In preparing for the class, I have been trying to summarize and systematize the various surveys that have been conducted on gun ownership in America. This semester I have assigned work based on the National Firearms Surveys of 2019 and 2021 conducted by Deborah Azrael, Matthew Miller, and their team at Harvard/Northeastern Universities and the 2023 National Firearm Attitude and Behaviors Study fielded by publish health scholars at the University of Michigan.

Those who have followed this blog for some time will recall that I have long held that gun owner surveys underestimate the actual level of gun ownership in the U.S. And no survey seems to underestimate gun ownership more than the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.

In doing my class prep I accidentally came across a paper that adds another piece to the underestimate puzzle. In a paper critiquing William English’s 2021 National Firearms Survey by 5 heavy hitters in the field — Deborah Azrael, Joseph Blocher, Philip Cook, David Hemenway, and Matthew Miller — I came across this table.

Setting aside the 2021 NFS by English, the estimate of personal gun ownership for female respondents in the GSS is well below the other estimates. If that estimate was 6% higher — mirroring the Harvard/Northeastern, Gallup, and Pew estimates — the overall personal gun ownership estimate of the GSS would also be in line with those other surveys.

There are, of course, reasons other than gender that surveys underestimate gun ownership, but this is a helpful piece of the puzzle.

I discussed The Standard Model also in Module 4 of my free public webinar on “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America,” as well as on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel.

A brief synopsis of The Standard Model from my original post on it follows.

ORIGINAL POST

Last year I was invited to contribute to a special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science by the editors Cassandra Crifasi, Jennifer Dineen, and Kerri Raissian. The theme of this issue is “Gun Violence in America: What Works and What is Possible.”

Specifically, the editors invited me “to write a paper overviewing the evolution of American gun culture – from hunting to gun culture 2.0. Your scholarship in this area will help readers of the special issue understand the role guns play in American culture and how that role has evolved (or not) over time.”

I am always flattered but such invitations, though perhaps I should not be. Maybe the first dozen people they asked said “No”? More likely is the reality that not many scholars have focused their work on gun culture per se, as opposed to adverse outcomes with guns, which is the primary focus of this special issue.

As usual, my participation in these sorts of enterprises reminds me of the Sesame Street song I remember so well from my childhood.

My contribution will focus on the rise of Gun Culture 2.0, the self-defense core of American gun culture today. But I also want to engage what I call “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership” – the primary way gun studies scholars approach Gun Culture 2.0.

The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership

An excellent example of The Standard Model can be found in “Protective Gun Ownership as a Coping Mechanism” by Nick Buttrick, a postdoc at Princeton University.

The Standard Model has the following structure:

(1) It recognizes Gun Culture 2.0: “the culture of protective gun ownership has become the dominant mode in American life” (Buttrick 835). No argument there!

(2) It discounts the need for and utility of guns for defense: “And yet gun owners rarely use their guns to prevent victimization” (Buttrick 835).

Here it is mandatory to reference David Hemenway’s and Sara Solnick’s 2015 article, “The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007–2011.”

In this article, Hemenway and Solnick argue against both the need for guns and their utility for defense: (1) “Self-defense gun use (SDGU) occurs in fewer than 1% of contact crimes,” and (2) “SDGU is not associated with a reduced risk of victim injury.”

(3) It holds that the opposite is true of owning guns: “In contrast, bringing a gun into one’s home clearly makes it more dangerous: A gun in the home substantially increases the likelihood that a household member will die by a gun, whether by homicide, suicide, or accidental shootings” (Buttrick 835).

Public health research on guns focuses on this point in particular, so the citations are numerous, but The Standard Model looks to founding architect Arthur Kellerman’s twin towers published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 (“Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership”) and 1993 (“Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home”).

(4) Therefore, defensive gun ownership is not rational but irrational. It is irrational both in a psychological sense that motivations for gun ownership are driven by fear instead of the reality of need and utility (Point 2) and in a utility maximization sense that the risks are greater than the rewards (Point 3).

