Jackson is a historian in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College and previously published a related book, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence.

As background for our discussion of We Refuse, the following are my reading notes/synopsis of Force and Freedom.

I have long been familiar with Frederick Douglass’ observation in his 1857 “West Indies Emancipation” address, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”

Force and Freedom puts this idea in the context of the shift in 19th-century abolitionist thinking from nonviolent moral suasion to an embrace of violence as the only way to true freedom from slavery.

Black physician and abolitionist James McCune Smith declared in 1856, “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only the philosophy of force” (p. 2).

In contrast to those who “lament that nothing good can come from political violence” (p. 2), in this book, Jackson seeks to “draw attention to the immense importance of violence to imagining emancipation and, in turn, freedom into being” (p. 3).

The philosophy of violence, according to Jackson, “In the quest for freedom, violence becomes a necessary liberating force when it is the only remaining option.” It is an “ideology of last resorts” (p. 4). Political violence is “forceful or deadly acts that operate around a political agenda or motivation to produce change” (p. 4).

Violence is, of course, a two-edged sword. As the colonial and revolutionary era of U.S. history taught, violence is “both a rhetorical and physical weapon to maintain the status quo, as well as a means to overthrow it.” Drawing on Patrick Henry’s famous declaration to “give me liberty or give me death,” black abolitionists came to understand that “freedom denied should be taken by force” (p. 4). Hence, the book’s title.

Black abolitionists who came to increasingly embrace the necessity of violence to secure their freedom were inspired by the example of the overthrow of slavery in the Haitian Revolution. “For the enslaved and black leadership, violence as a political language meant that Haiti was more than a noun; it was a verb” (p. 5).

When it emerged in the 1830s, the abolitionist movement held that “moral suasion coupled with nonviolent resistance was the best and surest way to abolish slavery.” For white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, “efforts outside nonresistance were shunned, even in self-defense” (p. 6). But, as Jackson pointedly puts it, “If nonviolent resistance and moral suasion constructed the house that Garrison built, black Americans were merely renters” (p. 7).

Put simply, black abolitionists were forced to use force because “moral suasion failed to protect black people and produce liberation” (p. 7). As the white-led nonviolent abolitionist movement developed in the 1830s and 1840s, slavery expanded in the U.S. The 1850s became a turning point. The entire decade overflowed with attempts to deprive black Americans of their human, civil, and legal rights, but also notably included the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Over five chapters, Jackson elaborates on this fundamental argument. I can’t capture all of the interesting historical details here. But in brief:

Chapter 1. Forcing Freedom: The Limits of Moral Suasion

In this chapter, we read the stories of key individuals who embodied the broader shift from nonviolent moral suasion to the philosophy of violence. Some are well known, and others are less so: Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Highland Garnet, Nat Turner, Joseph C. Holly, Elijah Lovejoy, Frederick Douglass, John, Brown, Sojourner Truth. Jackson concludes the chapter by turning the question of violence around: “Historically perhaps the question of the 1830s and ‘40s should have been: Why nonviolence? Why moral suasion?” If either of these had been effective, slavery and other forms of racial inequality would have shrunk rather than expanded during these decades (p. 46). In the end, the lesson was, “Freedoms give would always play second fiddle to freedoms won . . . If black abolitionists were going to produce real change, they had to embrace political protest and collective political violence. Essentially, they had to force freedom” (p. 47).

Chapter 2. Fight, Flight, and Fugitives: The Fugitive Slave Law and Violence

A slight modification of the subtitle to this chapter summarizes the argument: The Fugitive Slave Law makes violence necessary (p. 49). Its passage “was the final turning point in a failed campaign for moral suasion” (p. 52).

The chapter also provides a helpful reminder that Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution states, “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due” (see also Jackson, p. 50).

