Yesterday I wrote about liberal gun owners as liminal gun owners – a key idea from my keynote address at the Liberal Gun Club National Meeting in Las Vegas last weekend.

When a gun world friend saw an announcement about my keynote address, she emailed me a question that many of my non-liberal gun world friends have:

“I just do not understand that if Liberal Gun Owners believe in the right to own, how in the world can they vote for people that are 100% committed to strip you of that right? Seems insane to me.”

I take this question as sincere (and not merely rhetorical) and have been thinking about how to respond for a few weeks now. I am going to try to answer the question below, but before I do, a couple of caveats.

First, I have to challenge one of its premises. Although there is no question that the Democratic Party is the party of gun control — gun control being in the party platform since 1968 — I do not believe that the Democratic Party or most Democratic politicians are 100% committed to stripping Americans of their gun rights. Limiting that right? To be sure, see Assault Weapon Ban. Making it more difficult to exercise that right? To be sure, see Universal Background Checks. Expanding the list of people who are prohibited from exercising that right? To be sure, see Red Flag Laws. But very few people favor complete civilian disarmament along the lines that historian Andrew McKevitt chronicled in his book, Gun Country. And even Antonin Scalia famously declared in Heller that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”

Second, I am registered unaffiliated in North Carolina and hate how the Democratic Party has leaned into gun control as a key issue. I don’t think that is the primary reason I see so many Republican/Trump/MAGA signs when I drive through rural and small-town parts of the state, but it plays a part. (One of my earliest and most popular Light Over Heat videos was on “Chainsaws, Guns, and the Rural-Urban Divide in America.”)

That said, how can a liberal gun owner like me vote for people who favor greater restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms?

I was reminded of the need to address this question when I got home from the LGC National Meeting in Las Vegas to find the National Rifle Association magazine Shooting Illustrated in my mailbox.

Although Shooting Illustrated is not by design a political publication, the cover shows an image of presidential candidate Donald Trump after he had been shot at in Butler, Pennsylvania. The accompanying headline is, “Trump’s 2A Vision for His Second Term.” The subhead reads, “Fight for President Trump; Vote November 5th!”

I don’t have time to enumerate the reasons I would never vote for Donald Trump. Suffice it to say, I have reservations about him from his politics to his persona to his policies. He lost me at Obama birther conspiracy and “some, I assume, are good people” and “I moved on her like a bitch.” And he’s done nothing since to regain my confidence that he is fit to lead the country or that his policies would align with my values. (Forget Project 2025, I’m more worried about the America First Policy Institute’s plans for a second Trump administration.) On November 9, 2016, I actually posted “10 Initial Gut Reactions and Reflections” on Trump’s election that expressed hope that it would not be as bad as many of my fellow liberals thought. Hopes dashed.

Beyond the presidential election, the bottom of the Shooting Illustrated cover shows an “Official 2024 Pro-Gun Ballot” customized for my zip code. The recommendation for U.S. House of Representatives is Republican incumbent Virginia Foxx — a 2020 election denier who is gearing up for Big Lie 2.0, opponent of reproductive freedom, etc. Ultra MAGA I think it is fair to say.

The recommendation for my vote for Governor is the man that Donald Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” the Ultra MAGA and self-described “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson. Robinson is a member of the NRA Board of Directors so the endorsement is not surprising. It would be shocking if the NRA did not endorse one of its own board members. NudeAfrica aside, Robinson has undeniably said abhorrent things in relation to policies he would support or oppose as governor (someone has an abortion because she wasn’t “responsible enough to keep your skirt down”), not to mention being the very definition of a hypocrite (a perv with anti-LGBT views whose wife benefitted from legal abortion).

If I cared only about maximal gun rights, the NRA-endorsed candidates are the obvious choices. But, like the Liberal Gun Club says, I care about “every single civil right for every single person.”

Furthermore, when I vote, I look at the entire governmental complex not just a single office. The Republican Party in North Carolina has so severely gerrymandered the state legislature that the only hope of checking their legislative power is to have a Democratic executive. With Mark Robinson as the Republican gubernatorial candidate, this makes voting for the Democratic candidate, Josh Stein, that much easier.

