The paper I presented at Amherst is based on my observations at the United States Concealed Carry Association’s Concealed Carry Expo in 2016, about which I have written quite a bit (see the landing page collecting my posts here).

As the colloquium, and the planned book on The Social Life of Guns based on the colloquium, are both targeted to academic audiences, this paper can get a bit jargon-y. But if you’re interested in having a read, “‘The First Rule of Gunfighting is Have a Gun'” is now available on the SocArXiv website.

Although the book chapter is largely complete, this part of my work on gun and gear technologies will also feed into my Gun Culture 2.0 book, so feedback is welcome.

This page collects those other posts here for ease of access:

• Women’s Panel Discussion at the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo
• Why Women Hate Guns – USCCA Concealed Carry Expo Seminar by Beth Alcazar
• Mobile Tactics – A Mobile Three Lane Gun Range – At the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo
• USCCA Concealed Carry Expo Firearms and Fashion Show 2016
• USCCA Concealed Carry Fashion Show 2016
• Who is “The Gun Industry”? North Carolina People at the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo, Part 4
• Who is “The Gun Industry”? A Worm’s Eye View from the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo, Part 3
• Who is “The Gun Industry”? Observations from the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo, Part 2
• Who is “The Gun Industry”? On the Ground at the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo
• USCCA Concealed Carry Expo Final Day: Brief Report
• USCCA Concealed Carry Expo Day 2: Brief Report
• USCCA Concealed Carry Expo Day 1: Brief Report
• On My Way to the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo, Atlanta, Georgia, April 29 – May 1

Also coinciding with the launch of Carry Guard at the NRA Annual Meeting in Atlanta was the announcement by the United States Concealed Carry Association that they had been disinvited from exhibiting at the meeting (though I have since heard that they may have been disinvited as early as February and held back the news for maximum effect).

Whatever the case may be, it is clear that the NRA is in the process of creating a revenue stream that will attempt to marry concealed carry firearms training and a post-shooting legal plan. Among Carry Guard’s major legal plan competitors, Second Call Defense, U.S. Law Shield, and CCW Safe offer legal defense programs but no training.

Closer to what Carry Guard provides is the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network, which offers a tremendous amount of education about the use of lethal force in self-defense and also has “affiliate instructors” who provide firearms training, as well as the USCCA with its Self-Defense SHIELD legal plan and certified instructors.

Given the direct move against the USCCA by the NRA (don’t forget about the Carry Guard Expo which mimics the USCCA’s Concealed Carry Expo), it is not surprising that the USCCA is striking back. Yesterday, the USCCA announced a new partnership with firearms trainer Rob Pincus of I.C.E. Training and the Personal Defense Network.

As the subject line of an email from USCCA founder Tim Schmidt said: “USCCA + PDN + Pincus = ?”

To me it equals fighting fire with fire. And alot more research for me.

I still can’t help but think that having the Expo in the United States Concealed Carry Association’s back yard is deliberate, and I wonder whether folks in Gun Culture 2.0 who are aligned with the USCCA like Andrew Branca will be persona non grata at the Carry Guard Expo?

Fortunately others were on the scene and are starting to report on this major new development in Gun Culture 2.0. (The NRA involvement being new, not the idea of self-defense “insurance.”)

Kevin Creighton at Misfires and Light Strikes has a comprehensive comparison of the “insurance” side of the program in comparison to others, and Joshua at concealedcarry.com has compared CarryGuard to the Self-Defense Shield product offered by (NRAAM corporate persona non grata) United States Concealed Carry Association.

Please post links to other comparisons you find on-line in the coming weeks.

I am particularly interested in the training side of the program that is clearly announced on the cover of the Rifleman, but not yet available except to Gun Culture 2.0 gunlebrities like Colion Noir and Dana Loesch. Any NRA certified trainers out there who are willing to weigh in, please do so!

Although advertised as a “conference,” what took place was more of a workshop on our various papers. Because the papers were circulated in advance to most attendees, we each took just 5 minutes to say something about our work and each paper also had one commentator who also had 5 minutes. This left most of the hour set aside for each paper for other attendees to offer further comments, questions, and criticisms. It was very productive in that way.

My contribution was titled, “The First Rule of Gunfighting is Have a Gun“: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0.

