of gun carry by their gun-owning respondents:

Finally, 38.2% (n = 39) of individual gun owners indicated that they had carried a gun more frequently since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the top reason was for protection (Table 2). Furthermore, more than 1/3 of gun owners (38.5%, n = 15) reported that they carried a gun over half of the time (greater than 45 days) in the last three months.

They suggest (on the podcast) that guns are rarely used for self-defense (Point 2 of The Standard Model) and instead “the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent racism directed toward Asian Americans increased their risk for firearm injury through increased gun and ammunition purchase and unsafe storage” (Point 3 of The Standard Model).

They conclude by characterizing their study as one of the first to consider “the effects of discrimination of firearm-related risks,” there of course not being associated benefits worthy of mentioning.

Which recalls the conclusion of Studdert and his colleagues in their recent article on handgun ownership and suicide: “This information is also important for current and prospective firearm owners seeking to weigh the risks and perceived benefits of ownership.” Objective risk vs. perceived benefits, if any.

In the podcast, they advocate what Eric Ruben (SMU Law School) called in a Twitter exchange with me a “softer version” of The Standard Model. They don’t condemn gun ownership outright but highlight the need for better firearms safety education, especially around issues of safe storage. That’s something I can definitely get on board with.

In fact, I was discussing the diversity of Gun Culture 2.0 even before COVID, as in my lunchtime keynote lecture to the National Firearms Law Seminar in April 2019.

Beyond recognizing the diversity of new gun buyers, I have also argued that being a person who owns a gun does not automatically make someone a “gun owner” in terms of their identity. Not developing a gun owner identity could limit new gun owners’ engagement with gun culture more broadly or with Second Amendment advocacy specifically (per political scientist Matthew Lacombe).

Some recent data on new gun owners and gun policy preferences (H/T The Trace’s Daily Bulletin) show that I may be, as is often the case, only half-right.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago recently included some questions about gun buying in their ongoing AmeriSpeak Panel survey (March 3-7, 2022). In a press release yesterday, they highlight two key findings.

First, compared to pre-pandemic gun owners, pandemic gun buyers are younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to be unmarried. These findings are not surprising but it is good to see them confirmed once again.

I will be interested to see what the AmeriSpeak data show with respect to gender and political leanings, too.

Second, and here is where I may have gotten things wrong, pandemic first-time gun buyers look very much like pre-pandemic gun owners in favoring permissive gun policies such as allowing people to carry concealed guns in more places, allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools, allowing people to carry concealed guns without a permit, and shortening waiting periods for people who want to buy guns legally.

Whether their similarity to pre-pandemic gun owners made them more likely to become pandemic first-time gun buyers in the first place (selection) or whether buying a gun brought them in line with existing gun owners in terms of policy preferences (treatment) or some combination of both is unknown.

Whether I am actually wrong in my speculation about the 2A politics of new gun owners also remains to be seen. But these data definitely temper my earlier views.

Among this article’s general conclusions is that the recent Great Gun Buying Spree “resulted from a general increase in the number of U.S. adults who bought guns, the great majority of whom in any given year already owned firearms. Nonetheless, the number of new gun owners created, 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021, was sufficiently large (an estimated 7.5 million) and diverse (approximately half were female and almost half were people of color) to have a modest effect on the prevalence of firearm ownership and on the demographic profile of current gun owners.”

Findings regarding new gun owners:

We estimate that nearly 3 million more U.S. adults purchased firearms in 2020 (16.6 million) than in 2019 (13.8 million) (Table 2). As a result, even though the proportion of gun purchasers who were new to gun ownership in each of the 3 calendar years we examined hovered around 20%, without notable differences in this proportion prior to versus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the estimated absolute number of new gun owners increased. In 2019, for example, approximately 2.4 million U.S. adults became new gun owners (0.9% of U.S. adults); in 2020, 3.8 million did (1.5% of U.S. adults). Overall, an estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million people) became new gun owners over the 28 months before the survey, equal to 10% of all U.S. adults who personally owned firearms as of April 2021.

