January 28, 2019: “Looking at yet another instance of gun violence, partisans will no doubt be swept up in the kind of either/or thinking that obscures more than it enlightens. Gun control advocates will point to the gun as the key culprit. Gun rights proponents will note the suspect’s prior arrest record and the futility of signs posted at every entrance to campus reading, ‘No concealed or other weapons permitted.’ The event provides an opportunity for more subtle thinking.”

February 19, 2018: “After every high profile mass homicide in America – or at least those perpetrated with guns – people take to social media to express their disdain for “the other side.” As a blue bubble, liberal gun owners who also studies American gun culture, I have many friends on both sides. So I just scroll through my Twitter and Facebook feeds and SMH. It is impossible to address the issue of mass shootings in any critical way without being accused of defending them.”

February 20, 2018: “Why I Don’t Favor an Assault Weapon Ban. About me: 49-year-old, married, Asian-American man with three children. Lived a very happy life for 42 years without ever seeing, touching, or firing a gun. Becoming a gun owner, hanging out in gun culture, and reading a lot of scholarship about guns have led me to this conclusion. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but it seems that we have a Bill of Rights at least in part to protect citizens from the government deciding we don’t need certain things.”

May 30, 2022: “Maybe something will come out of the bipartisan talks happening in the Senate, or maybe it won’t. But while gun rights and gun control activists harden their positions, why not move forward with policies and practices we know can reduce gun death and do not require restricting guns?”

June 6, 2022: “These are the worst of times and the best of times to shed light on American gun culture. There already exists a strong bias in academic studies of guns toward negative outcomes. Mass public shootings like those in Buffalo (racist) and Uvalde (children) only heighten the emotionalism. As the smoke dissipates from yet another mass shooting and another meeting of the National Rifle Association, what do I have to say?”

As a gun owner who wants to see fewer gun deaths, I reluctantly watched events unfolding at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston Friday. The two extremes in our polarized gun debates were on full display, literally divided by Avenida De Las Americas. Inside the convention center at the NRA Institute for Legislative Action Leadership Forum, Wayne LaPierre and Donald Trump planted the flag for gun rights. Outside on Discovery Green, David Hogg and Beto O’Rouke rallied the crowd for gun control. Neither side could or cared to hear the other.

I feel the resignation of those less invested in either of these two poles but who still want answers to the problem of gun violence. I get the frustration people feel at the political stalemate on the gun issue. I understand the desire to do something, anything, in the face of exceptional and everyday tragedies involving guns.

Having studied guns in America for the past decade, I would like to share a small ray of light in the darkness we have all experienced this week. I am here to say: We are already doing some things to reduce gun death. Because they are not gun-centric, steer around our current impasse.

Mass public shootings. There is considerable ground between banning assault weapons and arming teachers. Student threat assessment. WORK.

Homicide. Mass public shootings like those in Buffalo and Uvalde get the most public attention, but most mass shootings are regular homicides just with more victims. The randomness that makes mass public shootings so terrorizing. Homicide is the opposite. As Northwestern University sociologist Andrew Papachristos puts it, a lot of homicide is “tragic but not random.” As The Trace has reported, St. Louis is segregated into neighborhoods with homicide rates higher than Honduras and those with rates that would make Japan jealous. Even within more dangerous neighborhoods in any given city, homicide is concentrated in certain identifiable social networks.

. . . these funds should go to programs that have already proved effective in reducing violence locally. I am thinking of programs that combine the efforts of police, social welfare agencies, and community members, like Operation Ceasefire and other focused deterrence programs, or those that work outside of state agencies, like Cure Violence and other public health approaches.

As Thomas Abt argues in his book Bleeding Out, violence and poverty exist as a truly vicious cycle. By taking on violence directly, disadvantaged communities can realize their economic potential, further reducing violence.

Suicide. The majority of gun deaths in any year are suicides. Unlike homicide rates, the suicide rate in the United States is similar to peer nations like . . . But we can do better. Recent research by David Studdert and colleagues suggests that owning a gun appears to increase the relative risk of suicide. But the absolute risk of even gun owning households experiencing a suicide is quite low.

Additional benefit: If we reduce homicide generally, we will also reduce mass shootings, which are often just large scale homicides. If we reduce suicide, we will also reduce mass shootings, since many mass shooters are suicidal.

Let’s get beyond reflexive responses, pre-written op-eds, and existing talking points.

Many who want to reduce gun deaths lament that Congress is powerless to act. Not so. Congress may not pass bills to add further restrictions on guns, but that is not the only way to reduce gun death.