Therefore, claiming self-defense as a reason for gun ownership is actually a rationalization. In reality, something else is motivating defensive gun ownership.

(5) Scholars from sociology and political science define the something else as:

(A) Downward economic mobility. Key works include: Prominent in Jennifer Carlson’s Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline and Carson Mencken’s and Paul Froese’s “Gun Culture in Action.”

(B) Stereotypical/Toxic masculinity. Key works include Angela Stoud’s Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry and Scott Melzer’s Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War.

(C) Racism/Racial resentment. Key works include Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland and Alexandra Filindra’s series of articles on the topic.

Of course, many scholars adopt an intersectional approach wherein two or more parts of social science’s Holy Quadrinity of race-class-gender-sexuality come together in a single analysis of the drivers of defensive gun ownership. Carlson and Stroud both focus on race, class, and gender. In Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, Caroline Light criticizes “white hetero/cis-masculinity” as driving defensive gun culture.

(6) Psychologists define the something else as a coping mechanism. As Buttrick argues, “guns act as a maladaptive coping mechanism that allows their owners to manage the psychological threats that they face in their everyday lives, but at a serious cost” (p. 836). In addition to Buttrick, Wolfgang Strobe and colleagues use this framing in “Is It a Dangerous World Out There? The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership.”

(Psychology is not my forte so I welcome suggestions for other work that falls under Point 6.)

Conclusion

One of the benefits of elaborating the terms of The Standard Model is that it facilitates a sort of plug-and-play approach to new studies I come across.

For example, a recent episode of the “Red, Blue and Brady” podcast caught my eye. It was on “The Social Lives of Firearms: How Guns are Made – And What They Mean.” The special guest was Brandon Hunter-Pazzara, a doctoral student in anthropology at Princeton, discussing his article, “The possessive investment in guns: towards a material, social, and racial analysis of guns”

Hunter-Pazzara’s argument: “This new era of guns in American life builds from a longer history in which the gun remains central to the maintenance of the American racial order.” In my framework, 5C.

Two other recent articles (one published in the special issue of Sociological Perspectives I edited) fall under my framework’s 5B: Tara Warner and colleagues’ “To Provide or Protect? Masculinity, Economic Precarity, and Protective Gun Ownership in the United States” and Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino’s “Sometimes (but Not This Time), a Gun Is Just a Gun: Masculinity Threat and Guns in the United States, 1999–2018.”

And so on.

I will be breaking down each of the parts of The Standard Model into separate posts in the future so I can keep a running bibliography of the major works in each. Stay tuned for that!

By Eliza Cook

Growing up, I never thought about guns in a concrete way as neither of my parents owned, used, or discussed guns. My abstract and removed conceptions about guns and gun usage in America changed in fifth grade when the Sandy Hook shooting took place near my school, and the damage and devastation caused by guns became palpable in my own life.

The year after the Sandy Hook shooting occurred, I moved to Seattle to live with my grandparents, who are both staunchly against gun usage in the US. My grandmother cofounded and is on the board of Grandmothers Against Gun Violence, an organization comprised of grandmothers who share the mission of reforming gun control laws in Washington state (and eventually in the country as a whole) via protests, community events, and grassroots organizing. After getting involved with the organization and hearing the numerous personal stories of grandmothers that lost husbands and children and friends to gun violence, I too became staunchly against guns, even in recreational and hunting contexts.

During spring break of my freshman year of college, my brother took me to a gun range in Alabama, where I shot several rounds from a 9mm pistol. With weak arms and a fear of guns, I found the experience to be simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. My perception of America’s culture around guns centers around men, especially big burly men who are either valiant FBI agents and police officers or dangerous criminals or rural hunters, so feeling the “bang” of the pistol in my hands was strangely empowering as a woman. In the roughly two years between going to the gun range in Alabama and the gun range field trip last Wednesday, I have explored on both a personal and academic level what it means to be a strong and empowered woman in America: I started weightlifting six days a week and taking sociology courses focused on gender and power dynamics, which upon reflection significantly influenced my experience and perceptions during the field trip.

