The results are interesting and complex and complement a few previous videos on this channel (see below).

I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on these findings, particularly whether the findings seem generalizable from this limited sample.

Other “Light Over Heat Videos” I reference in this video are:

Please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

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As Kautzer notes, authors feel honored when people take time to read and think about their work, even when you don’t think the reader gets it quite right, or even if you think the reader gets it quite wrong. I feel the same here, and posting his vigorous reply fits in with my overall goal in attempting to understand guns and gun culture in America: LIGHT OVER HEAT.

My original post (as evidenced by a mistake Kautzer notes) and Kautzer’s reply were both written fairly quickly, and so Kautzer’s reply here appears as it was originally written to preserve that reality. Please read on.

Comment by Chad Kautzer

Professor Yamane, it’s a pleasure to engage you on this topic. I too remember you from the Amherst conference and I’m honored that you took the time to read my latest essay in Boston Review. It is quite long and, as you say, connects a lot of dots, so I do not fault anyone for missing a point or argument along the way. Since your interpretation of my essay has informed a public critique of it, I do, however, feel a responsibility to respond to some mischaracterizations and factual errors. This is particularly so since you draw a rather strong conclusion, namely, that my essay (together with the others you mention) is paternalistic insofar as it “casts racially diverse gun owners in the role of “Acting White.”

Let me begin with a factual error. You write: “We know that Kautzer concludes his essay invoking the work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.” I don’t, actually. I appreciate the work of Dunbar-Ortiz, although I disagree with her interpretation of the Second Amendment, but either way her work is neither cited nor relied upon in my essay. Normally, this would be an insignificant mistake, but you rely on such connections in order to demonstrate the “magnificently consistent takes on gun culture” at Boston Review. Or, as you write, that my work and that of Dunbar-Ortiz are the “other dots [that] could also be connected.”

Consistency is more than merely a question of who cites whom, of course, so my correction of your mistake doesn’t take the possibility of a more substantive consistency off the table. But before I address that question, I do want to say something about the method that informs your post. After a sketch of my essay, you write: “The Boston Review’s algorithm also pointed me to three additional stories, all of which provide variations on Kautzer’s theme.” My essay, together with these other three, are where you find “magnificently consistent takes on gun culture.” Now, as an academic you know that journals are specialized by topic or method, so it would surely be unsurprising that a journal about, say, race and criminology, would publish many articles about race and criminology. Indeed, the point of specialization is to further debates and research on a set of topics of interest to the readers and authors and in that process they often cite each other and, indeed, blurb each other’s books. In this case, however, you take it a step further and rely on a Boston Review’s “readers also like” algorithm for your critique of magnificent consistency.

I don’t think I need to explain the problem with this method, but in any case I take your consistency critique to be a bit of a red herring. To fault an algorithm designed to provide consistency for providing consistency would be absurd. I assume that your critical post about my work and Boston Review is motivated by your dislike or disagreement with either the methods or the claims (or both) of the work you read. It is true that the works you cite generally focus on questions of masculinity, race, colonialism, white supremacy, social domination, and identity and do so using methods attentive to history, power, and subject formation (including the construction of raced and gendered subjects). Most work on gun culture or firearms generally employs different methods and does not engage these themes, so we are no doubt a subfield. But, again, finding consistent methods or topics within a subfield is not revelatory, so I assume the problem you see with this work concerns the specific claims being made.

You write, for example: “Metzl also continues on Kautzer and Dunbar-Ortiz’s theme of guns as “integral to white male authority.” You don’t attempt to refute this claim, but you apparently disagree with it. Similarly, you write: “The Boston Review story includes a conversation between Pettengill and Dunbar-Ortiz. Dunbar-Ortiz concludes very much as Kautzer does,” namely, that we both believe the positions and policies of the NRA’s Harlon Carter intended to empower “racial enforcer[s]”. You don’t give reasons for why this is not true, but you highlight it, presumably because you find it problematic.

Finally, you conclude with a few straw man arguments. (1) “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.” Where does my essay or any of the other works you cite claim that firearms “can only be seen as upholding a racially unequal social order”? The key word here is “only,” of course, because it renders the claim impossible to agree with. (2) “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.” What’s so interesting about this claim, for which you provide no textual evidence and for which you certainly would not find any, is that it is literally the inverse of the argument of my essay. Or said another way, one of my critiques of Richard Hofstadter concerns his paternalism toward the Black Panthers:

One problematic conclusion that follows from Hofstadter’s explanation concerns the community-defense practices of groups like the Black Panthers. Rather than understand them as a response to real threats of civilian and law enforcement vigilantism, he views practices of armed community defense as self-defeating and the result of faulty thinking—of subscribing to the “mythology about the protective value of guns.” The Panthers’ “accumulations of arms have thus far proved more lethal to themselves than to anyone else,” he writes. “Militant young blacks,” he continues, are, in general, merely “borrowing the white man’s mystique” by taking up arms.