Let’s not let our political polarization on the issue of regulating guns prevent us from investing in . . . I am sure some readers will say, “Yes, but . . .” As a realist about the polarization that has made guns a political wedge issue for both parties, I am content for now to just say yes.

Rather than proposing broadscale, blanket “solutions” to “eliminate” gun violence, we can pursue violence reduction and harm mitigation strategies that don’t engage the political stalemate on gun control.

Note: I meant to post this a few months ago but it got lost in my “drafts” folder. Putting it up for the record. These are reading notes not a composed review of Metzl’s book but you may find them useful nonetheless.

This post continues what I started before with my recaps of the first two sessions of our Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club on Jonathan Metzl’s recently published book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms (Amazon affiliate link to help offset my expenses in doing this work).

Here are my reading notes of what I liked and disliked about the first section and the second section of what we read.

For our third and final meeting last night, we had another solid turnout of panelists and other registered participant observers.

For the session, we read pages 213 to 303 of Metzl’s book. Following are the “reading notes” I brought with me to the meeting.

I encourage panelists each session to first read with the text (what did you like or appreciate?) and then to read against the text (what did you dislike?). Here are my likes and dislikes in this section:

LIKE

(1) In the concluding chapter on “Where Do We Go From Here?” toward the end of the book, Metzl appropriately “challenges gun researchers to avoid the trap of framing gun safety interventions in red-state America as ‘common sense,’ as if attitudes about guns and shootings are obvious rather than the result of people’s everyday values, choices, and realities” (p. 284).

Couldn’t agree more. Even though this framing “works” better in “blue-state America,” since 2018 I have urged gun violence prevention advocates to drop the language of “common sense” because it is political, rhetorical, and divisive. In 2022, I included “common sense” or “commonsense” as one of three arguments my fellow liberals should avoid in discussing guns in America. (The other two were “protect children not guns” and “other countries acted immediately”).

(2) Particularly in the concluding chapter and Epilogue, Metzl’s argument closely matches what I call The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. (A) He recognizes (and dislikes) that defensive gun ownership is the core of gun culture today (p. 269). (B) He discounts the need and utility of guns for self-defense, invoking (of course) Hemenway and Solnick’s “Epidemiology of Self-Defense Gun Use” (p. 295). (C) He holds that the opposite is true of guns: “In each case and many others, the gun itself adds risk to the situation” (p. 296). (D) From A, B, and C, he concludes that defensive gun ownership is not rational but irrational, describing guns as “talismans of self-protection” and approvingly citing The Trace’s Mike Spies on “the ‘addictive’ nature of gun ownership.” (E) In terms of the “something else” that is motivating gun ownership, Metzl clearly points a finger a white male privilege and racial resentment (as he did in his earlier book, Dying of Whiteness).

It is reassuring every time I read a study that so clearly maps onto The Standard Model.

(3) I appreciate Metzl mentioning my work under his “Where Do We Go from Here?” point #2: “Expand the Public Health Framework.” I have promoted the study of gun ownership beyond the frameworks of criminology of epidemiology for nearly a decade now (p. 276).

I’m not quite sure what to make of his characterizing my (and others’) work as “largely red-state-based approaches — ones that nod toward validating gun rights” (p. 276). It is true that I discovered guns in North Carolina, though it was among both red and blue people, and my ideas apply to red and blue people alike. This may suggest some limitation in Metzl’s insistence on seeing things largely in terms of red- and blue-state politics.

It’s also the case that, even as Metzl recognizes gun owner diversity, he don’t like it. In the first suggestion in his “Where Do We Go from Here?” conclusion, he suggests we need to “Better Understand What It Means to Own a Gun and What It Means to Carry One.” He acknowledges that “gun ownership is far from monolithic” (p. 273). But when he discusses liberal gun owners, ever so briefly, here are some of his characterizations:

• “Liberal gun owners present a different challenge” (p. 273). Why a challenge and not an opportunity?
• “Growing evidence suggests that simply owning a gun can make liberals more conservative” (pp. 273-74). Checks references: Not a single piece of evidence cited, much less growing evidence.
• Following the above, Metzl claims, “when guns become talismans of self-protection, people become more sensitive to arguments that the government wants to take them away” (p. 274). Calling something a “talisman” is dismissive, and again no research is cited to support either of the two claims in this passage.
• “Investigative journalist Michael Spies exposes the ‘addictive’ nature of gun ownership, whereby people who buy one gun are likely to buy more” (p. 274). Checks references: a link to Spies’ author page on The Trace website, not to any documentation of this particular claim. Calling a behavior “addictive” is gaslighting. I actually address “Becoming a Gun Super-Owner” in Gun Curious which refutes quite a few of Metzl’s claims without even having seen his book when I finished mine. Buy my book!