Specifically, going to the range in a group with three men subconsciously made me feel less weary about being in the presence of such large and deadly pieces of machinery – I found myself more interested in being a “good shot” than being scared of the gun in my hands. Shooting the two smaller handguns felt very similar to shooting the 9mm pistol in Alabama, which I believe alleviated some of my unease about shooting the guns due to their familiar nature.

While this exercise is aimed at getting me to reflect on my perceptions of and experiences with the guns themselves, I cannot help but also reflect on the subtle and subconscious gender dynamics that I encountered during the experience as well, as I think they are not mutually exclusive. After shooting the first handgun, I was met with more praise than the men in the group, which made me recall the sociology of sexuality course I took last semester, in which we discussed the gendered nature of certain activities, hobbies, and occupations. I felt incredibly empowered and strong after shooting the gun, which I imagine I felt to a greater degree than the men in my group who also shot the gun – perhaps a reflection of the historically gendered nature of guns in my mind.

While shooting the two smaller guns felt more familiar and therefore less scary – in tandem with my feelings of female empowerment – shooting the AR-15 was an entirely different experience. I was apprehensive about shooting the gun even before arriving at the range given the incredibly negative connotation the name has due to its frequent usage in violent and devastating mass shootings in recent years – not to mention its intimidating and ominous size and physical presence. Feeling my body on the gun, from my chest supporting the back of the gun to my cheek rested on the side to my hands on the trigger, made me feel like an appendage of the gun, which was a very striking feeling when I shot the gun. It was like some sort of strange epiphany – feeling one with the gun as it reverberated with sound and movement and launched a bullet across the range with stark precision. All I could think about when shooting the ten rounds was how jarring it is that the gun is used in so many mass shootings, because that means that the killers are physically feeling and experiencing the damage they are doing to another human body when the bullet leaves the AR-15.

Overall, I am very glad that I went to the gun range and clearly see the value of starting off the course by going on the field trip, as learning about and discussing gun culture and usage in America takes on an entirely different meaning when guns no longer exist in some removed vacuum.

Here I engage the 5th of the model’s 5 points: That something other than objective risk motivates defensive gun ownership.

From a sociological perspective, that something else centers on the discipline’s Holy Trinity: class, gender, and race. From a psychological perspective, defensive gun ownership is a maladaptive coping mechanism.

Links to the first five videos in the series are below.

In this video, I highlight three books by sociologists that focus attention on social class, gender, and race:

• Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson
• Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland by Jonathan Metzl
• Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry by Angela Stroud

From the psychology side, I discuss two key articles:

• Wolfgang Stroebe, et al., “Is It a Dangerous World Out There? The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership”:
• Nicholas Buttrick, “Protective Gun Ownership as a Coping Mechanism”

The previous five videos in this series follow.

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The pamphlet is notable for being published in 1975 by an anonymous “group of women who have spent our lives living in danger of attack from men.”

Thanks to Kathy Jackson (a.k.a., “The Cornered Cat”), a thought leader on women in gun culture, for finding her copy and sending it to me.

For more on the reasons I needed this document recently, please read on. . .

I have been furiously working on a revision of my article on the evolution of American gun culture for an upcoming issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. As noted on “Light Over Heat,” I received some excellent feedback on my original draft from an anonymous peer reviewer. One critique was that I needed to flesh out the seeds of Gun Culture 2.0 that were planted in the 1960s and 70s. So for the past week, I have launched myself down this intellectual rabbit hole like a drunk New Jersey high schooler at (Class) Action Park.

In tracing the roots of Gun Culture 2.0, I want to avoid the temptation to make it a story about the National Rifle Association (NRA). I generally downplay the importance of the NRA (perhaps too much) in my work to counteract every other scholar who overplays the centrality of the NRA.