Kautzer, “America as a Tactical Gun Culture”

Lastly, I just want to reiterate that my essay is long and I would not fault readers for overlooking a thing or two, but your conclusion would be impossible to draw if you read my other Boston Review essay “A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense” (2018) which is almost entirely about communities of color justifiably taking up arms. Unfortunately, the algorithm didn’t recommend it to you.

I hope these comments, however imperfect, help clear up some things for you, Prof. Yamane. Thanks again for engaging my work. For what it’s worth, I would be honored by, and certainly benefit from, you giving reasons to reject any of the claims I make in my essay.

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.

This post is not going to analyze the findings in depth (though I will mention some), but is more of a PSA to let everyone know these data are now available are are worth checking out.

Most of the trends seen in earlier versions of this report continued in 2021. 8.3% of American adults have concealed carry permits, over 21.5 million people. That is a 10.5% increase over the number of permits counted in 2020.

The fact that the number of permits continues to grow at such a high rate is particularly notable because an increasing number of states allow permitless carry. Of course, as I note in my book, Concealed Carry Revolution, the dominant model of permitless carry is “Alaska Carry” (h/t reader Matthew Carberry) – the state issues but does not require a permit. But the permit is nonetheless valuable because it (typically) allows more latitude for carrying and also makes inter-state reciprocity possible.

Also notable, from my perspective, is the continuing diversification of concealed carry permit holders. This tracks with the changing face of gun owners that I spoke about recently at the annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

Where states make the data available, the report finds the percentage of female and racial minority permit holders continue to grow faster than the percentage of white male permit holders. This is especially true of the percentage of racial minority women permit holders. Of course, beginning with a lower permitting rate facilitates this to some extent, but does not explain it entirely.

Although North Carolina stopped providing demographic data on permit holders in 2016, I did note the inclusion of a graph showing the percentage change in the number of active permit holders by race by year. As an Asian American who first received my concealed carry permit in 2011, I am well-represented in this graph.

There is so much more in this report to learn from. Truly something for everyone, depending on your particular interest. It is an essential document to have on hand.

Recently, I was sent a link to Smith & Wesson’s new advertising campaign short film, “Empowering Americans Since 1852.” Here it is and some of my thoughts on it.

In the past, I have noted that one of Smith & Wesson’s advertisements for the M&P Shield did a great job of creating a gender neutral advertisement. The “Empowering Americans” film does a decent but not perfect job of creating an inclusive portrayal of American gun owners.

It leads with a fairly traditional image of a white man driving a truck. It’s also bookended with a young woman working on a dirt bike, but it turns out this is the daughter of the truck driver and the moment says more about him as a good father/protector than her as an independent actor.

The voice over includes language about the world being an uncertain place, broken, and divided so we have to strive to fix it – which I found terrific and think will be strongly resonant for many new and nontraditional gun owners. But for me there was a dissonance between that language in the voice over and the image of two white guys working on a John Deere tractor. I thought that scene could have been made much more inclusive, perhaps showing people from different social backgrounds coming together to solve a common problem and thereby doing a little bit to mend the world.

We do see in the second scene an African American woman featured, but I noted that in contrast to the truck driver and farmers, she is not shown actually holstering a pistol. Her generosity and hard work is highlighted, good values to be sure, but the portrayals are not parallel.

I appreciate that Smith & Wesson is taking seriously how it represents gun owners, and look forward to further developments of this advertising campaign in the future.

According to Lott’s estimates, there are currently 19.48 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States. This is up from 2.7 million in 1999 and 8 million in 2011. This represents not simply a numeric increase, but a large increase in the proportion of the U.S. adult population with permits, from 1.3% in 1999 to 7.6% in 2020 (p. 6, Figure 1b).

These increases are taking place at the same time that a growing number of states have passed permitless carry laws. For example, the percentage of the population in Oklahoma that has a concealed carry permit has declined since the state passed permitless carry (p. 3).

Other highlights of the 2020 report include:

• Outside of the highly-populous and restrictive states of California and New York, 9.2% of the adult population has a permit (p. 3). Excluding all nine may issue states, the permitting rate is 9.9% in the other 41 states — nearly 1 in 10 (p. 15)
• Alabama (28.5%), Indiana (18.7%), and Iowa (15%) have the highest permitting rates in the country. Hawaii (0.0%), New Jersey (0.02%), and Rhode Island (0.23%) have the lowest (Vermont excluded as has always had permitless carry, pp. 20-22, Table 2).
• In the 14 states that provide data by gender, women are over a quarter (26.4%) of permit holders. In states where comparisons are possible, permitting among women has grown much faster than for men (pp. 4, 30).
• In 4 states that provided data on permitting by race between 2015 and 2020 (Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas), the permitting rate for Blacks and Asians grew faster than for Whites (p. 30).