In place of moral suasion arose an emphasis on militancy. William Parker, for example, founded the Lancaster Black Preservation Society (p. 54). His home in Christiana became the site of violent collective resistance to a Maryland slaveholder, Edward Gorsuch, and others in search of his slaves. Later, Parker gave the revolver Gorsuch held when he died to Frederick Douglass as “a token of gratitude and a memento of the battle for Liberty and Christiana” (p. 57). As Jackson quotes another historian, “the soil of the Civil War was fertilized with Gorsuch’s blood” (p. 58).

The case was critical but not unique. “There remain countless stories of black men and women and their allies employing the use of axes, pistols, rifles, and the like to combat slave catchers in the region” (p. 60).

The Fugitive Slave Law forced Douglass to abandon the nonviolent abolition camp. In 1850, he “declared that life and liberty were the most sacred of all human rights and that nothing could be more important than self-defense” (p. 69).

Ultimately, “Violence would be the new political tool for the oppressed, the new method of casting a ballot for progress” (p. 79).

Chapter 3. From Prayers to Pistols: The Struggle for Progress

The chapter centers on the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which established the two territories and allowed each to decide whether they would be free or slaveholding states (p. 81). The Act violated the Missouri Compromise, which stated that no new territory north of latitude 36-30 could be slaveholding (p. 83). Jackson observes that the Kansas-Nebraska Act “solidified two major parties as oppositional foes: the Democratic South and the Republican North” (p. 85). But from the perspective of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglas, “Opposing slavery and hating its victims has become a very common form of abolitionism.” White supremacy was the Republican way as much as the Democratic at the time (p. 85).

Much of the evolution to violence centered on “Bleeding Kanas” (p. 81).  Famous white abolitionists like John Brown and Henry Ward Beecher (of “Beecher Bibles” fame) enter the story here supplanting the moribund Garrisonian nonresistance wing of the movement (p. 96). But Jackson’s story centers more on the development of black military companies, which “represented resistance, self-determination, self-defense, collective defense, and pride” (p. 99) and responses to developments in the decade that led to the conclusion that “immediate abolition was the only option and violence was the surest accelerator” (p. 105).

Chapter 4. Black Leadership: The Silenced Partners of Harpers Ferry

This chapter centers on the famous story of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 but broadens the story to include those often written out of the legend. Among the “silenced partners” are the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s rebellion, which provided inspiration (p. 108). In addition, silenced partners in this history include black women like Harriet Tubman, Mary Ellen Pleasant, and Anna Murray Douglass, who supplied inspiration, support, and resources for his actions.

In contrast to those who elevate Brown, Jackson’s account concludes, “More accurate is the notion that Brown himself was but a foot soldier in the long movement toward black freedom” (p. 134).

Chapter 5. A Carbonari Wanted: Violence, Emigration, and the Eve of the Civil War

A day after South Carolina’s attack on Fort Sumpter on April 12, 1861, traditionally marking the beginning of the Civil War, a Weekly Anglo-African newspaper headline read, “A CARBONARI WANTED.” Jackson informs us that The Carbonari were a secret society founded in the early 19^th century to violently overthrow the authoritarian government of Italy (p. 135). Reporting on the arrest of a black family as fugitive slaves, George Lawrence called for men who would respond to the event as The Carbonari would: with violence against tyranny (pp. 135-36). At this point, the violence was on. However, as Jackson shows, it has been incubating for decades.

A key moment Jackson highlights in this final chapter is the mobbing at Tremont Temple. In December 1860, black and white abolitionists were scheduled to commemorate John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. White Bostonians who objected to Brown’s philosophy of violence sought to silence the event (p. 145). Eventually, fighting erupted between the two sides and the event was shut down. Or so it seemed. It was actually moved to J. Sella Martin’s Joy Street Church that same evening.

Among the speakers was John Brown Jr., who implored his audience that their “watchword should not be, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ but ‘Give me liberty, or I will give you death’” (p. 147). Another speaker, white abolitionist Wendell Phillips, continued, “John Brown, Jr. has advised colored men to arm themselves with revolvers,” and added, “This meeting was a revolver.” At the meeting, Frederick Douglass affirmed that nonviolence and moral suasion had failed and that political violence was the order of the day. “I mean the John Brown way” (p. 148).