I guess I have inadvertently turned to my dislikes already. So, read on for more.

DISLIKE

(1) The book continues to have an odd texture that weaves together meticulous detail on every aspect of the shooting (before, during, and after) and ideas that seem to be purely speculative or hypothetical. For example, the chapter on “Race” pairs some of the transcript of Jeffrey Reinking’s deposition (p. 258) with an “interpretation” of Reinking’s conspiracist worldview. What connects these two for Metzl is Reinking’s deflection of responsibility in the deposition. I have never been deposed before, but I don’t suppose I would (or my attorney would allow me to) directly implicate myself in potentially criminal behavior in a deposition. And Metzl acknowledges this as an interpretation of Reinking’s behavior, before posing “another interpretation” (p. 259). From there he proceeds to invoke Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon, Josh Hawley, and Tucker Carlson, which left me straining to connect the dots.

(2) Metzl says the loonies “framing the events” at the Waffle House “as fake news represented the ultimate act of structural racism” because they “reinforced the notion that whiteness itself was under attack” (p. 260). Again, I strain to connect the dots as Metzl again seems to overreach by defining “framing” as “structural racism.” (To be clear, I am not opposed to the concept of structural or systemic racism or institutional racism as explaining racial inequality in the United States.)

(3) Some small annoyances continue to pop up in the heated rhetoric Metzl is bringing here. Not only does he continue to refer to magazines as “clips” (see my original set of comments), but he also writes things like, “It was red hot from shooting and killing” (p. 222) in reference to James Shaw grabbing the “barrel” of the killer’s rifle. I don’t care that he said barrel instead of handguard, but the barrel/handguard was not red hot from killing. When I take my Sociology of Guns students to the range, the handguard of the AR-style rifle we shoot also gets hot and we are not killing anything.

To my mind, the events being described are horrific enough that the author need not take additional liberties to amp them up even more.

(4) This is not an academic book but it does base many of its claims on academic work. I didn’t catalog every example, but I was disappointed to see frequent references to news stories about research rather than citations to the research itself. Not to mention instances (some of which noted above) in which no research was cited to support Metzl’s empirical claims.

In addition to what I noted above, here’s another example: “DEFENSIVE-USE DATA instead REPEATEDLY SHOWED that by the time someone yanked a gun out, it was too late–the other guy already had the upper hand” (pp. 295-96, emphasis added). Checks references: No documentation to support this claim. I think for a reason: those data don’t exist. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, it’s not surprising that Metzl invoked Hemenway and Solnick in the course of discounting the significance of defensive gun use as this is central to The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership (see above). But Metzl’s description of Hemenway and Solnick’s study is wrong, which is surprising given his embeddedness in that field of scholarship (p. 295).

(5) Metzl follows the recent convention coming from the medical lane of the gun violence prevention movement of speaking in catastrophic terms about the .223/5.56 round fired by most AR-style rifles. To be clear, I believe the .223 bullet is devastating enough — especially when fired at close range and in high volume — that it need not be exaggerated. Following many others, I discuss in the chapter of Gun Curious on “Living with AR-15s” the fact that Eugene Stoner, Jim Sullivan, and Bob Fremont of ArmaLite were trying to update the U.S. Army’s primary service rifle to shoot a smaller, faster bullet.

But I do find myself annoyed when Metzl describes someone being shot “not with a regular bullet, if such a thing exists, but with a bullet from an AR-15” (p. 229). This is incredibly misleading to someone who doesn’t know much about guns, which I take to be Metzl’s primary audience. Here’s the reality: Every bullet is regular insofar as it is designed to do what it does. The .223 Remington cartridge commonly associated with the AR-15 — a military-grade or military-style assault weapon, a “weapon of war that has no business on our streets” — is regular insofar as it was derived from “a standard hunting round called the .222 Remington.” That is a quote from Gun Curious, but I am actually quoting Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson’s recent book on the AR-15.

(6) I guess in the end there is just too much heated rhetoric in this book for my taste. But I’m a light over heat guy, not really the audience for this book. With all of the success Metzl’s book is having among cultured despisers of guns, however, I am rethinking my approach. Stay tuned for my follow-up to Gun Curious.

