This is the third of several student gun range field trip reflection essays from my fall 2023 Sociology of Guns seminar (see Reflection #1 and Reflection #2). The assignment to which students are responding can be found here. I am grateful to these students for their willingness to have their thoughts shared publicly.

By Gabi Overcast-Hawks

Being from the rural South, guns were a regular part of my upbringing, both in my immediate home and with extended family. As the daughter of two women, my mothers were adamant about setting the example of responsible gun ownership and proper firearms practices. Their reasoning for owning firearms, despite both of them being comfortably raised around them, was that they were two women with two daughters which sadly made them a vulnerable target for a variety of crimes. Owning a firearm gave them a piece of mind when it came to feeling secure, but with two children in the house, made them religious in safely storing and stowing the firearms.

My extended family, although not the most responsible gun owners, regularly engaged with firearms for sport and leisure. The first firearm I handled was a .22 and I shot bottles off of a fence on my grandfather’s farm. During this, my Uncle Johnny (a lifetime hunter and currently a Virginia citizen with a concealed carry license) and my Cousin Matt (an SBI ATF-ALE Agent) stressed to me the importance of feeling a balance of fear and comfort around firearms. They have the ability to empower us, but also are also powerful tools with lethal consequences far too frequently. Because of experiences and perspectives like those, my understanding of firearms was formed at a very young age with the adults in my life stressing two crucial messages: firearms are dangerous when handled irresponsibly BUT they are a very real part of the world we live in and something we MUST learn to be comfortable around.

The first part of the message, referencing the lethality of firearms, was and is still something I keep at the forefront of my mind whenever I am shooting with my uncles and cousins, or at the range with my SOC346 class. It directly relates to the rules of safety that our class discussed before attending the range, specifically keeping your finger off of the trigger until you are ready to shoot, treating every gun as loaded, and being aware of what is beyond and around your target.

As naive as it sounds, I wasn’t aware that most of my classmates hadn’t interacted with firearms before. I assumed that given the prevalence of gun ownership in the US, that most of my classmates’ parents probably owned a firearm or gave their children some sort of instruction regarding firearm safety prior to entering adulthood. In the South, going to the range for the first time or joining in on hunting trips was a right of passage that nearly everyone I knew had done well before they turned 18.

In between our turns, I chatted with Lane (whom I knew prior to this class) and Boris (whom I had never met before our range field trip). Their two perspectives were particularly of interest to me. Lane, who is from California, had never seen a firearm before, except for one that a police officer had holstered. She explained that firearms were far from the norm where she grew up, but I appreciated her willingness to show up and learn about them through practice.

Simply interacting with firearms makes them seem less daunting but also gives you a larger understanding of the gravity and power that they have. One of the many reasons why I, personally and through my own conversations, feel that firearms are such a divisive topic is because they are either regularly engrained in individuals’ upbringings or are foreign and forbidden objects. It is incredibly easy to form opinions about things, individuals, and policies, amongst other things, that you have no personal interaction or relationship with. It is not uncommon for family members to support the LGBTQ+ community after having a child come out, or better understand racism, mental health struggles, and rape culture once they have a friendship with someone who has experienced it.

I am hoping that this field trip not only encourages some individuals to feel more comfortable discussing firearms but that it encourages them to do so in a way that is more critical thinking that they have safely engaged with firearms in a controlled environment.

Many of the policy conversations that I hear surrounding firearms oftentimes discuss what our country would be like if we strengthened gun laws or entirely banned firearms. My only academic understanding of firearms comes from Freak-o-nomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, which I read for a high school class. They discussed their economic research in which they looked at death rates of children by pool drownings compared to swimming pools. Children were 100 times more likely to die from drowning in a swimming pool than to be victims of gun violence (Levitt & Dubner, 2006). They also talked about the prominence of the illegal firearms market, which accounts for a large proportion of the firearms used in gun-violence-related felony crimes (Levitt & Dubner, 2006), and how that market undermines the success of programs (such as California’s gun buyback program) aimed at curtailing legally purchased firearms (Levitt & Dubner, 2006).

I am hoping from this class to understand from an academic perspective what the research says effective solutions to reducing gun violence-related deaths are and what policy approaches are both feasible and constitutional. The willingness of my classmates to attend the range field trip and share their personal experiences with firearms already indicates to me that this is a group of open-minded learners who I can learn from and who are willing to engage in discussions about firearms policy, research, and data.