For example, I was recently re-reading Caroline Light’s book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. (If you replace “history” with “critique,” you get a better idea of where she is coming from.) In any event, at one point Light writes, “Armed citizens such as Arizonan Carrie Lightfoot . . . have helped bolster the NRA’s appeal to women.” Lightfoot founded The Well Armed Woman in 2012 for reasons she explains on her website. To reduce Lightfoot’s work to bolstering the NRA’s appeal to women both slights her efforts and gives too much credit to the NRA. Sure, the NRA brought Lightfoot on board once she was already established, as they did with Colion Noir and Chris Cheng on NRATV. But all were significant figures in the gun culture outside the NRA prior to their formal association.

To bolster my own argument about the roots of Gun Culture 2.0 outside the NRA, I have been looking at women’s self-defense in the 1970s. As Caroline Light herself recognizes, a movement for self-defense empowerment for women was developing out of the Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s. Model Mugging was founded in 1971 and the Women’s Self-Defense Council in 1975. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. The struggle for women’s bodily autonomy was a thing during that time period, as it is still today.

These are the roots of what sociologist Martha McCaughey would later call “physical feminism” in her book Real Knockouts. And this is the context within which The Woman’s Gun Pamphlet was born in 1975.

As civilian gun training became more popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some adherents to physical feminism continued to incorporate armed self-defense. After all, the legal justification for use of deadly force in self-defense includes not just the possibility of death but also grave bodily injury, which includes rape, as McCaughey points out.

As is often the case, the NRA played cultural catchup after it noticed women’s growing interest in physical self-defense. It capitalized on it with programs in the 1970s like Women in the NRA and the 1990s’ “Refuse To Be a Victim.” This led to a critical response in which anti-gun people argued that women were being “seduced by the NRA’s ads” and were victims of the NRA’s “patriarchal double-dealing” (McCaughey 1997, 140). McCaughey’s response: “We cannot blame or credit NRA advertisements for the entire self-defense movement.”

This is a good reminder in general, even today, as many seek to equate gun culture with — or, more accurately, to reduce it to — the NRA.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to include a screencap of one of the pages of The Woman’s Gun Pamphlet which strongly resonates today as we see movements for and against women’s bodily autonomy today.

I find advertising in general extraordinarily interesting. I was a devoted follower of the TV show Mad Men and I teach about advertising in my classes. Advertising is a major part of our culture, and of course, it is a major part of gun culture as well. When I consume gun-related media, I am as drawn to the ads as to the content.

I am also one of the only gun scholars to have systematically analyzed gun advertising. I have published two studies documenting the rise of Gun Culture 2.0 using changes in advertising over time in The American Rifleman (1918-2017) and Guns Magazine (1955-2019), and a third study of the portrayal of women (and men) in ads placed in The American Rifleman (1920-2019).

Without question, advertisements do not simply sell products. They sell certain ideas and ideals which they try to get consumers – often subconsciously – to attach to their products. The male protector is one such ideal I have seen, and ideas about masculinity (and femininity) are frequently sold. (Though see my book chapter on “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertising” for a more complicated gender story.)

Many have looked to Bushmaster’s “Man Card” ad as selling a particular understanding of masculinity in connection with the AR-15 platform rifle. This was especially so in the wake of the mass murders in Newtown, CT, since the murderer happened to use a Bushmaster XM15-E2S (see, for example, the Huffington Post story the day after the event).

But does advertising like Bushmaster’s lead to gun violence? The question of the connection between gun advertising selling masculine ideals and violence committed by people with guns was raised by the plaintiffs in Soto v. Bushmaster and their allies.

As journalist Lois Beckett reported back in 2016:

In the wake of the shooting, some family members of victims questioned whether the gun companies’ aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles was irresponsible, and whether gun companies were intentionally targeting their product to troubled, violent young men like Lanza.

Unfortunately, with the settlement of this case, we will likely never know if what the plaintiffs suggest is true.

Like many others, I personally thought Bushmaster’s “man card” advertising campaign was dumb. But anyone who consumes ad-based media knows that a lot of advertising campaigns are dumb.