The recap also includes my reading notes of what I liked and disliked about the first section we read.

For our second meeting last night, we had 10 of 12 panelists present and another 10 people going strong in the chat (of 25 registrants – another solid turnout!).

The final session will be on Thursday, May 2nd at 6:00pm EDT. Registration link: https://wakeforest-university.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jmhtxIKMQ8eOSXOYlhAkmw.

For the session, we read pages 88 to 212 of Metzl’s book. Following are the “reading notes” I brought with me to the meeting.

I encourage panelists each session to first read with the text (what did you like or appreciate?) and then to read against the text (what did you dislike?). Here are my likes and dislikes in this section:

LIKE

(1) Metzl correctly recognizes that “[g]un safety emerged as a core political wedge issue” (p. 92) and that Democrats played an important role in driving the wedge (citing the 2016 Democratic party platform). He adds, “Support for gun reform became a key marker that defined what it meant to be a Democratic politician and voter” (p. 93).

Here I would simply add that the wedge was definitely driven harder post-Sandy Hook (2012), but the divide began much earlier, with the Democratic Party putting gun control in every party platform since 1968.

(2) The emergence of guns as a core political wedge issue beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was certainly not a one-sided affair. As I have noted previously, the increasingly hard-line political stance of the National Rifle Association in defense of gun rights has developed symbiotically with the increasingly hard-line political stance against guns by its opponents. This point was also made by Andrew McKevitt in the first book we read in book club, Gun Country. And Metzl recognizes it also: “the so-called gun debate was in fact a gun dialectic”: meaning that each side’s view was fundamentally shaped in relation to the other side’s view (p. 93).

Extremism was not monopolized by the NRA. I was happily surprised when Metzl took the New York Times editorial board to task for morally shaming gun owners for being gun owners (p. 94). I did this at length in December 2015 shortly after the editorial in question was published. Nihil sub sole novum.

(3) Metzl observes, “By a considerable order of magnitude, most gun owners act lawfully, and most purchased guns were never fired in real-world situations” (p. 96). I’m glad Metzl says it and It bears repeating: Guns are normal and normal people use guns.

He also later observes that, “Using disease modeling that highlighted gun injuries and deaths exposed little about the ideologies of gun buyers and gun sellers. And relying on funding from foundations whose express purpose was gun policy reform. . . meant that few funded studies explored the potential benefits of gun ownership” (98). Or, as I wrote in 2017, “Despite the fact that a robust culture centered on the legal ownership and use of guns by law-abiding gun owners exists in the United States, there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture. Rather, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence.”

One consequence of this for Metzl is that public health scholars could not address divisions over guns “in ways that did not structurally pathologize by association a majority of American gun owners, and that addressed their concerns, anxieties, biases, and fears about matters ranging from regulation to protection, rather than reinforcing them” (p. 102). Even though I see the other shoe waiting to drop in this passage, I credit Metzl for recognizing how the biases internal to the public health approach to guns is part of the problem with how guns are discussed in America today.

(4) Toward the end of this section, Metzl writes that, “Reinking’s road to Nashville was paved by far more complex foundations than the simple binaries of bad or good on which the polarized American gun debate often relies” (p. 207). I’m excited to get to the final two parts of the book so I can see how Metzl puts together all of the various pieces of this puzzle together.

DISLIKE

(1a) On the same page that Metzl recognizes the normality of guns and gun owners, he also connects contemporary gun ownership to “three hundred years of American history that cast gun ownership as a privilege of whiteness. In an ever-more-lucrative market, owning guns became synonymous with being a conservative white American” (p. 96).

This passage sits uneasily with Metzl’s (correct) critique of social scientists on the previous page for homogenizing gun owners, notably as harboring “symbolic racism” (p. 95).

When I go to the notes for page 96 to see who Metzl is leaning on for these claims about whiteness, I find one reference to his previous book, Dying of Whiteness, and one reference to a Tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Insert eye-roll emoji.

(1b) This same ping-pong (or is it a yo-yo?) experience happened when Metzl discusses the issue of “sovereignty” — “the push and pull between autonomy and authority, individual rights and communal actions, that shaped the Constitution, the nation, and the American gun debate” (p. 132).

Here we have on the one side “growing numbers of liberal writers and thinkers” who see guns as “threats to democracy” (p. 132). This is what I have identified as The Master Narrative of Democracy-Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture. On the other side we have “Second Amendment extremism” – here Metzl quotes one of the combatants in the sovereignty war, the Brady Campaign (p. 133). One the one side, “paradigms of gun ownership that promise to protect individual freedom against government tyranny,” and on the other side, “public health’s emphasis on communal safety through communal participation” (p. 133).