Based on my observations at the United States Concealed Carry Association’s 2nd annual “Concealed Carry Expo” last spring in Atlanta, I explored how various gun and gear technologies being sold at the CCX were designed to help people reconcile competing demands of concealed carry so they can observe the first rule of gun fighting: to CARRY YOUR DAMN GUN (as Tom Givens has put it).

This paper will be a chapter in a book that is to be produced from the conference, provisionally titled The Social Life of Guns, and an expanded version will be a chapter in my own book on Gun Culture 2.0. Alas, neither will see the light of (published) day until at least 2018 or 2019.

Because they are still works in progress, I do not want to say too much about the other papers that were presented, since the authors may change their minds based on the feedback given at the conference. But you can see the other presenters and topics in the schedule below. More than the typical criminologies and epidemiologies of violence often found in gun studies, these papers really did capture the various ways in which guns are a part of social life, broadly understood and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (sociology, political science/theory, history, rhetoric, criminal justice/law).

The first part of the title is a quote from gun writer Mark Moritz. I was toying with the idea of titling the paper “Carry Your Damn Gun,” quoting gun trainer Tom Givens of Rangemaster. But since Givens says he is just paraphrasing Moritz, I thought I would acknowledge him, too.

In the paper I approach Gun Culture 2.0 as a culture, thinking about it in a way that recalls the origins of the term “culture” itself, from the Medieval Latin culturare – to tend or to cultivate. Put briefly, “Culture, in this sense, amounts to ways of taking care of things.”^[1]

I examine gun culture in this particular paper by focusing on guns and gun-related accessories as cultural objects created for specific purposes, frequently to address the challenges of concealed carry. They respond to and facilitate cultural practices of gun carrying which are central to Gun Culture 2.0. Because the first rule of gunfighting is have a gun.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Consequently, a large segment of the “Gun Culture 2.0 Industry” focuses on developing technologies into products that will help solve the practical problems of carrying a concealed firearm in public. Specifically, how to carry a handgun on or about your person that provides sufficient firepower and can be concealed comfortably, safely, and accessibly.

In my paper, I examine various guns and gun-related accessories as objects of material culture, technologies developed by companies small and large into products like guns, holsters, clothing, and bags which are sold to the public as commodities in venues like the United States Concealed Carry Association’s Concealed Carry Expo and the recently announced National Rifle Association Personal Protection Expo.

An important part of the CCW equation, of course, has to do with the “W” — the weapon. Smaller guns are easier to conceal and carry, but this benefit is bought at the price of “stopping power” — both caliber and capacity. Gun manufacturers try to negotiate these trade-offs in their gun designs as concealed carry consumers try to identify the ideal gun for them.

While I was trying to find the specs of a gun I was writing about, I came across an interesting website called WhichGun.com, which markets itself as “Your Complete Firearms Buying Guide(tm).” What caught my attention was within this site it has a rating system called “Concealed Carry Factors(tm)” which incorporates two central aspects of any gun’s physical specifications. Quoting the Concealed Carry Factors page of the WhichGun.com website:

Concealability Factor is a measure of how easily a handgun is concealed. Overall length, width, height, and weight all come into play here. Some of these specifications are more important than others — for example, a small change in width can make a very large difference in the concealability of a handgun, while a change in overall length does not, since a long barrel or slide simply extends further down the thigh of a person using an IWB (inside-the-waistband) holster, the most common method of concealing a handgun. Width and weight are the two most important specifications for concealbility, and a relatively small difference in width or weight will quickly lower the Concealability Factor of a handgun. Changes in height, or grip length, will not affect a handgun’s Concealability Factor as much as width or weight, and changes in overall length has the least effect on this rating.

Firepower Factor measures handguns’ effectiveness for self-defense. The caliber a handgun is chambered for, and the number of rounds a handgun can hold, is used to calculate this datapoint. More powerful calibers, like .45 ACP and .357 Magnum, will give a handgun a higher rating than less powerful calibers, like .380 ACP and .38 Special. A larger magazine or cylinder capacity will also result in a higher rating for that firearm. Many firearms are available in more than one caliber, so for these models, a separate Firepower Factor is calculated and displayed for each version.

These two factors are then combined to calculate a gun’s “CCW Factor (Carry-Capable Weapon)”:

The CCW Factor for a handgun takes everything into consideration: overall length, width, height, weight, caliber, and capacity. This gives you a single number that shows each handguns’ suitability for concealed-carry usage, freeing you from the tiresome task of manually comparing the specifications of a dozen or more handguns in order to narrow down your list of choices. Smaller and lighter handguns with a larger caliber and capacity will receive a higher CCW Factor than larger and heavier handguns with a smaller caliber and capacity.