If it was supposed to intentionally target troubled, violent young men and therefore play a causal role in mass homicide, however, then Remington needed to fire its ad agency. Available data suggest that the campaign strategy was a terrible failure.

In 2012, including the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people, the total number of Americans who were murdered with all rifles (including but not limited to AR-15 style rifles) was 298 – 2.3% of the 12,888 murders that year.

Both the number (332) and proportion (2.6%) of murders with rifles were higher in 2011 than in 2012, and the number (367) and proportion (2.8%) were higher in 2010 than in 2011, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. (For an unrelated recent post, I provided FBI UCR data showing rifles were used in 2.6% of homicides in 2019.)

Of course, we can never know what would have happened if Bushmaster hadn’t run its Man Card ad. At best, Bushmaster’s alleged “aggressively macho advertising of military-style rifles” and “intentionally targeting their products to troubled, violent young men” kept the rifle homicide rate from going down even faster than it did from 2010 to 2012.

But, to me, it seems much more likely that Bushmaster’s marketing was not targeted to “troubled, violent young men” and therefore had no effect on the rifle homicide rate, directly or indirectly.

I sympathize with the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. I don’t know how I would react to the loss of one of my children or loved ones. I am sure I would lash out with anger and experience major depression, and then want to do something about it. I doubt the monetary settlement will help, but perhaps getting the insurers of the former Remington Outdoor Company to settle will.

The first survey, Georgetown business professor William English’s 2021 National Firearms Survey, highlights the diversity of contemporary gun owners.

The second survey, a 2021 National Firearms Survey by scholars at Northeastern and Harvard University, highlights the diversity of those who became new gun owners from January 2019 to April 2021.

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Here is the sixth of several such essays, written by a student whose initial reflections on our field trip to the gun range can be found here. (Link to the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth reflection essays.)

By Kierra Law

Coming into this class, I had minimal knowledge about guns. However, I have learned a lot from our trip to the gun range, our readings, class discussions, and my research project. My previous exposure to guns was primarily through the media, which mostly paints firearms as bad. However, I learned in this class that guns are normal and that the gun culture is much more complex than it seems.

First, I was very interested in learning about the history of guns because I had never considered how the gun culture has changed over time. I was not very surprised to learn that Gun Culture 2.0 is centered around self-defense because most of the people I know who own guns have them for self-defense.

However, I was somewhat surprised but very interested to learn about new gun owners and groups that I would not have typically thought of when it comes to gun owners (women, minorities, people in the LGBTQ+ community, and liberal gun owners). I appreciated that there was some focus on these groups that we typically do not hear about in discourse about gun culture. I plan to look into some of the organizations and read some of the books you mentioned in class to learn more about them.

I also loved that we were able to consider actual world events and examine how they impact gun culture. In particular, I enjoyed learning about how gun culture has shifted recently because of the pandemic. This is an area that I am also interested in learning more about.

One of the most valuable parts of this class was listening to the guest speakers who are immersed in gun culture and asking them questions. I appreciated this because it’s important for me to be open to perspectives that may differ from my own. It was also helpful to hear from some of the people whose works we read or listened to because I was able to get a clearer understanding of their stance on issues within the gun world. While I did not necessarily agree with all of their stances on gun issues, I still learned something from each of them, and through that process, I gained a better understanding of my own stance on guns and issues concerning firearms in the U.S.

My research project was also very meaningful because I was able to research racial disparities in officer-involved shootings, which is an issue that is very important to me. This process was enlightening because I think that police violence against people of color using firearms has played a considerable role in my hesitance about guns, mainly because I had a family member who was racially profiled and held at gunpoint by a police officer. Although I wanted to do my research project on a more positive aspect of gun culture, I kept coming back to this topic because it is so close to home. I am glad that I learned more about the issue and possible ways to address it. After completing this project, I was inspired, and I was able to take what I learned and apply it to a research study proposal that I recently wrote for my psychology of race and ethnicity class. My proposed study would look at the effectiveness of incorporating programming centered on intersectionality into officer training in reducing racial disparities in officer-involved shootings.