Additionally, when I vote, I don’t just look at specific policy proposals. In fact, like most people, policy details are the last thing I look at since I am not a public policy expert on all of the issues of concern to me. Political parties, therefore, serve as heuristic devices (i.e., decision-making shortcuts) for voting.

Beyond policy, I look for candidates whose conception of a good society is closest to mine. For example, we should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, empathize with prisoners, and welcome strangers. Strong communities play an important role in this, but local charity needs to be complemented by local, state, and federal government action to ensure justice in these areas. Professional civil servants play a role in this. The government should also safeguard civil rights and the courts need to provide a safety net when the government fails to do so.

No candidate perfectly embodies this vision of a good society, but those with a “D” beside their name typically come closer to supporting this conception than those with an “R” beside their name. In my judgment. YMMV.

Last, not only gun rights, but democracy itself is on the ballot. Which party better supports the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, judicial and legislative constraints on executive power, and protection of civil liberties? Given our two-party reality, I would say the Democratic Party, though imperfectly. Again, in my judgment. YMMV.

I certainly don’t expect to convince my conservative gun-owning friends, especially the gun rights culture warriors among them, that voting for Democratic candidates is not “insane.” (Any more than I expect to convince liberal cultured despisers of guns that backing off “common sense” gun laws is not “insane.”)

But I hope this at least begins to make clear where my particular insanity comes from and why I voted for Kamala Harris for President.

I should also make clear that I respect the sincerely held beliefs and values that propel some of my friends in different political directions than I take. I only ask that they do the same for me.

I routinely hear about fellow liberals who lost friends when they became gun owners. I wonder if I will lose friends in gun culture over these revelations?

I am posting the review here and now because the journal is published biennially so my review will not appear until this fall or next spring (this is a typical academic publishing timeline).

Note that there is much more I could say about the specifics of the book, but I only had 1,500 words to work with. As with all of Carlson’s work, you will see me engage these ideas in my own work in the years to come.

By David Yamane, Wake Forest University

Judging from the regular inquiries I receive from international media, a robust civilian gun culture is enigmatic outside the United States. Or at least the particular civilian gun culture of the United States is. As the interdisciplinary study of guns shows, it is enigmatic to many Americans as well.

In the growing field of gun studies, MacArthur Foundation-certified genius Jennifer Carlson holds a singular position at the top. Merchants of the Right follows her pathbreaking studies of (mostly) white men who publicly carry guns in the context of socioeconomic decline in Citizen-Protectors (Oxford, 2015) and the racial politics of gun rights through the prism of law enforcement in Policing the Second Amendment (Princeton, 2020).

This book uses the thoughts of gun retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic gun buying spree in the U.S. as a window onto the politics of guns and understands the politics of guns as a microcosm of right-leaning politics more generally.

The titular “merchants” here are 50 gun sellers in four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Michigan – that Carlson interviewed from April to August 2020. Of these, 84% self-identified as some variety of politically conservative (including Republican, libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Christian conservative) (p. 31). Hence the book’s title: Merchants of the Right. These individuals do not only peddle guns, but a conservative political imagination that has dire consequences for democracy itself (Ch. 4). In a more normative and speculative conclusion, Carlson considers the implications of her study for the future of democracy in America.

Drawing on Swidler’s “toolkit theory,” Carlson devotes one chapter to each of three primary “civic tools” that constitute gun sellers’ political imaginations: armed individualism (Ch. 1), conspiracism (Ch. 2), and partisanship (Ch. 3).

Safety and security are universal human concerns.Carlson’s interviews with gun sellers show how this concern is interpreted through the lens of conservative politics. Armed individualism turns attention away from collective solutions to the problem of security and toward personal responsibility. Rooted in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, this “gun-centric sensibility” gets updated throughout American history (p. 37). In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson puts the most recent incarnation in the context of the rise of neoliberalism; others have used the term “responsibilization” to characterize this ethos.

As the COVID-19 pandemic amplified concerns for safety and security, many sought to alleviate those concerns by purchasing firearms. In the same way that many became “preppers” during the coronavirus pandemic – hoarding toilet paper, cleaning wipes, and hand sanitizer – gun buyers stocked their arsenals or in many cases began new ones (p. 53). As a result, Carlson’s gun sellers felt vindicated in their view of armed individualism as a mechanism of control in times of profound uncertainty (p. 68).