Of course, this veneration of John Brown made sense in the context of the event, but Jackson is more concerned with the role that blacks played in their own liberation. Jackson argues that if “a riot is the language of the unheard,” then “black abolitionists have changed our understanding of violence to see that a revolution is the language of the empowered” (p. 156).

Significantly, Jackson concludes that “the topic of violence and its utility is too quickly dismissed, lumped in with fanaticism, or monopolized by Southern antics and terrorism” (p. 157). Indeed, “Today many white Americans romanticize the Civil War era and even the Civil Rights movement, for its leaders’ radical ideas regarding nonviolence. However, until America reckons with the disturbing fact that freedom for black Americans has been largely achieved through violence, these invaluable lessons will remain largely untaught and wholly unlearned. Because of white supremacy, black Americans always knew freedom would require force. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, slavery was abolished. The shots fired at Fort Sumpter on April 11, 1861, were not only the first shots of the Civil War, they were also shots that pierced the hopes of any American leader who still hoped for nonviolent reform” (p. 159).

Epilogue

Jackson’s short Epilogue brings home the centrality of violence to black freedom in America. Faced with violence, “more black Americans than commonly believed sought to protect themselves and their community without apology” (p. 160). For many, “self-defense was godly, and guns were held in honor” (p. 161).

This includes black women like Ida B. Wells, who famously said, “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give” (Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases). And Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary Cynthia Washington, who carried a handgun in her handbag to avoid the fate of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (p. 160).

In addition to writing violence back into the story of black liberation in the U.S., throughout the book Jackson also seeks to write women back into the story, especially the willingness of black women to engage in violence. I have not yet read We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, but the image of a black woman holding a rifle on the cover suggests that this theme may receive still more attention in Jackson’s new book.

I also expect the new book to pick up where this one ends: “In short, black Americans have always had to force their own freedoms, and forcing freedom is what they will continue to do until white resistance to black humanity has at long last come to an end” (p. 163).

I’m looking forward to finding out.

Overall, I was pleased with how the event went, especially my contribution of the perspective of normal gun owners who are also concerned about negative outcomes with firearms. Immediately following the event, I recorded some reflections that I published on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube page.

The event video (2 hours) is much longer than my own (11 minutes), but I think it is full of insights about guns/gun violence and how we frame/engage those issues.

Thanks for reading beyond the headline. If you appreciate this or some of the other 1000+ posts on this blog, please consider supporting my research and writing on American gun culture by liking and sharing my work.

The title, of course, is provocative and the essay certainly provoked considerable attention on my social media feeds. My gun-skeptic friends had all of their biases about Gun Culture 2.0 confirmed, while my gun-sympathetic friends didn’t recognize themselves in Shapira’s characterization.

As usual, I tried to translate between these two different perspectives, but 140 characters doesn’t allow for much nuance.

So, in addition to 11 minutes of more free-flowing “Light Over Heat” video comments, this blog post presents the points I would like to make more systematically.

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. In fact, I invited him to present an early version of his research on defensive gun training to my Sociology of Guns course and to the Wake Forest University community back in 2016. His concept of “civilized violence” doesn’t appear in his NYT essay, but it is insightful and I imagine it will appear in his book-length treatment of this, Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America (forthcoming, 2024).

Our paths have since crossed several times, both IRL and in print. I published my analysis of “The Rise of Self-Defense in Gun Advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918-2017″ in a book Shapira co-edited with Jennifer Carlson and Kristen Goss; he published an article on “How Attitudes about Guns Develop over Time” in a professional journal I co-edited with Trent Steidley; and our work has appeared alongside each other in another book, The Lives of Guns.

[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. He notes in the essay that he observed 42 classes and interviewed 52 instructors and 118 students in at least four states (Texas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois) but “immersed” himself in firearms schools in Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.