Findings regarding diversity of new gun owners, confirming earlier anecdotal accounts:

We estimate that approximately 10% of gun owners as of May 2021 had become new gun owners over the prior 28 months. Slightly more than half of these new gun owners were male and non-Hispanic White; one fifth were Black and one fifth were Hispanic. One quarter were younger than 30 years. On average, new gun owners owned 1.9 firearms, 1.2 of which were handguns. In the 16 months before the survey, these purchasers bought on average 1.3 firearms, approximately three quarters of which were handguns.

Methodological Notes

I’m not a survey methodologist but I like the opt-in panel design of this study as the response rates seem much better than random digit dialing or mail-back surveys I have seen recently, whose response rates seem to be tanking.

I note the estimated rate of personal and household gun ownership in the 2021 National Firearms Survey is higher than in the General Social Survey, perhaps because it overcomes some of the reasons for underestimation I have noted before.

My only question right now has to do with the estimate of personal gun ownership in this study. The text and Table 1 say 28.8%, but the footnote(*) in Table 1 says 5,932 of 19,049 respondents own firearms. Isn’t that 31.1%? What am I missing here?

I will update this post if/when I get some clarity on this.

I was fairly certain that the presentation would not be recorded, so before I left for Jay, Vermont I recorded an abbreviated (15 minute) version of my talk from my basement studio and uploaded it to YouTube.

In the talk I briefly review the concept of Gun Culture 2.0 then discuss its implications for the changing face of gun owners in the United States.

Gun owners are becoming more diverse because Gun Culture 2.0 is more inclusive than Gun Culture 1.0. It is more inclusive because the self-defense at the core of Gun Culture 2.0 is a universal concern. I document this using national data on gun owners and show that the trend that has been developing over a number of years was amplified during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+.

I appreciate your taking a moment to watch the video. If you find this and the other work I do of value, please give the video a thumbs up on YouTube and share it through your own networks.

I was fairly certain that the presentation would not be recorded, so before I left for Jay, Vermont I recorded an abbreviated (15 minute) version of my talk from my basement studio and uploaded it to YouTube.

In the talk I briefly review the concept of Gun Culture 2.0 then discuss its implications for the changing face of gun owners in the United States.

Gun owners are becoming more diverse because Gun Culture 2.0 is more inclusive than Gun Culture 1.0. It is more inclusive because the self-defense at the core of Gun Culture 2.0 is a universal concern. I document this using national data on gun owners and show that the trend that has been developing over a number of years was amplified during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+.

I appreciate your taking a moment to watch the video. If you find this and the other work I do of value, please give the video a thumbs up on YouTube and share it through your own networks.

We know from many surveys over a long period of time that the statistically average legal gun owner is a middle-aged, politically conservative, married, white man from a rural area in the South or Mountain West. Basically, the main characters from TV’s “Duck Dynasty.”

But one of the problems with averages is they hide diversity. The average American, after all, has one testicle.

As we see in this module, compared to Gun Culture 1.0, Gun Culture 2.0 is younger and more female, more racially and sexually diverse, more urban and suburban, and more attracted to handguns for self-defense. New and non-traditional buyers in the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+ made this abundantly clear and scholarship on gun owners is beginning to catch up.

Required readings for Module 3 are:

• Claire Boine, Michael Siegel, Craig Ross, Eric W. Fleegler, and Ted Alcorn. “What Is Gun Culture? Cultural Variations and Trends across the United States.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2020).
• Michael B. Siegel, and Claire C. Boine, “The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the U.S.: The 2019 National Lawful Use of Guns Survey.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2020). A survey that centers the lawful use of guns? Yes, please.
• Joseph Wertz, Deborah Azrael, David Hemenway, Susan Sorenson, and Matthew Miller, “Differences Between New and Long-Standing US Gun Owners: Results From a National Survey.” American Journal of Public Health (2018). One of the most important articles on gun ownership I have read. The differences between new and long-standing gun owners are significant and telling.
• Deborah Azrael and Matthew Miller, “Who Bought Guns During the Pandemic?” Unpublished results from the 2021 National Firearms Survey. Bring some empirical data to the speculation of many in gun culture and the gun industry that gun buyers in 2020 were quite demographically diverse.