But this tension is not really a tension for Metzl who clearly favors the communal over the individual orientation toward sovereignty. From here, it is just a couple of easy steps to the necessary arrival at the ultimate expression of individual (male) sovereignty in gun culture: The Bushmaster Firearms “Man Card” campaign (p. 135). And again in connection with “guns as masculinity enhancements” (p. 191). (I’ve discussed this easy-to-critique ad campaign myself a few times, e.g., “Bushmaster is the Worst Marketer in the History of Guns – Punto Final.”)

But, but, but . . . “Again, only a minuscule percentage of America’s increasingly diverse populations of gun owners fired their gun in real-world situations, let alone joined extremist groups, committed mass shootings, or stormed the Capitol” (p. 135). It’s almost as if he read and just failed to cite my essay shortly after January 6th, “Why Are There So Few Violent Insurrectionist Gun Owners?” (13 January 2021).

The ping-pong-yo-yo experience I am having when reading the book I think is connected with a larger issue I take up in dislike #3 below.

(2) This long section of the book we read continues a somewhat annoying habit in which Metzl periodically stops to ask, “What would have happened if Travis Reinking had been Black?” (as on p. 108, p. 143).

I’m no color-blind racist; I recognize that the criminal justice system (in particular) is partially responsible for the pattern of systemic racial inequality we have in the United States. But I don’t think it is very helpful to repeatedly ask this “what if” in the context of a consideration of a public mass homicide like the Antioch Waffle House. After all, this is a model of mass homicide perpetrated more frequently by white men, rather than the much more common criminal mass shootings that are perpetrated more often by Black men.

Beyond that, are we to want Travis Reinking to have been treated more like a Black gun owner? Because I don’t think we’re happy with racial bias against Black gun owners. Or are Black gun owners supposed to be treated more like Travis Reinking was? Because that didn’t work out so well.

I think a better question than “What would have happened if Travis Reinking was Black?” is “What would we like to see happen regardless of Travis Reinking’s race?” That’s the solution that I hope Metzl is driving us toward. I hope.

(3) There are many points in the book to which I can only say “Amen.” But I’m also beginning to say, “So what?” The spiraling narrative structure of the book has raised so many issues in so many different directions that I’m not sure where we are headed right now. Hopefully, the final two parts we will read for the last session will start tying up some of the many loose ends that have been pulled so far.

The basic format of the book club is a panel of 12 people discussing the book in a Zoom Webinar, with anyone else interested able to attend and interact with each other and the panel in the webinar chat. For our first meeting, we had 11 of 12 panelists present and 15 people going strong in the chat (of 25 registrants – a solid turnout!).

To encourage candor, the sessions are not recorded, but all are welcome who can attend the bi-weekly events at 6:00pm Eastern Time. Registration link: link: https://wakeforest-university.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jmhtxIKMQ8eOSXOYlhAkmw.

The book club panel is fairly diverse, with a bias toward enthusiastic gun owners, but with considerable ideological diversity among them. We also benefit from having JJ Janflone from Brady on the panel and just added criminologist Tara Warner.

I’ve long argued for the importance of brave, empathetic, and civil face-to-face conversations about difficult issues across our differences. I think this book club realizes that goal.

For the first session, we read the first 88 pages of Metzl’s book. Following are the “reading notes” I brought with me to the meeting.

I encourage panelists each session to first read with the text (what did you like or appreciate?) and then to read against the text (what did you dislike?). Here are my likes and dislikes so far:

LIKE

(1) Metzl: Drawing especially on court testimony, we re-live the experience of the Waffle House shooting from the perspective of its surviving victims. And we learn something about the irreplaceable uniqueness of those who lost their lives.

Yamane: These were not easy sections of the book to read, and at times I wanted to just skip ahead to the next section. But I forced myself to read — and also to sit with and contemplate — the experiences described. As an empirical social scientist, it is easy for me to step back from the literal flesh-and-blood details of these events and look at broader patterns (how many mass shootings per year, what percentage with AR-15s, etc.). It is important to step back and analyze these cases objectively. But to fully understand negative outcomes with guns and divisive views of guns in American society, we do well to put ourselves in others’ shoes. I think that’s called empathy.

(2) Metzl: “I do not suggest equating gun owners with mass shooters—quite the opposite. Most gun owners act lawfully, and most purchased guns are never fired in real-world situations” (p. 7).