This is actually considerably more research than went into other books on defensive gun culture like Jennifer Carlson’s pathbreaking Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline or Angela Stroud’s Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry (2016).

Having done qualitative research my entire career, I can attest to how much time and effort goes into this doing much observation.

I can also attest to the humility that doing empirically limited qualitative and interpretive social research should bring. Such humility was not on display in Shapira’s opinion essay. Of course, the New York Times would not publish it in that case.

[4] Subjective Limitations

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

This is not a condemnation of Shapira, but a simple recognition of how social science (and, some would argue, natural science) actually works. As I learned as an undergraduate at UC-Berkeley studying theory under the renowned Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy, there is no perfect standpoint of objectivity in research (“Punctum Archimedis”).

I actually went off on the New York Times editorial board over eight years ago and what I wrote then applies here as well.

But this does not mean that everything is completely relative and the quest of objectivity should be abandoned. To the contrary, it means we should redouble our efforts to recognize and distance ourselves from our biases. Personal efforts at critical reflection can help, and so can participating in a community of science as individuals with different personal starting points engage in dialogue that can surface their biases.

Of course, if everyone in a scientific community shares the same starting points, then the biases never get surfaced, as seems to happen among public health scholars studying guns and violence.

Incredibly, I wrote that before having read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind in which he makes essentially this same point, that “good reasoning [is] an emergent property” of a “community of scientists” characterized by “intellectual and ideological diversity.”

[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. Whereas Shapira seems to have focused his attention on lower-level, local, basic gun training courses, I have spent most 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.

And as I have written about in a series of posts on this blog (e.g., this one on “What is a ‘professional civilian firearms trainer’”), with the exception of concealed carry instructors in certain states (like North Carolina), “civilian firearms instructor” as an occupation is unregulated by any local, state, or federal agency. In such an environment, anyone can put up a shingle that says “I are a gun trainer,” to quote Ken Campbell, COO of Gunsite Academy, a nationally-recognized gun school I have observed.

So, the likelihood that Shapira observed low-quality but probably common forms of firearms instruction is high. By contrast, I have focused on what in 2018 I called “the frontiers of defensive gun culture,” like John Murphy’s Concealed Carry: Advanced Skills and Tactics course, Alliance Police Training’s Carbine Shoothouse course, Craig Douglas’s Extreme Close Quarters Concepts course, and The Complete Combatant’s Force Readiness course. (There are many others I have not yet had the opportunity to observe.)

I have additionally been exposed to some very deep thinkers on issues of personal defense, like John Correia (“Lessons Learned from Watching 20,000 Gunfights”), John Johnston (“The Work Never Ends”), Dr. Sherman House (“Becoming the Civilian Defender”), and Claude Werner (“Negative Outcomes, Standards, and Gun Culture 3.0”), to name just a few.

My different take on the defensive firearms training (cottage) industry in comparison to Shapira’s can be found in the specific links scattered about this post as well as in my collected posts page on this blog.

[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. For example, Shapira asserts that the classes he observed “trained students to believe that their lives are in constant danger.” The classes I observed also addressed the issue of risk, but the focus was more on the ever-present possibility of danger but the low probability of danger.

As Shapira rightly observes, “It’s not the odds, I heard on numerous occasions; it’s the consequences.” The lesson Shapira learned from this is “that I ought to shoot even when my instincts might tell me otherwise.” In other words, shoot first and ask questions later.

As I have written on this blog, and at greater length in a chapter of my so-far spurned book, low odds/high stakes is part of the gun culture version of Pascal’s Wager. While some people no doubt respond to Pascal’s Wager with religious fanaticism — shoot first and ask questions later — Pascal suggests a more cautious, reasoned approach.