The self-reliance that firearms achieve through force is complimented by conspiracism as a cultural tool that supports self-reliance through knowledge (p. 73). Conspiracism is part of a broader shift among conservatives toward distrust not just of government but all elites. This was particularly apparent in how Carlson’s interviewees saw science during the coronavirus pandemic. In my own wanderings through American gun culture, I have seen this ethos as well, perhaps best reflected in a gun social media influencer who described the mask he was forced to wear to combat COVID as a “Marxist face diaper.”

The treatment of partisanship was my favorite of the three toolkit chapters because other gun scholars and I have noted the changing face of gun owners evident during the great gun-buying spree of 2020 (Yamane 2023). New gun owners include more racialized minorities, women, LGBTQ people, people living in urban and suburban areas, and political liberals. Carlson’s gun sellers often welcomed some of these new faces, but their extremely partisan conservative politics led them to draw the line at political diversity. Partisanship “provided a tool for gun sellers to police the boundaries of gun culture as conservative terrain” (p. 104). Which would be fine if the implications were limited to gun culture. But Carlson suggests that, at its worst, gun sellers’ partisanship drew a line around citizenship and political community that put their liberal political opponents on the outside.

To be clear: Carlson recognizes that Democrats are even more likely than Republicans to agree that the country would be better off if their political opponents “just died” (p. 127) and that partisanship is non-partisan (p. 129). Her empirical focus here is simply on one side of the two-way street of negative polarization.

Taken together, these three civic tools inform the political imaginations of gun sellers. Carlson identifies three: a libertarian imagination “which centers on a celebration of individual rights as the preferred remedy to social ills”; an illiberal imagination, “which rallies around an exclusionary vision of ‘the people’ to resuscitate a bygone era of American democracy”; and an eclectic imagination, “which brings together elements of conservative and liberal politics by emphasizing induvial rights alongside collective responsibility” (p. 135).

The overwhelming majority of Carlson’s gun sellers reflect one of the two conservative political imaginations (libertarian and illiberal) that are at odds with liberal democracy’s need for balancing the conflicting demands of political equality, social difference, individual liberty, and the common good. Carlson finds some hope, however, in the eclectic imagination shared by the only three gun sellers who self-identified as left-of-center (p. 154). Because these gun sellers “straddled political worlds” – conservative gun culture and liberal political culture – they reflected the imagination that might develop among diverse, non-traditional, first-time gun buyers. And in the end, this suggests a path out of the crisis of democracy weighing on Carlson’s mind.

Carlson begins her concluding chapter on “The Democracy We Deserve” by adapting a line from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “There’s a specter haunting American democracy—the specter of the gun owner.” Her case departs from Marx’s, though, because Marx took the specter of communism to be a force for good, such that “[a]ll the powers . . . have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” In the contemporary United States, gun owners are often seen as a destructive force, and the oppositional holy alliance includes the national Democratic Party, gun violence prevention advocacy groups, public health scholars, and generally those who construct a master narrative of democracy-destroying right-wing gun politics (e.g., Busse 2021, Lacombe 2021).

On one reading, Carlson’s book contributes to this master narrative. She argues that the 1970s merger of the National Rifle Association as a political force and the broader conservative political movement in the U.S. created a gun-centric politics that has played an essential role in the crisis of American democracy. This runs from “democratically perverse outcomes,” such as the Congress not passing universal background checks despite popular support (p. 163), to the “illiberal mobilization of democracy” in the assault on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6^th, in which armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship were on full display (pp. 164-5). Gun sellers’ dominant libertarian and illiberal political imaginations are two particular responses to the challenges of living “at the edge of democracy” (Ch. 4), but ultimately they push us closer to the edge.