Yamane: Shouldn’t have to be said, but it does need to be said and I appreciate it being said.

(3) Metzl: “The framework through which liberal America understood guns were replete with their own sets of implicit biases against gun owners” (p. 8).

Yamane: Again, shouldn’t have to be said, but I appreciate it being said. A question going forward is whether this and the previous observation about gun owners generally acting lawfully are just asides or whether they are central to Metzl’s project.

(4) Metzl highlights differing underlying visions of what a good society looks like among the American population (p. 11). For example, how much willingness should there be to sacrifice freedom for common good (p. 13).

Yamane: He is smart to recognize this, but it also creates challenges in figuring out a way forward because people’s orientations to guns, gun safety, gun regulation, and gun rights are shaped by these underlying visions. Moreover, they are driven by deeply rooted experiences, intuitions, and emotions that are not subject to rational argumentation. I.e., I don’t think you can reason a person into a different fundamental underlying vision of the country or understanding of guns. I think Metzl understands this and am looking forward to how he gets around it.

(5) Metzl: “I advocate for methods that more closely align the incentives and interests of gun owners and non-gun-owners” (p. 12-13).

Yamane: Really looking forward to this.

(6) Metzl: “Guns are not ideological statements; they are daily life” (p. 21).

Yamane: Of course, for some — on both sides of the great gun divide — guns are an ideological statement. Symbols of good or evil. The salvation of democracy or threats to democracy. A political wedge between red and blue. But for many (of us), guns are a normal part of our normal lives. Read my book!

DISLIKE

(1) Metzl: Uses “clip” to describe the magazines the Waffle House shooter was carrying. In the first sentence of the second paragraph on p. 1 of the book.

Yamane: I am relatively new to guns and not a guncrank or gear head when it comes to gun technologies. So, I try not to be the language police when people of goodwill simply misspeak or misunderstand technical details about guns. But if I was writing a book that was really trying to recognize the normality of gun owners and bring them on-board with my program (as Metzl suggests – see above “likes”), then I would be sure to get the language right. And Metzl says that he had Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser read his work specifically for this purpose. And yet here is “clip,” so early in the book, so unavoidable at the start. Why?

(2) Metzl: Very frequently — I would even say fundamentally — portrays the country as “red” vs. “blue.” He also distinguishes early on between “gun country America” (p. 5) and “liberal America” (p. 9).

Yamane: There is no question that in terms of our political structures, we are dividing up into “red” states and “blue” states. Gerrymandering into non-competitive districts perpetuates this in state legislatures. Red states are increasingly all in on gun rights and blue states all in on gun restrictions. So, Metzl’s language is fair in this respect.

But not only is there considerable political diversity even in “red” and “blue” states, the distinction between “gun country America” and “liberal America” is drawn too sharply for my taste.

(3) Metzl: Quotes approvingly New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie’s claim that permissive gun laws challenge the possibility of open, democratic society (10).

Yamane: This is an opinion. Metzl could have cited another New York Times opinion by sociologist Harel Shapira that I have commented on extensively (and addressed also in my book). Whether it will be empirically established in the book remains to be seen. It does fit well with what I call The Master Narrative of Democracy-Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture.

(4) Metzl: The National Rifle Association (NRA) looms large in Metzl’s analysis of gun culture and politics. Rightfully so.

Yamane: But as with so many critics of the NRA, in his distaste for the organization, Metzl gives the NRA more credit than they are due. I don’t have the book in front of me and didn’t capture the full quotes (I will add these back later), but in talking about the growing interest of racial minorities in gun ownership in 2020, Metzl connects that interest to fear generated by the NRA following the George Floyd murder (p. 39). And in talking about how guns became a political wedge issue, Metzl credits/blames the NRA when in fact both sides of the wedge played a role in this. Our first book club read, Andrew McKevitt’s Gun Country, actually highlights the relationship of action and reaction that exists between gun rights and gun control advocates.

My appearance was broken into two separate segments (S2G35 and S2G36) and followed two segments with fellow half-Japanese-American (but also half-Chinese American) Chris Cheng (S2G33 and S2G34).

Although I am not an expert in mass violence, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on issues that hit very close to home and do so from a very personal perspective at times.

Of course, I typically turn to statistics before getting personal on these issues. The following is the documentation for some of the empirical claims I make during these episodes.