Some figures from the report that show these changes follow. There is much more in the report than is covered here. Depending on your particular interests, I am sure you can find something insightful and useful.

I have spent weeks this summer learning how to teach online, developing and teaching 2 sections of Introduction to Sociology online, and facilitating a Peer Learning Group on online education for my department colleagues.

Also, because my personal and family life has not been as disrupted by COVID19 as some of my professional peers, I have tried to say “yes” to every request to review manuscripts, books, and promotion dossiers I have received since March.

Among the assignments I have accepted is to review the book, Land, God and Guns: Settler Colonialism and Masculinity in the American Heartland (Zed, 2020), for Choice Reviews. (Choice Reviews is run by the Association of College and Research Libraries and is used by academic librarians to select materials for their collections.)

This book’s author, Dr. Levi Gahman of the University of Liverpool in England, is a white settler man from rural Kansas who approaches the issue of “settler colonialism” and masculinity by drawing not only on his academic training as a critical geographer but also as a product/survivor of the very heteropatriarchal/racist/colonialist American Heartland he analyzes.

Land, God and Guns combines extensive use of “a wide array of critical theories and political-intellectual perspectives (e.g., anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, poststructuralist, Marxist, anarchist, queer, socialist)” (p. 28) with interviews and (auto)ethnography in a densely written treatise that is intended to be not just an analysis of his chosen reality but a political intervention designed to undermine it.

Land here refers to colonial capitalism, God to patriarchal white supremacy, and guns to imperial war: “the three pillars upon which the United States of America (U.S.) was founded and rests” (p. 1). Two chapters (2 & 3) are given over primarily to theorizing, and three address the core themes more empirically, land in chapter 4, guns in chapter 5, and God in chapter 6.

Of course, I focused most of my attention on chapter 5 on guns. But even before I got there, Gahman gave some hints in the introductory chapter of what was to come. Of his relationship with his brother, Gahman writes, “We still watch Star Wars and football, as well as shoot guns together when I head back home, to Kansas, for Christmas. ‘Normal’ things that brothers and ‘guys’ do” (p. 12). The scare quotes here signaling that what is normal is going to be problematized in relation to (heteropatriarchal notions of) masculinity. So when he talks about “the normalization of gun culture in the Heartland” (p. 34), we know he don’t mean it in no nice way.

For Gahman, guns are normalized but not in the sense that gun owners actually experience. He’s not saying, as I do, that “guns are normal, and normal people use guns.” Because by chapter 5 he has exhaustively/exhaustingly established that “normal” in the context of his analysis is heteropatriarchal/racist/colonial-capitalist, being normalized means being all these things.

So, even when he makes a statement that on its face is unobjectionable, the critical glare of his theoretical perspective seems ever-present. He notes that the gun owners he spoke to highlighted the need for guns in rural areas where police are few and far between. Moreover, “guns were a farm/country tool.

That is, interviewees noted the necessity of having a firearm on ready given that outside threats include wild animals, stray vermin, or rabid predators may attack or spread disease amongst their livestock, garden, or crops. ‘They [guns] are a way to hold down the fort’ and ‘help rid the place [farm] of pests,’ as Everett, 54 years old, and Ricky, 48 years old shared; which are statements connoting that gun use makes men empowered and active agents (pp. 135-36).

Ignoring his quick pivot away from the idea of guns as a “farm/country tool,” even his notion that guns can facilitate empowerment and agency could be seen as a positive attribute (even if only in the hands of those other than white settler men).

But Gahman predictably slides straight from this statement to noting that “recent literature on gun use and manhood suggests the reasons men sometimes own guns are because of disillusionment, powerlessness, despair, and alienation they are experiencing as a result of their social standing, economic situation, and/or just ‘getting older’/less ‘able’” (p. 136). So, guns are not normal tools that people in the Heartland use to have fun (like he and his brother) and/or protect their lives and livelihoods (Everett and Ricky). They are a normalized way that men compensate for their loss of masculinity. If Gahman were a psychoanalyst rather than a critical geographer, he might just come out and say that they are penis substitutes.

The idea that guns compensate for lost white heteropatriarchal dominance is accepted as conventional wisdom in gun studies today (which I would challenge, but that is a story for another time). Although the “recent literature” Gahman cites to support this point ends in 2009 (recall his book was published in 2020), he could have cited many more recent proponents of versions of this argument: Carlson, Light, Melzer, Mencken and Froese, Metzl, Shapira, Stroud, and others.