Before this class, I had never handled a firearm, and I was very intimidated by them because I live in an area where gun violence is prevalent. I have family members who own guns and have them in the household because they work in security and own them for self-defense; however, we have never talked about them, and I did not even know where they were kept until I was in high school. Growing up, I never thought to ask them about their views on guns. This class has made me more interested in talking to my family members about what guns mean to them, their views on gun policies and regulations, and other areas of gun culture.

I never had any interest in guns. However, in the last year, as I started thinking about living alone after graduation, I began considering whether I should purchase a handgun for self-defense. As a woman, and particularly as a black woman, I always have to consider ways to protect myself as I move through a world where my identity may make me a target. After going to the gun range, I feel more comfortable with the idea of owning a gun. However, I still think that if I were to purchase a gun, I would not feel comfortable carrying it outside of my home.

I want to go to the gun range to get more experience and learn more about firearm safety. I also think that I would like to talk to more people of color and female gun owners to understand better what owning a firearm would mean for me. To feel comfortable making informed decisions about a gun, it is also imperative for me to learn more about gun laws and regulations where I live. I know we talked about some laws in class, but this area still seems pretty complex and unfamiliar to me, and I need to learn more.

Moving forward, I want to continue learning about guns and their roles in society, and I hope to gain more clarity on whether purchasing a firearm would be a good decision for me. Thank you for a great class this semester, Dr. Yamane.

The essay is actually quite sweeping in scope and in detail connects a great many dots together, including Kyle Rittenhouse and vigilantism, Ferguson and the militarization of law enforcement, extra legal violence in the name of border security, Threepers and Oath Keepers, Lavoy Finicum and Civil War II, “Operation Wetback” and the NRA, Stand Your Ground and vigilante sovereignty, George Mason and Dick Heller, CSPOA and authoritarian populism, “racialized fears and patriarchal aspirations” driving Gun Culture 2.0, and others!

Kautzer’s fundamental argument is that “an armed white citizenry, working in tandem with law enforcement, has for centuries sustained white rule in the United States through legal and extralegal violence.” As white rule has been challenged over the past several decades, we see the “rise of a tactical gun culture” in response. It’s a variation on the same old song of America. Although it alone is not sufficient to sustain the old regime of racial domination, “it does cultivate the material and ideological conditions necessary for a return to an authoritarian legal and political order.”

The Boston Review’s algorithm also pointed me to three additional stories, all of which provide variations on Kautzer’s theme.

[1] “Guns in the Family” (March 2018) by Harvard historian Walter Johnson. The summary under the title reads: “A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture.”

From the “tell us what you really think files”:

When I hear the NRA people going on about how guns are just “tools,” I think, absolutely, you are right, guns are tools: tools for making emotionally stunted men feel whole; tools for guiding lonely boys along the bloody pathway to becoming violent men; tools for spreading the fearful fantasy of the coming race war; tools for enflaming urban areas in rural states, and making the argument for more cops and more prisons; tools for reproducing male dominance and white supremacy; tools for white male parthenogenesis.

Walter Johnson, “Guns in the Family”

Johnson’s conclusion: “Until we deal with the admixture of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that produces such pornographic inequality; until we stop using armed police to guard the border between the haves and have-nots; until we recognize that imperial violence and police violence and school violence are related aspects of the same problem, we are going to keep producing killers. The cause of the United States’ problem with guns, to paraphrase Dunbar-Ortiz, is not guns, it is the United States.”

[2] “How the Modern NRA Was Born at the Border” (May 2021) by Sierra Pettengill and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Speaking of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, here we have a story about a documentary, The Rifleman, made by Sierra Pettengill, whose thinking she says was shaped by Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (2018).

The Rifleman uses the story of Harlon Carter — who we know from Kautzer’s essay as head of the US Border Patrol ran “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s and subsequently became head of the NRA after the “Revolt at Cincinnati” (1977-1985) — to tell the story of the NRA, but in a broader context.