I first observe that the Half Moon Bay shooter was not a U.S. citizen. I mention this only because a 2019 Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans believe immigrants are making the crime situation worse in America. This is perhaps not surprising given political rhetoric that some immigrants are “bad hombres” and “animals” and come from “shithole countries.”

But according to a scholar from the (libertarian not librul) CATO Institute, illegal immigrants (in Texas) have a 45% lower criminal conviction rate than native-born American citizens and legal immigrants have a 62% lower rate. This holds across all types of crime from violent to property-related.

So, the citizenship status of the mass murderer in Half Moon Bay (and, I could add, in Monterey Park, California where the shooter was a naturalized U.S. citizen) does not seem to me to be part of the story.

What about the fact that both the Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park murderers were Asian men?

The fact that they were men almost goes without saying. The vast majority of mass shooters are men, as are mass murderers more generally.

What about the fact that they were both Asian? This, I think, is more interesting. We know that Asians are about 6% of the U.S. population but commit disproportionately fewer murders. In 2019, for example, only 1.0% of those charged with murder or nonnegligent manslaughter in the U.S. were Asian.

But study after study shows that the proportion of MASS murderers who are Asian is closer to their share of the U.S. population, and perhaps even greater than their share. That is, Asians may be overrepresented among “mass shooters” and “mass murderers” in the U.S. This holds across datasets that cover different time periods and have different definitions of “mass shooting” or “mass murder.”

The table above appears in “US Mass public shootings since Columbine: victims per incident by race and ethnicity of the perpetrator” (Preventative Medicine).

9 percent of mass public shooters in The Violence Project database for 1999-2021 are Asian, more than we would expect based on their population proportion, and much more than we would expect based on the overall Asian murder rate.

The table above, produced by Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, uses the Mother Jones magazine database of 121 mass shootings from 1982 to 2021. He also finds Asian mass shooters to be overrepresented relative to their population proportion.

Using a database of 308 mass murders from 2006-2014, criminologist Adam Lankford again finds the proportion of mass murderers who are Asian to be close to their population proportion, or perhaps slightly overrepresented at 6.3%. Notably, Lankford highlights that Asians are significantly overrepresented among mass murders compared to their proportion of everyday murders (1.5%, z = 6.00***).

Of course, not all mass murders are the same. Indeed, one prominent definition of “mass shooting” highlights their commission in public places (hence “mass public shooting”) and excludes those committed in the context of robbery, gang violence, or conventionally motivated crime (used by Mother Jones magazine and The Violence Project).

This is significant because, as Adam Lankford shows, there are racial differences in mass murder by attack type. Asians (and Whites) disproportionately commit family and public killings, while Black and Latino mass murders are more likely to be in the context of robbery/burglary.

The table above also highlights two other significant findings concerning Asian mass murder. First, Asian mass murders have the highest average body count (6.88, F = 4.57***). Second, Asian mass murderers are most likely to be killed (i.e., commit suicide either directly or by cop) in the commission of their crime (63% vs. 44% for Whites, 38% for Latinos, and 15% for Blacks).

These additional facts highlight the need for nuance in understanding mass murder cross-racially, a nuance that Randy Miyan and I try to emphasize in these podcast episodes.

Even as we try to find patterns and explanations, it’s also important to recognize that Asian mass murder is extremely uncommon. The Preventative Medicine study mentioned above includes 9 total cases of Asian mass shooters over a 22-year period (0.4 cases per year using The Violence Project data). Eugene Volokh’s analysis includes 8 total cases over a 40-year period (0.2 cases per year using Mother Jones data). And Adam Lankford’s data includes 15 total cases of Asian mass murderers in an 8-year period (1.875 cases per year).

The episode went live while I was touring San Francisco with my wife, so I only had a chance to watch it recently. It’s available on the CNN website or the CNN YouTube page. Check it out and let me know what you think. My thoughts on the episode are below.

Many gun rights activists (among others) have little trust in the “mainstream media.” I have generally been treated well by journalists, though they certainly have an established narrative that structures their writing about guns. I am usually working against that narrative. But I would rather have my perspective represented than not.

I spoke with John Avlon for over 30 minutes about a whole range of issues relating to guns. Knowing the episode would be about 12 minutes long, and half of it would be Avlon introducing the issue, I was unsure what 3-5 minutes out of 30 they would use.

I have to say I was impressed at how much time they gave me, and I thought the editing was very fair.

Avlon is a political commentator so had a perspective on the issue he was pushing. I doubt I changed his mind about anything we discussed, but they gave me an opportunity to express my perspective and that’s all I can ask. Perhaps some gun curious viewers out there have a slightly better understanding of the broader reality of guns in America that they didn’t have before.

