On my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel this week, I discuss sociologist Harel Shapira’s opinion essay, “Firearms Taught Me, and America, a Very Dangerous Lesson,” published in the New York Times on 16 May 2023 (gift link here should take you behind the NYT paywall if you haven’t seen the opinion yet).

When I sat down to write the brief show notes for the YouTube episode, I ended up spending 9 hours writing a 3,500 systematic response. Which is probably too much to ask of most people. So, here is the TL:DR or Cliff’s Notes version of that post. If you want to see any of these points elaborated or the documentation supporting them, please pop over to the original post.

TL:DR of this TL:DR I have learned very different lessons from firearms classes than Harel Shapira.

[1] I know Harel Shapira

First, I know Harel Shapira personally. He has been my guest at Wake Forest University and our paths have since crossed several times.

[2] Shapira is not dishonest

Therefore, I do not think that Shapira is lying or being disingenuous in his NYT essay. I think he is accurately reporting what he saw in his research.

[3] Empirical Limitations

Of course, what he saw is limited by his own data, limits he notes in the original opinion essay. Unfortunately, the conclusions he draws from his limited data are not so limited. Such humility would not get him published in the New York Times or a fat advance on his book, of course.

[4] Subjective Limitations

Beyond his limited empirical data, what he saw is also shaped by his personal/cultural orientation to guns and the intellectual frameworks he brought to/developed in his research.

[5] Therefore, Shapira’s Truth is Partial

So, I do not think Shapira is simply wrong in his observations about firearms classes. But his truth is partial, in both senses. It is incomplete (point #3) and represents a particular perspective (point #4).

[6a] Differences in Observations

There’s nothing wrong with #5 per se. My own research and writing on guns are also partial. Shapira seems to have focused his attention on lower-level, local, basic gun training courses. I, too, have studied these kinds of courses, but I have spent more of my time studying high-level, national gun trainers and courses (though I do know there is at least one very advanced gun school we have in common).

This surely accounts for some of how we may see things differently. Many people I know in Gun Culture 2.0 are critical of poorly-qualified self-defense instructors and poorly taught self-defense courses. John Correia of Active Self Protection, for example. So, the likelihood that Shapira observed low-quality but probably common forms of firearms instruction is high.

[6b] Differences in Interpretation

However, beyond us studying different parts of the gun training industry, there seem to be differences even in how we interpret the same things. Consider the following scene portrayed by Shapira:

Outside a restaurant in Austin, an instructor saw a disheveled man sitting on the curb and nudged me in the other direction, directing me to pick up the pace. He said he had detected “potential predatory behavior” and wasn’t sure if this man was a panhandler or someone about to stick a gun in our faces.Harel Shapira, New York Times

For Shapira, this is the kind of avoidance that reflects people being trained “to be suspicious and atomized,” which in turn undermines “the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable.” For me, this is the kind of avoidance that reflects people being aware of their surroundings and taking simple, non-threatening, non-violent actions to protect themselves. It’s the kind of avoidance my sisters (who have never taken a firearms class) use when they walk around San Francisco. It’s the kind of avoidance that my mother (who has never taken a firearms class) uses when she doesn’t answer her front door for people she doesn’t know or is not expecting.

It’s not the only possible response to this situation (see the concluding section below), but it’s also not a democracy-corroding response.

[7] The Guns Erode Democracy Master Narrative

When all of the partial empirical analyses of a topic come from the same partial perspective, you get a partial master narrative. Shapira’s particular narrative is that gun classes “instill the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy.”

[8] A Different Mirror

But what if we look at guns, gun training, and gun culture through what UC-Berkeley historian Ron Takaki called “a different mirror”? Could this sort of diversity of ideas help us to understand these important phenomena better?

Because, in fact, firearms classes taught me very different lessons than Harel Shapira learned in his study. Shapira learned “to be suspicious and atomized,” which in turn undermines “the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable.”

I learned to be aware of potential dangers in my social environment and to have a broad tool-kit of hardware (e.g., flashlight, pepper spray) and software (e.g., “social literacy”) that can be used as necessary. This allows me not to treat public space as a battlefield to be negotiated but as a place to be enjoyed. It facilitates the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable.

As trainer Craig Douglas put it, “Sometimes you just want to go enjoy a museum without having to worry about whether you have a gun or not.” After he taught in my Sociology of Guns class at Wake Forest, Douglas and I enjoyed dinner together at the Katharine Brasserie in the former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco headquarters, a beautiful old art deco building in downtown Winston-Salem. From there we walked to Bailey Park, an urban greenspace where I showed him the conversion of old Reynolds warehouses into a high-tech innovation district. We ended up meeting my wife Sandy at Fair Witness Fancy Drinks, a craft cocktail bar nearby. We shared a few drinks and a lot of laughs. And we didn’t have to yell at, eye gouge, punch, stab, or shoot anyone. It was a good day.

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