Pettengill wants to “place it in the broader context of how gun ownership has, since early in the nation’s founding, been central to enforcing a white nationalist vision of the United States.”

The Boston Review story includes a conversation between Pettengill and Dunbar-Ortiz. Dunbar-Ortiz concludes very much as Kautzer does:

I think what the NRA—and Carter specifically—did was to simply revive something that had waned, because it was for a moment no longer needed. Slave patrols were not needed. The KKK wasn’t needed because the Jim Crow state had taken on that role of racial enforcer. But as that began to break down with civil rights, Carter handed to the descendants of the white settler population this tool for their empowerment, the new NRA.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

[3] “The Supreme Court is Poised to Put Politics Ahead of Gun-Violence Prevention” (October 2021) by Jonathan Metzl. Like Kautzer, I also know Jonathan Metzl, from having contributed an article (“Targeted Advertising”) to a journal special issue he edited.

Although ostensibly about the Supreme Court case of NYSRPA v. Bruen, that could force the remaining “may issue” concealed carry regimes to go “shall issue,” Metzl also continues on Kautzer and Dunbar-Ortiz’s theme of guns as “integral to white male authority.”

After Heller, guns became ever-more prevalent and, in most parts of the United States, easier for everyone to purchase and carry. To be sure, ready access to civilian firearms portended the realization of arguments by Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, and other leaders who once argued that Black Americans deserved the right to arm themselves in defense of myriad forms of white aggression. But as guns flooded southern states at previously unimaginable levels, conservative politicians and gun manufacturers upped the ante, continually reinventing ways to assure white tactical advantage while casting firearms as lethal prosthetics of white identity.

Jonathan Metzl

I began by noting how many dots Chad Kautzer connects in his essay. Other dots could also be connected. We know that Kautzer concludes his essay invoking the work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. [Thanks to reader AY for pointing out this statement is not correct. It was Johnson who invoked Dunbar-Ortiz at the end of his essay.]

In her interview with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill, Dunbar-Ortiz mentions David Hogg, the student gun control activist from Parkland High School. She say, “I should add that … David and I have become friends. He’s a student at Harvard now, and was taking a course from Walter Johnson, and he came up to Walter and said, ‘Have you read this book, Loaded?’ And of course, Walter had blurbed it!”

It’s not surprising, then, to find such consistency of thinking. As a sociologist of guns, I find myself divided between the obvious reality of racism in American society and the more dubious assertion that firearms therefore can only be seen as upholding a racially unequal social order. Seeing firearms as “tools of white male pathogenesis” and “lethal prosthetics of white identity” casts racially diverse gun owners in the role of “Acting White.” Which strikes me as, what’s the word? Paternalistic.

The essay is actually quite sweeping in scope and in detail connects a great many dots together, including Kyle Rittenhouse and vigilantism, Ferguson and the militarization of law enforcement, extra legal violence in the name of border security, Threepers and Oath Keepers, Lavoy Finicum and Civil War II, “Operation Wetback” and the NRA, Stand Your Ground and vigilante sovereignty, George Mason and Dick Heller, CSPOA and authoritarian populism, “racialized fears and patriarchal aspirations” driving Gun Culture 2.0, and others!

Kautzer’s fundamental argument is that “an armed white citizenry, working in tandem with law enforcement, has for centuries sustained white rule in the United States through legal and extralegal violence.” As white rule has been challenged over the past several decades, we see the “rise of a tactical gun culture” in response. It’s a variation on the same old song of America. Although it alone is not sufficient to sustain the old regime of racial domination, “it does cultivate the material and ideological conditions necessary for a return to an authoritarian legal and political order.”

The Boston Review’s algorithm also pointed me to three additional stories, all of which provide variations on Kautzer’s theme.

[1] “Guns in the Family” (March 2018) by Harvard historian Walter Johnson. The summary under the title reads: “A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture.”