The website is very easy to navigate. You can view guns by manufacturer, or you can sort the list by name, price, rating (by users of the website), or CCW Factor. The top 3 CCW Factor semi-automatic pistols according to this system are the Kel-Tec P-3AT, Diamondback DB380/DB380N, and the Ruger LCP .380.

A gun I am particularly interested in comes in 7th on the list, just behind the Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380 and the Rohrbaugh R9. The Kahr P380 has an overall CCW Factor of 4.09 (out of 5), composed of a very good Concealability Factor of 4.40 and a weaker Firepower Factor of 3.17, which demonstrate the trade-offs inherent in choosing a gun for concealed carry.

Unfortunately, it appears from the absence of recent blog postings (last one in March 2015) and of recent subcompact 9mm handguns (e.g., no Beretta Nano) that WhichGun is not being updated anymore. A link on the site seeks donations, so I imagine the site’s creator might not have been able to monetize his effort.

The site, of course, is suggestive not definitive (and the site admits as much). One important factor that is left out of the CCW Factor equation is shootability. A handgun that maximizes both the Concealability and Firepower Factors can be a bad recipe for disasters like missing your target, being slow on follow-up shots, and shooter-induced malfunctions. Although it is too recent to have received a CCW Factor rating, I found this out when I tried to shoot the Heizer Defense PKO-45 — a 0.8 inch thick semi-auto chambered in .45 ACP with a 2.75 inch barrel.

It would be good to combine the strictly quantitative metrics of WhichGun’s CCW Factor with the slightly more subjective but still quantified metrics of Midway USA’s Larry Potterfield. Viewers of Outdoor Channel’s “The Best Defense” will be familiar with these segments/commercials. The Midway USA system takes into consideration (1) time to first hit, (2) accuracy, and (3) knockdown factor.

Their Rate Your Concealed Carry Handgun website not only explains the system but also allows you to plug in the scores you achieve shooting your own handgun to generate a total score.

Midway USA’s concealed carry handgun rating system, however, does not factor in concealability alongside shootability and firepower. Consequently, the top rated gun listed on the Midway USA site is the .40 caliber Glock 22. At 8.03″ x 5.43″ x 1.18″, this full-size duty weapon is not the easiest gun to conceal and carry comfortably everyday.

As always, the bottom line is trade-offs.

NOTE

[1] Battani, et al., Sociology on Culture, p. 7.

The event makes perfect sense for the NRA as self-defense is the core of the current iteration of American gun culture. There is alot at the annual meeting of the NRA that is of little interest to this segment of gun culture. This more focused event would seem to provide a good marketing opportunity to gun/accessory manufacturers and retailers, as well as trainers and those selling other services like insurance/legal products.

I will be particularly interested to see whether the religion and politics that figure so prominently at the NRA annual meeting will get benched in favor of more practical considerations at the PPX.

I am also definitely interested in this event because I learned so much attending the United States Concealed Carry Association’s second annual Concealed Carry Expo in April 2016. I learned alot about smaller companies that are part of “the gun industry,” I got to handle and even shoot new firearms, I saw seminars on the Law of Self-Defense and women’s concerns, and I had front row seats to a well-produced concealed carry fashion show.

The USCCA is holding its third annual Concealed Carry Expo in Fort Worth, April 7-9, 2017 and I will definitely attend if my schedule permits.

I have no doubt that the NRA observed the success of the USCCA Concealed Carry Expo and so it seems a bit disingenuous for the NRA to characterize its Personal Protection Expo as an “innovative event.” On the other hand, I don’t doubt that the NRA will take the idea of an personal protection/concealed carry expo to another level. I hope my schedule will permit me to attend.

Finally, I cannot help but wonder whether the NRA holding their Personal Protection Expo in Milwaukee — the USCCA’s back yard — is a sort of warning shot across the bow of a competing organization.

Notably, it tells the stories of Gerald Ung and David Jackson, both of whom were legally permitted to carry firearms and used them in acts of justifiable self-defense.