Recommended readings for Module 3 are:

• David Yamane, “Gun Culture 2.0 and the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020,” Discourse (February 2021). My reflection on how the gun buying spree of 2020+ is comprehensible in the context of a self-defense oriented Gun Culture 2.0.
• Richard L. Legault, Nicole Hendrix, and Alan Lizotte, “Caught in a Crossfire: Legal and Illegal Guns in America”, Handbook on Crime and Deviance (2019). Sets the stage for understanding both normal and criminal uses of guns, and highlights a key point: “The legal and illegal gun worlds can be quite far apart.” Legal gun owners don’t understand criminal uses of guns, and those who are victims of gun crimes don’t understand why reasonable people need guns.
• Pew Research Center, America’s Complex Relationship with Guns, results of national survey (June 2017). In my view still the best nationally-representative survey of gun owners’ beliefs and behaviors. I’ve summarized some of the highlights of this report in a series of posts ending here.
• Crifasi, Cassandra K., Julie A. Ward, Emma E. McGinty, Daniel W. Webster, and Colleen L. Barry. “Gun Purchasing Behaviours during the Initial Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic, March to Mid-July 2020.” International Review of Psychiatry (2021). Brief article but one of the first to take up the issue of COVID-19 pandemic gun buying.

I don’t take the recommended readings to be comprehensive or complete. Suggestions are welcome.

I’m curious. Have any of your students been “triggered” by the range trip? Are any affected emotionally by shooting a firearm for the first time? Have you had students refuse to participate?

These are great questions that I am happy to answer.

The field trip is mandatory but the shooting is voluntary. In previous years, when everyone in the class (16 students) attended in one group, about 2/3 to 3/4 of the students opted to shoot.

The participation rate was lowest when we went to an indoor range because some students decide in the moment whether they want to shoot or not. As you probably know, indoor ranges are not the most sonically welcoming environments.

Due to COVID, last year I took just 4 students at a time and EVERYONE shot. I think being outdoors in a smaller group made the situation less intimidating. Even though COVID is less of a concern this year, I am still going to do the small groups for this reason.

Students are only rarely negatively triggered. This may be because I pre-screen students for the class, letting them know that the field trip is mandatory and telling them that if they have strongly negative personal experiences with firearms, the class may be challenging for them. I have had just a couple of students in the past ask to sit out the discussion of suicide do to previous trauma.

On the other hand, I have had many students who experience the cognitive dissonance of disliking guns going in and enjoying the experience of shooting. You can get a flavor for this in the reflections students write after the field trip, some of which I post on my blog(s).

From last year, for example:

The collected posts from the class dating back to 2015 are available HERE.

As necessity is the mother of invention, I learned some things about shooting and training over the past year that can be carried over into our post-pandemic times. This includes lessons from on-line classes conducted by the Liberal Gun Owners, pistol marksmanship simulator training with The Tactical Professor Claude Werner, and my old nemesis, dry fire practice.

In April 2020 I was supposed to attend a 2 day pistol and rifle training class with the Liberal Gun Owners at the Triple C Range in Cresson, Texas. When it was canceled, the LGO EO Randy Miyan arranged to have Ron Grobman of Tactical Fitness Austin (who was going to teach the in person classes) conduct a one hour pistol and one hour rifle class over Zoom.

Geared up as we would be for class — sans ammo, of course — we watched Grobman discuss the basics of pistol and rifle shooting. He also was able to watch us manipulate our guns on video and offer advice and feedback based on what he saw.

The class was much like what I experienced teaching my own classes online. It is not as good as teaching face-to-face, but it is certainly better than nothing. It gives the opportunity to train when one can’t get out of the house, and also allows training with someone who is not physically present without either party having to travel. Parallel to my Sociology of Guns class is being able to have people guest lecture in my class online (like Tiffany Johnson and Aqil Qadir, for example) without them having to come to Winston-Salem to be in class.