From the “tell us what you really think files”:

When I hear the NRA people going on about how guns are just “tools,” I think, absolutely, you are right, guns are tools: tools for making emotionally stunted men feel whole; tools for guiding lonely boys along the bloody pathway to becoming violent men; tools for spreading the fearful fantasy of the coming race war; tools for enflaming urban areas in rural states, and making the argument for more cops and more prisons; tools for reproducing male dominance and white supremacy; tools for white male parthenogenesis.

Walter Johnson, “Guns in the Family”

Johnson’s conclusion: “Until we deal with the admixture of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that produces such pornographic inequality; until we stop using armed police to guard the border between the haves and have-nots; until we recognize that imperial violence and police violence and school violence are related aspects of the same problem, we are going to keep producing killers. The cause of the United States’ problem with guns, to paraphrase Dunbar-Ortiz, is not guns, it is the United States.”

[2] “How the Modern NRA Was Born at the Border” (May 2021) by Sierra Pettengill and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Speaking of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, here we have a story about a documentary, The Rifleman, made by Sierra Pettengill, whose thinking she says was shaped by Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (2018).

The Rifleman uses the story of Harlon Carter — who we know from Kautzer’s essay as head of the US Border Patrol ran “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s and subsequently became head of the NRA after the “Revolt at Cincinnati” (1977-1985) — to tell the story of the NRA, but in a broader context.

Pettengill wants to “place it in the broader context of how gun ownership has, since early in the nation’s founding, been central to enforcing a white nationalist vision of the United States.”

The Boston Review story includes a conversation between Pettengill and Dunbar-Ortiz. Dunbar-Ortiz concludes very much as Kautzer does:

I think what the NRA—and Carter specifically—did was to simply revive something that had waned, because it was for a moment no longer needed. Slave patrols were not needed. The KKK wasn’t needed because the Jim Crow state had taken on that role of racial enforcer. But as that began to break down with civil rights, Carter handed to the descendants of the white settler population this tool for their empowerment, the new NRA.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

[3] “The Supreme Court is Poised to Put Politics Ahead of Gun-Violence Prevention” (October 2021) by Jonathan Metzl. Like Kautzer, I also know Jonathan Metzl, from having contributed an article (“Targeted Advertising”) to a journal special issue he edited.

Although ostensibly about the Supreme Court case of NYSRPA v. Bruen, that could force the remaining “may issue” concealed carry regimes to go “shall issue,” Metzl also continues on Kautzer and Dunbar-Ortiz’s theme of guns as “integral to white male authority.”

After Heller, guns became ever-more prevalent and, in most parts of the United States, easier for everyone to purchase and carry. To be sure, ready access to civilian firearms portended the realization of arguments by Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, and other leaders who once argued that Black Americans deserved the right to arm themselves in defense of myriad forms of white aggression. But as guns flooded southern states at previously unimaginable levels, conservative politicians and gun manufacturers upped the ante, continually reinventing ways to assure white tactical advantage while casting firearms as lethal prosthetics of white identity.

Jonathan Metzl

I began by noting how many dots Chad Kautzer connects in his essay. Other dots could also be connected. We know that Kautzer concludes his essay invoking the work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. [Thanks to reader AY for pointing out this statement is not correct. It was Johnson who invoked Dunbar-Ortiz at the end of his essay.]

In her interview with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill, Dunbar-Ortiz mentions David Hogg, the student gun control activist from Parkland High School. She say, “I should add that … David and I have become friends. He’s a student at Harvard now, and was taking a course from Walter Johnson, and he came up to Walter and said, ‘Have you read this book, Loaded?’ And of course, Walter had blurbed it!”

It’s not surprising, then, to find such consistency of thinking. As a sociologist of guns, I find myself divided between the obvious reality of racism in American society and the more dubious assertion that firearms therefore can only be seen as upholding a racially unequal social order. Seeing firearms as “tools of white male pathogenesis” and “lethal prosthetics of white identity” casts racially diverse gun owners in the role of “Acting White.” Which strikes me as, what’s the word? Paternalistic.