A second reading suggests a more nuanced view of American gun owners and gun culture. This returns me to a significant empirical carve-out Carlson notes in her introduction: “I focus on a conservative corner of American gun culture and American gun politics, but the reality is that there is a great deal of diversity among gun owners and gun rights advocates that this book does not engage nor attempt to capture” (p. 32). Adding these diverse voices to the conversation about guns, gun culture, and gun politics in America provides a way forward as Carlson hints at in Chapter 4 and fully recognizes in the book’s concluding paragraph: “those Americans who straddle political worlds may be the best, and last, hope for reinvigorating democratic culture in the United States and forging the democracy we deserve” (p. 181).

Why? Because those who straddle different worlds, like liberal gun owners, may be better able to “embrace rather than eschew” the conflict that is central to democracy (p. 171). They may be more comfortable with the three-part alternative democracy-enhancing civic toolkit that Carlson outlines. First, she endorses political equanimity – “a measured tolerance for uncertainty” inherent in democracy – over armed individualism’s “eager attempt at controlling it” (p. 173). Second, she promotes civic grace – “political compassion toward one’s fellow citizens” and acceptance of their “sincerity of political expression and legitimacy of political standing” (p. 174) – over exclusionary conspiracism’s distrust. Third, she encourages social vulnerability – recognizing the frailty we share in common as humans and the “grievances, losses, traumas, and suffering of fellow citizens” (p. 177) – over partisanship’s limited view of “the people.”

In the end, I agree with Jennifer Carlson that a robust democracy in America depends on the willingness of gun people and non-gun people across the political spectrum to embrace each other “as equal citizens and fellow humans” (p. 181).

REFERENCES

Busse, Ryan. 2021. Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America. New York: PublicAffairs.

Lacombe, Matthew J. 2021. Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Yamane, David. “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence.” Journal of Lutheran Ethics 23, no. 2 (May 2023). https://learn.elca.org/jle/understanding-and-misunderstanding-american-gun-culture-and-violence/.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

David Yamane, Department of Sociology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. Yamane is author most recently of “Gun Culture 2.0: The Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America” (The ANNALS, 2023). His book Gun Curious: Understanding America’s Evolving Culture of Firearms is forthcoming in 2024.

As usual, I find myself trying to capture the complex reality of guns in the United States, and pointing out ways in which “things are not what they seem.” I can’t help it. I’m a sociologist.

They sent me the clip of my segment with them and I posted the 4-minute video to my “Light Over Heat” channel.

I wasn’t expecting it, but they mentioned my mini-book, Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberalizing the Right to Bear Arms in America (Updated Edition).

New “Light Over Heat” videos are released on YouTube every Wednesday, so please surf over to my YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

Bump makes the following interesting observation:

One of the most useful polls I have covered during my time at The Washington Post was an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released in 2015. It determined that the two most positively viewed political organizations in the United States were Planned Parenthood and the National Rifle Association.

The rub is that the positive views of these organizations are distinctly partisan. Republicans love the NRA and Democrats love Planned Parenthood. That’s why we have a state like Oklahoma where you can carry a concealed firearm in public without a permit but the Republican trifecta government just completely banned abortion.

We see this divide in attitudes toward restrictive gun legislation. Bump highlights the case of requiring police permits to buy a gun. From 1972 to 2022, overall support for such a policy dropped slightly, but most of this drop was due to declining Republican support.

Thinking about where guns and abortion meet is instructive because restrictive vs. liberalized attitudes toward each intersect in interesting ways.

The table below is a bit hard to read because the gun law question is restrictive (yes = law requiring a police permit to buy a gun) and the abortion law question is permissive (yes = law allows a woman to have an abortion). So, in order of most to least commonly held, the Democratic position is “gun law, yes; abortion law, yes” (around 40%). The Authoritarian position is “gun law, yes; abortion law, no” (around 25%). The Republican position is “gun law, no; abortion law, no” (just over 20%). And the Libertarian position is “gun law, no; abortion law, yes” (just over 10%).

These are all minority positions, but it’s interesting to see the precipitous decline of the Authoritarian position.

Where do you fit?

When I began this blog 10 years ago, I had no idea that I would be talking about a new era of concealed carry in the United States. Shall issue was the thing.

By March of 2017, however, I was writing about “The Dawn of the Permitless Carry Era.” At the time, 10 states and Vermont allowed concealed carry without a permit. Two years later, in March 2019, when the number had grown by 4 states, I wrote about “The Continuing Expansion of Permitless Carry.”

