This post continues what I started before with my recap of the second 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).

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.