Ung shot one of a group of men who were threatening him on the streets of the Old City neighborhood in Philadelphia in January 2010, and Jackson shot one of two men who were perpetrating an armed robbery of the Columbia, South Carolina barber shop he was getting his hair cut in January 2016. Ung was acquitted by a jury of attempted murder in February 2011, and Jackson was not charged with any crime after police reviewed videotaped evidence of the event.

Among the realities overlooked by Osnos in his article is that concealed carry license holders are very law-abiding in comparison to the general public. The Michael Dunn’s of the concealed carry world are the exception, not the rule, and Dunn is spending the rest of his life in prison for the felonious killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida.

As sociologist Jennifer Carlson has written in her book Citizen-Protectors, gun carriers “are not more likely to commit crime than the general population. As a general rule, a gun carrier is much less likely to be arrested than the general population” (p. 142).

Much of the explanation for this is that people with concealed carry permits are not a representative sample of the broader population. It is a “selection effect” of the type of people who are able to get permits.

But some part of it, I believe, is also a “treatment effect” as people recognize the awesome responsibility of carrying a firearm and take steps to do so safely and legally.

Case in point: At the United States Concealed Carry Association’s Concealed Carry Expo in Atlanta, attorney Andrew Branca gave a seminar on the law of self-defense. There was such interest in the topic that audience for the seminar literally spilled out into the hallway of the Georgia International Convention Center.

After the seminar, Branca signed dozens of copies of the third edition of his book, The Law of Self-Defense, which the USCCA licensed and gave away free to Expo attendees.

I have previously sung the praises of Branca’s law of self-defense seminar, for which I paid 2x tuition (for my wife and me). The fact that he travels the country giving these seminars and has published a third edition of his book suggests that there is a demand for what he is selling.

If I didn’t get a free copy at the concealed carry expo I would have bought the third edition of his book, even though I already bought the second. The third edition includes new cases and other changes in response to questions received by Branca over the years. But most importantly, because the law is constantly changing, I want to know the current state of not just the “black letter law” (statutes) but also jury instructions and case law.

My only quibbles with the book are that its layout can be a bit complex, with various case studies and multi-page tables intermingling with the text. And its lack of an index. I have indexed several books myself, and it is a time-consuming and mind-numbing task, but in the era of electronic publishing it is much easier than it used to be. I would like to be able to flip to the back of the book and find, for example, all the places I can read about “North Carolina” in particular.

Evan Osnos mentions many luminaries of Gun Culture 2.0 in his New Yorker article – Cooper, Ayoob, Schmidt, Lamb, Grossman – but Andrew Branca is not among those mentioned. Which is too bad because for many armed citizens, buying an understanding of the law of self-defense is as much a part of the “business of guns” today as buying the gun itself. I know I happily paid for Branca’s knowledge before I got to know him personally, and heartily recommend others do so as well.

That’s something I’ve always been good at: if there’s a problem, I like to solve it – often in a way that makes little sense to others. I guess that’s just the way I think – the engineer in me (p. 31).

In my last post on the United States Concealed Carry Association’s interest in women, I mentioned Tim Schmidt’s autobiography, Guns, Freedom & The American Dream: The Story of Tim Schmidt and the USCCA.

Reading the book made me realize that Schmidt and I have a few things in common.

The oddest commonality is that we have both strung tennis rackets for money. Schmidt tells about how he got a job working at a sporting goods store in the Boston area when he couldn’t find a job in engineering. He got the job in part by forgetting to tell the store that he had never strung a tennis racket in his life (p. 64). He learned on the job and became an expert racket stringer, like I am now.

Another commonality was surprising for me to learn from his autobiography. When I first saw Schmidt at the United States Concealed Carry Association’s Concealed Carry Expo (CCX) this past April I thought to myself, “That is a big man with a big personality. He stands out even in a room of hundreds of people, and people are drawn to him.

I was surprised to learn, therefore, that Schmidt is (like many engineers) is something of an introvert. He is not a “people person,” as he puts it (p. 9). I can relate. Introverts are not people who cannot interact with others, but people who must expend a great deal of psychic energy in doing so. I don’t have to imagine how exhausted Schmidt must be at the end of every day of an event like the CCX because he describes in his autobiography what it takes for him to meet and talk to people over the course of the three day National Rifle Association annual meetings and exhibits (pp. 129-30).

The third commonality is the most obvious and important one: We are both involved in Gun Culture 2.0. I began this blog to give myself a place to think out loud about my own journey into gun culture. Schmidt’s autobiography tells the story of how he came to be a central figure in the emerging culture of armed citizenship that is at the heart of gun culture today.