Compared to my pistols, I hardly use our AR-style rifles, so my familiarity with their manual of arms is much worse. I am awkward in my rifle handling skills to be sure. In the online class, not having to worry about working with a loaded gun was a huge benefit.

This benefit of working on the fundamentals of shooting without the distraction of live guns and live fire was also evident in an NRA Pistol Marksmanship Simulator Training course Sandy and I took with Claude Werner in June 2020. The Tactical Professor was good enough to teach us this course on our way home from The Complete Combatant’s range in Dahlonega (where we took their Entry Level Pistol Essentials course and I observed John Johnston’s Technical Handgun course).

Claude followed the NRA’s prescribed curriculum for this course, working through the PowerPoint slides which are familiar to those who have taken NRA courses in the past. He added his own elaborations and amendments as we went along. E.g., regarding “always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot,” he added the helpful practice of being able to see completely through the trigger guard with no trigger finger visible. For the slide on “index points of a proper grip,” he substituted his own pictures for the default NRA photos. For shooting position, he suggested that (following Matt Burkett) that “your feet should feel heavy,” which tends to put you on the balls of your feel.

Following the presentation, we used a SIRT pistol and an empty semi-auto to practice the fundamentals of shooting under Claude’s expert eye using targets set up on patio chairs in his backyard. As with the LGO online course, not having to worry about a 180 decibel explosion at arms length from our face allowed us to focus on other things we were trying to learn.

I think these short, non-shooting courses could be an excellent introduction for new shooters especially. I recognize that many longer courses begin with working the fundamentals via dry fire, but the reality that live fire will take place does hang over that work. Creating an entirely separate course could alleviate some of that anxiety.

Finally, sometimes necessity helps us to re-invent the proverbial wheel. To wit: Dry firing is the perfect activity to do when you cannot leave your house and have no ammo.

Earlier this month, we made up the LGO training course that was canceled last April. Because I did not want to be a burden on the class, I wanted to tune myself up before arriving. In addition to taking a private pistol and rifle lesson with Chris Cypert of Citizens Defense Research, I also visited the range twice and shot about 50 rounds each time. In between, these live fire sessions, however, I forced myself to do some dry fire practice. Drawing from concealment, establishing a solid grip, pressing the trigger without moving the sights on the pistol. Safety off, safety on with the AR.

It is definitely more fun to go to the range and fire off a bunch of live rounds, but the COVID experience and ongoing ammo shortage definitely taught me some lessons on how to be a better shooter when that isn’t possible.

This post collects various blog posts, stories, and studies I have come across that I think have some value. If you know of other works to be included, please post them in the comments.

–Gun Culture 2.0 and the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020. An essay I wrote for Discourse magazine connecting the spree to the broader culture of guns in America.

–COVID-19 and Guns Video Series by Duke Center for Firearms Law. Including an interview with yours truly.

– Pandemics, Protests, and Firearms Purchasing. Study by two economists using NICS data highlights the uniqueness of the 2020 gun buying spree.

–Societal Uncertainty + Social Unrest = Gun Sales. Highlights a NICS data visualization produced by The Trace.

–Coronavirus Supplants Barack Obama as Greatest Gun Salesman in American History. Builds on a Wall Street Journal article on “What Sells in a Pandemic.”

–COVID-19 Handgun Purchasing Boom. Data from Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting on ratio of handguns to long guns in NICS data for March 2020.

-Series of three posts by my fellow sociologist, Trent Steidley (University of Denver) offering some perspective on interpreting NICS data: Caution and Sense with NICS Data and Gun Sale Spikes and How Unprecedented Was The Gun Buying Spree of March 2020 and A COVID-19 Handgun Purchasing Boom?

-“Americans have bought record 17m guns in year of unrest, analysis finds,” The Guardian of London by Lois Beckett. Drawing on data from Small Arms Analytics.

–“Why Americans are buying more guns than ever,” by Aimee Huff and Michelle Barnhart in The Conversation. An August 2020 summary of what is happening and why, connecting to some scholarly literature on guns.