At this point, I have been writing about “The Permitless Carry Era” as part of the overall history of concealed carry laws in the United States for a while.

In 2021, five states passed permitless carry laws (Utah, Montana, Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas), and already in 2022 another four states have (Ohio, Alabama, Indiana, and Georgia). With the total now at 24 states plus Vermont.

The animation below, continually updated by Jeff Dege of Radical Gun Nuttery!, is perhaps the best representation of the liberalization of gun carry laws in the US since 1986.

For the record, the previous four parts of this ongoing history are:

• Part 1: The Early Republic
• Part 2: The Restricted Era (1850s-1980s)
• Part 3: The Shall Issue Era (1986-2013)
• Part 4: Dawn of the Permitless Carry Era (2015- )

If you are interested in a concise and readable single-volume history of concealed carry laws in the US, please consider buying my book, Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberalizing the Right to Bear Arms in America.

As of April 12, 2022, 24 states have what reader Matthew Carberry calls “Alaska Carry” laws. The term refers to the fact that Alaska was the first state, in 2003, to adopt a system in which the government issues but does not require concealed carry permits. This means that anyone who can legally possess a gun can carry it concealed in public without a license (although various other restrictions on who, what, where, and when still apply).

There are a couple of reasons individuals in these Alaska Carry states might want to get permits. First, having a permit conveys the benefit of concealed carry reciprocity in other states. For example, 38 other states accept Alaska concealed carry permits.

Second, in some Alaska Carry states having a permit allows individuals broader discretion when carrying. For example, in early adopting Arizona, only those with concealed carry permits can carry in restaurants that serve alcohol and within 1,000 feet of a school.

The 24 Alaska Carry states and Vermont take their place alongside 16 states which are shall issue, making 41 of 50 states with liberalized concealed carry regimes. Only 9 states today remain may issue, though over a quarter of the US population lives in those 9 states.

Following a 2017 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Wrenn v. District of Columbia and Grace v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department no longer requires applicants for concealed carry permits to provide a “good reason.” Although not a state, it is a shall issue jurisdiction.

Given the current division of American states into red and blue, we may see additional red states go from shall issue to permitless concealed carry regimes, but it is very unlikely that currently blue may issue states will become permitless carry.

At the same time, it seems there is no going back from liberalized gun carry laws, at least not yet. Since the rise of the shall issue era, no state has gone from a liberalized carry regime to a more restrictive one. That is, no permitless carry state has gone back to shall issue, and no shall issue state has gone back to may issue.

NOTES

*Initial law applied only to Idaho residents was expanded to include all U.S. citizens in 2020.

**Following a 2018 decision by the Arkansas Court of Appeals in Taff v. State (2018 Ark. App. 488), the NRA-ILA and other pro-gun rights organizations recognized Arkansas as an open carry state. As the sections of the Arkansas Code that cover concealed carry have not yet been amended, however, gun control organizations like the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence continue to classify Arkansas as a shall issue permitting state.

Pro-gun control organizations, I wrote, promote safety FROM guns. Because they view guns only as a risk factor for injury or death, the safest approach to guns is to avoid them altogether.

Recognizing that some people will own guns nonetheless, the next line of safety is to make it as hard as possible for people to access them — whether in terms of ownership in the first place, or in terms of storing guns unloaded and/or disassembled with ammunition stored separately. This is a sort of safety WITH-ish and FROM-ish guns position.

On Twitter recently, I saw a prominent gun control activist represent both of the safety FROM-ish and the safety FROM positions in a matters of hours. (I have blurred out her Twitter handle because her particular identity isn’t as important as the broader position she represents.)

And after a night’s sleep and some further thought, first thing in the morning:

Although I don’t agree with her position, I appreciate her honesty. Rather than #GunSafety I do think many gun violence prevention organizations would be more honest if they used #SafetyFROMGuns or #GunsDontMakeUsSafer or #GunFreeHomes as their hashtags.

This includes the paperback with free 2-day Prime shipping for $12.95 and the Kindle edition for $0.00 with a Kindle Unlimited subscription or $6.99 otherwise.