At one point, Avlon asked me about instances of mass gun confiscation in the United States. I said I didn’t know and asked him if he did. Although this doesn’t make me look great, I liked that they included this interaction because one frustrating aspect of the gun debate in America is everyone is an expert and no one acknowledges their uncertainty. I *AM* an expert and still have a great deal of uncertainty about the reality of guns in America.

I am reminded of Jon Meacham’s commencement address at Wake Forest University a few years ago when he said reason requires that you accept you may be wrong.

Since the episode People have weighed in on my social media offering instances of gun confiscation in American history. As I have been discussing in my “Light Over Heat” videos this past couple of weeks, I am constantly learning.

I am a scholar of gun culture not gun violence so I don’t have ready-made “solutions” to the problem of mass public shootings like claim to. I do wholeheartedly embrace my conclusion: less shouting, more talking. I tried to model that on “Reality Check.”

I was surprised when the show ran some clips of me at the range from my YouTube channel, including showing me in my “Guns Are Normal, Normal People Use Guns” shirt.

Available on my Gun Culture 2.0 Spring store.

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.

I was sitting at the park tonight, watching my wife play tennis and minding my own business, when Rob Pincus texted to ask me if I had any source for data on the seasonality of mass shooting activity. I.e., mass shootings by month.

I did not, but I was intrigued enough by the idea to do a little work when I got home tonight. The fruit of that labor is below. Important notes and interpretive points follow the chart.

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

Average number of mass public shootings by season (corrected):

• SPRING (March, April, May) = 7.0
• SUMMER (June, July, August) = 7.7
• FALL (September, October, November) = 8.3
• WINTER (December, January, February) = 8.7

I did not statistically analyze the difference in number of shootings by season, but both eyeballing the chart above and looking at the average number of shootings by season suggest there is not a major seasonal effect on mass public shootings.

To the extent there is a seasonal effect, it is not what I expected. I had expected summer to have the highest number of mass public shootings, as I thought that homicides in general were higher in the summer time. (Turns out that may not be the case, either; it’s complex.) In these data, winter (corrected) is the mass public killing season, especially relative to spring.

DATA NOTES

I use data on mass public shootings compiled by Mother Jones magazine. Anyone can download, scrutinize, and analyze this data. Regarding the data: There is no commonly agreed upon or “official government” definition of a mass shooting. So, to be clear, Mother Jones has a particular definition of a mass shooting:

Our research focused on indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker. We exclude shootings stemming from more conventionally motivated crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence.

I have no problem with this working definition. Everyday murders that claim a large number of victims or domestic violence murders (typically murder-suicides) in which someone wipes out a family do not generally make the entire public anxious in the same way that mass public shootings do.

***CORRECTION: As noted above, the working definition used by Mother Jones changed in the middle of their dataset. Mother Jones was not being sneaky in doing this, as hey make clear on their site:

In January 2013, a mandate for federal investigation of mass shootings authorized by President Barack Obama lowered that baseline to three or more victims killed. Accordingly, we include attacks dating from January 2013 in which three or more victims were killed. (Any analysis of the frequency of mass shootings should account for this.)

So, it was my fault for not making clear that they changed their inclusion criterion for 2013 forward. That said, I don’t think methodologically it is a good idea to make a change like this without retroactively updating the entire database using the new definition.***

* * *

FINAL NOTE: I didn’t bother to do a Google search on this, so if some other blogger or scholar out there has already addressed this issue, my apologies for not citing your work. This was just meant to be a quick and dirty look at the issue in response to Pincus’s question.

As dumb as many people thought Bushmaster’s “man card” ad was, if it is supposed to be responsible for mass homicide then Remington needs to fire its ad agency because the campaign was a terrible failure.

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 platform rifles) in 2012 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.)

A more likely culprit than gun advertising in understanding mass homicides is the news media. Perhaps the Sandy Hook families should be suing ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN for so excessively publicizing mass murders that they foster copy-cats? Immediately after the Sandy Hook homicides, The Atlantic ran a story suggesting that “The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders.” More recently there was a host of media coverage in the fall of 2015, such one in Mother Jones — like The Atlantic, no friend of guns — about “How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters.”

I have sympathy for 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. But a lawsuit goes beyond an emotional outburst, and seems to me to be a waste of time, energy, and money that could be put to better use – perhaps in trying to “cure violence” in the places it is most prevalent.