Of course, these arguments register for me not just as a sociologist of guns, but as a human being as well. If I say, “I will do what it takes to ensure the safety of my family”—which I absolutely do say — am I adopting a heteropatriarchal/racist/colonial-capitalist perspective? Am I reproducing such a society? What if my wife, a cisgender woman, says the same? Which she absolutely does. Is that her white settler heterosexuality speaking? What if it is a person (or community) who embodies every possible marginalized positionality?

More generally, who that has a family – especially children – would NOT say “I will do what it takes to ensure the safety of my family”? To me, THAT would be “abnormal.”

So, recognizing the profound inequalities of empowerment and agency that formed and continue to exist in this society, I favor extending the boundaries of normality to include as many people as possible.

To the extent that the protector role is easier for white settler men to enact, that is a problem. But I have an uneasy feeling that many want to problematize the protector role itself. Gahman included.

I regret, therefore, that I missed the SHOT Show unveiling by Kevin Dixie of NOC (No Other Choice) Firearms Training of The Truth pistol.

If you visit the NOC Training Facebook page you can learn much more about the gun and its purpose. Suffice to say what caught my eye is the foam insert created by Carolina Custom Foam (just up the road from me in Black Mountain, NC) commemorating the Black Wall Street that was destroyed in Tulsa in 1921.

Another case included a quote from Harriet Tubman, which reminded me of a point Maj Toure made in his SHOT Show presentation: “Harriet Tubman should be the symbol of the gun community – she is black and female.” But where has the gun culture been slow to evolve? On women and race.

I am looking forward to following the work of Kevin Dixie more closely in the future, and maybe I will have a chance to see The Truth pistol in person at the NRA Annual Meeting in April.

The faces in the crowd in the picture above and every other picture I have from the show reflect the statistical reality that the average gun owner in America is a middle-aged white male. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, per se, but one of the promises of Gun Culture 2.0 is that it will better reflect the diversity of the American population. The massive photo on the back of the Glock booth at the SHOT Show is definitely aspirational.

This was my first SHOT Show, so I don’t have any historical perspective, but I saw more women in professional shooter jerseys or covering the event as media than I did “booth bunnies” (though there were still some of those). I would count that as progress based on what I have heard about previous SHOT Shows.

I also attended a seminar on how companies can leverage their brand ambassadors that featured two female professional shooters, Diana Muller and Gabby Franco.

Although I did not see Colion Noir, the NRA’s designated black commentator, he was apparently at the SHOT Show. I did, however, attend a seminar called “Evolve or Die: Engaging Urban Communities in the 2A Fight” featuring Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter.

I counted about 90 attending Toure’s seminar, overwhelmingly white people. Toure alternated between a reading the text of a PowerPoint presentation on the concept of evolution applied to gun culture, and a freestyle interaction with the audience. He was much more in his element doing the latter, but the net result of his alternating back and forth was some lack of clarity on the promised topic of evolution and engaging urban communities.

In my view, his talk boiled down to a couple of key challenges to gun culture: “What are you doing to engage people outside your bubble?” And support companies that support outreach into urban communities, even if you just want to make more money because you need new customers.

Kudos to the NSSF for giving Toure a platform to begin a dialogue about diversifying gun culture. It’s unfortunate, then, that the same NSSF was selling a SHOT Show branded t-shirt in its show store that threw shade on the professional athletes kneeling during the national anthem to bring attention to the issue of police brutality and racism.

Among the issues that Maj Toure said gun culture was slow to evolve on: inner city police violence.

Why the NSSF felt it necessary to wade into that culture war, I have no idea. I thought that was what the NRA was for? Why not just stick to the more inclusive message found on another t-shirt: I just want to drink coffee and shoot guns.

Sad news coming out of Charleston to end 2018. The Charleston Rifle Club — founded in the antebellum confederate state of South Carolina in 1855 — considered 14 individuals for membership and accepted 13. The one member rejected is a US Naval Academy graduate and retired Navy physician, Melvin Brown.

Melvin Brown is African American.

Although the population of Charleston, like the State of South Carolina, is approximately 30% African American, Brown would have been the first African American among the Charleston Rifle Club’s 800 members.

Reading beyond the headline, however, reveals a more promising story line which is unlikely to get as much press. An online petition (see screen cap below) reads:

As a private club, the Charleston Rifle Club can choose to exclude people based on their race, but the vast majority of the Charleston Rifle Club’s members find that to be an abhorrent and immoral choice and inconsistent with what we believe the club is.

Furthermore, we believe that this action is supported by a tiny fraction of the club’s membership. The current system allows for this small group to control the membership process. Six members, out of more than 800, can alone choose to exclude a prospective member.

Here’s hoping that the Gun Culture 1.0 members of this club succeed in overcoming the Gun Culture 0.0 members to allow Gun Culture 2.0 to stake a claim there.