If you buy a copy of the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon (or Goodreads or Google books) because that helps others outside my social networks find the book.

If you bought a copy of the first edition, there’s nothing to prevent you from leaving a review of the Updated Edition.

For those who bought the original edition and want to know why there is a new edition out so soon, please read the back story here.

Of course, you can also get an ePub or paperback version of the book by supporting me on my Buy Me A Coffee page (like Patreon, only better).

$5 monthly members get a “free” ePub version of the book and $60 annual members receive a signed paperback directly from me.

This includes the paperback with free 2-day Prime shipping for $12.95 and the Kindle edition for $0.00 with a Kindle Unlimited subscription or $6.99 otherwise.

If you buy a copy of the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon (or Goodreads or Google books) because that helps others outside my social networks find the book.

If you bought a copy of the first edition, there’s nothing to prevent you from leaving a review of the Updated Edition.

For those who bought the original edition and want to know why there is a new edition out so soon, please read the back story here.

Of course, you can also get an ePub or paperback version of the book by supporting me on my Buy Me A Coffee page (like Patreon, only better).

$5 monthly members get a “free” ePub version of the book and $60 annual members receive a signed paperback directly from me.

I am particularly interested in ways in which those involved in gun culture can play a role in reducing negative outcomes with guns. Initiatives like the Gun Shop Project and Walk the Talk America (WTTA) provide some models. I am pleased for the fourth consecutive year to welcome to class as a guest speaker gun trainer Rob Pincus, a board member of WTTA and co-founder (with Dan Gross, formerly of Brady) of the Center for Gun Rights and Responsibilities.

Required readings for Module 8 are:

• Fowler, Katherine A., Linda L. Dahlberg, Tadesse Haileyesus, Carmen Gutierrez, and Sarah Bacon. “Childhood Firearm Injuries in the United States.” Pediatrics (2017) (with Errata). Does for children what Fowler, et al. (2015) did for the US population, a comprehensive overview of firearms injuries.
• Anestis, Michael D., Claire Houtsma, Samantha E. Daruwala, and Sarah E. Butterworth. “Firearm Legislation and Statewide Suicide Rates: The Moderating Role of Household Firearm Ownership Levels.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law (2019). The title here is descriptive of the main independent and dependent variables in the study.
• Johnson, Renee M., Catherine Barber, Deborah Azrael, David E. Clark, and David Hemenway. “Who Are the Owners of Firearms Used in Adolescent Suicides?” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior (2010). Where do adolescents who commit suicide with firearms get their guns?
• Vriniotis, Mary, Catherine Barber, Elaine Frank, and Ralph Demicco. “A Suicide Prevention Campaign for Firearm Dealers in New Hampshire.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior (2015). An example of how gun control and gun rights advocates can collaborate.

Recommended readings for Module are:

• Fowler, Katherine A., Linda L. Dahlberg, Tadesse Haileyesus, and Joseph L. Annest. “Firearm Injuries in the United States.” Preventive Medicine (2015). A comprehensive overview of firearms injuries by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control.
• Anestis, Michael D. Guns and Suicide: An American Epidemic (2018). There is a voluminous literature on this topic, but this single volume captures much of it.
• Peter Manseau, Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck (2016). The introduction lays bare the editor’s bias (“the dark shadow that guns cast on American culture”), but the old news stories reproduced here capture both serious mistakes and extremely bad luck.
• Claude Werner, Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make (2019). A book about bad decision making by people with guns that lead to significant negative outcomes, written by a data analyst and elite gun trainer.

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

An even better way to get a copy of the book is to make a small donation in support of my work through my “Buy Me a Coffee” page (like Patreon). Those who sign up as annual members will receive a free signed copy of the book and monthly supporters will receive a free electronic copy as a “Thank You!”

This small book (100 pages including extensive notes) was originally written as a chapter in my larger book on Gun Culture 2.0 on which I continue to work. As the chapter grew longer and the focus of that work shifted, I found myself with a great deal of material which had no obvious outlet.

If you happen to get a copy of the book, I would appreciate your review (honest, if necessary) on Amazon.com, Goodreads, or your favorite book review site.

As always, I am grateful for your interest in and support of my work in telling the story of American gun culture.