Schmidt earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and met his wife Tonnie (also an engineer) at Michigan Tech. After living and working in Boston, Tim and Tonnie moved back to Tim’s home state of Wisconsin and started Schmidt Engineering, Inc. out of their apartment in Muskego in 1997 (p. 11). Although the company in time had some success, the work itself was never satisfying to Schmidt.

Guns, Freedom & The American Dream recounts the story of Schmidt’s evolution from an engineer to an entrepreneur, with an important step being reading Robert Boatman’s “The Constitutional Right and Social Obligation to Carry a Gun,” from Boatman’s 2002 book Living with Glocks.

The article inspired Schmidt immediately to take greater responsibility for his family’s safety, subsequently to start Concealed Carry Magazine, and ultimately to found the United States Concealed Carry Association.

After the birth of his son, Schmidt became more interested in firearms self-defense but couldn’t find the information he wanted to develop this interest. So, he did what most people would in his circumstance. . . . Actually, he didn’t. He “decided to start a magazine” (p. 12). In January 2004, he produced the first issue of Concealed Carry Magazine.

And when he says he produced it, he really means he himself. He was one of the models, “took the photos, wrote the articles [including one under the pen name “Fred W. Black”], laid it out, and bought a mailing list of 30,000 names and addresses” (p. 78). As a marketing ploy to make the magazine seem more legitimate, he said it was “the official publication of the United States Concealed Carry Association (which technically didn’t even exist yet)” (p. 79).

The 30,000 free magazines he sent out yielded a 3% subscription rate, which was not really enough to pay the bills but did give him some confidence that there was a market for such a product.

Some of the most interesting parts of Schmidt’s autobiography are not the successes, but the failures and how he learned and rebounded from them.

As he tells it, he took hundreds of copies of the first issue of the magazine to the SHOT Show in January 2004 thinking that everyone would be as excited about the idea as he was. He could not give away the magazine to attendees. As Schmidt recalls, “that was one of the lowest, most embarrassing moments of my entire life” (p. 14).

Along the way, Schmidt realized that “the only way to make a business work in the long term is to have awesome marketing, too. . . . That was my problem: I didn’t have awesome marketing. I really didn’t have any marketing sense at all” (p. 76).

What saved Schmidt from this failure? In addition to his attitude and drive, direct marketing saved him. Programs like “Magnetic Millionaire” and “Magnetic Marketing,” direct marketing gurus like Dan Kennedy and Yanik Silver, and seminars like “Underground Marketing Online.”

From these Schmidt learned to use “automated, direct response marketing principles” on the internet and transformed his fledgling magazine into a thriving business. Ten years after bringing home almost as many magazines from the SHOT show as he brought with him to Las Vegas, Schmidt’s United States Concealed Carry Association gave away nearly 5,000 copies of Concealed Carry Magazine at the 2014 NRA annual meeting in Indianapolis (p. 16). And the following year the USCCA launched its own show, the Concealed Carry Expo.

Learning better marketing techniques also required and helped Schmidt to clarify what exactly he was selling. It wasn’t Concealed Carry Magazine. In 2005, Schmidt finally got around to establishing the USCCA as an organization and the magazine became a benefit of membership (though now non-members can also subscribe). So, what Schmidt learned to market – using “direct response marketing on the internet” as promoted by Yanik Silver’s Underground Marketing Online seminars (p. 90) – was membership in the USCCA itself.

Growing the association’s membership rolls – i.e., growing the business – requires Schmidt to figure out what benefits to offer members that can be done profitably. Beyond the education and training benefits, the major current benefit of USCCA membership is Self-Defense SHIELD, a legal insurance plan that protects members in the event that they have to use lethal force in self-defense. This was rolled out in 2011 as an option for members, but shortly thereafter became mandatory.

Schmidt reports that the USCCA lost half of its membership – 25,000 members – because of the increased cost. But because the new insurance-backed membership cost three times the previous membership fee, the USCCA generated more revenues (p. 104). And within two years, membership levels had returned to the previous levels, and since that time has doubled again.

There’s a lot more to Schmidt’s book than just this, but this is the part that most interested me. It’s an easy read and there’s something in it for almost anyone whose interested in Gun Culture 2.0, so I encourage you to check it out.