I’ve seen cautious, reasoned approaches discussed incessantly in Gun Culture 2.0. Specifically, how practices of avoidance, awareness, and preparedness — the motto of gun educator Michael Bane’s TV show “The Best Defense” — can lower people’s risk of needing to shoot at all. As the cliche suggests, “The first rule of gunfighting is don’t be there,” or as gun writer Tam Keel puts it, “Can’t lose a fight you’re not in.” Follow gun trainer John Farnam’s “rules of stupid.” Heed trainer Craig Douglas’s admonition to “not let things get shitty” in the first place.

Of course, risk assessment is subject to all sorts of biases (h/t Daniel Kahneman), but Shapira sees his fellow students as worse risk analysts than I see in my wandering around gun culture. In this, he is working within what I have called The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. Insofar as he focuses on hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, he contributes to the argument that something other than objective risk motivates defensive gun ownership.

But back to our different ways of interpreting the same data, using the color codes of personal awareness codified by Jeff Cooper, one of the founders of the civilian defensive gun training industry via Gunsite. Shapira interprets instructors as saying students should constantly be in code orange (specific alert, full attention) or even code red (mental trigger, fight or flight), while I saw instructors suggesting students avoid code white (unaware and unprepared) in public and to be in code yellow (relaxed awareness) instead.

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.

Obviously, there’s more to Shapira’s argument than this particular incident or that specific class teaching. Big picture, Shapira correctly identifies the “primary lessons” of defensive firearms courses as being “if and when to shoot someone on purpose” (emphasis added). Intriguingly, Shapira suggests “this is where the trouble begins.”

Here I suspect, but cannot prove, that Shapira’s view reflects a common sentiment among liberals in the academy studying guns: That the very idea of shooting someone on purpose is offensive. For example, he writes, “Repeatedly the lesson was that I ought to shoot even when my instincts might tell me otherwise.”

Would Shapira’s instincts ever tell him he ought to shoot someone on purpose? Perhaps we will find out in his book.

As for me, my instincts tell me that I don’t ever want to shoot anyone on purpose. Going back to my childhood worship of Dr. Martin Luther King and his ethic of nonviolence, I feel that “violence is rarely the answer,” to quote Tim Larkin. But, he continues, “when it is, it’s the only answer.”

So, my instincts have definitely been shaped by involvement in Gun Culture 2.0, teaching me that violence can be virtuous and to distinguish between the black swan times when violence IS the answer and the normal times when violence IS NOT the answer. This is in contrast not just to Shapira’s sense of things, but to arguments that participation in defensive gun culture is harmful to one’s character.

At the risk of playing armchair psychologist to Shapira’s armchair psychology (to the extent that he is delving into the psychology of gun owners), Shapira’s own psychology may be playing an outsized role in his interpretations.

“Officially,” Shapira writes, “the message is caution.” I couldn’t agree more. But, he suggests, there is a hidden curriculum (my term not his) in gun schools that affects students far more than what is officially taught.

(Hidden curriculum is a concept emerging from the sociology of education that suggests “the implicit, unintended, and frequently unrecognized outcomes of schooling” can be even more influential on students than the formal curriculum. See an excellent application of the concept of “hidden curriculum” applied to campus rape prevention education by Martha McCaughey, who has also written an interesting treatment on the role of guns in relation to physical feminism. But I digress.)

Shapira argues that “relentlessly harping on the dangers that surround us changes the way students assess those risks” in troubling ways. How does he know?

“I experienced it myself.”

Case in point:

On a recent night I saw a driver who didn’t appear to realize that he was going the wrong way on a one-way street. As the other car approached, I began to slow down, roll down my window and stick my hand out in a friendly gesture. Suddenly I worried the other driver might have a gun. How might he respond to someone slowing down a car and waving at him in the middle of the night? Would he shoot? Probably not. But it’s not the odds, I remember telling myself; it’s the consequences.

Harel Shapira, New York Times

This places a great deal of interpretive weight on how Shapira himself understood the hidden curriculum of gun schools. From this (and surely other examples drawn from his research), he concludes: “That’s the great irony of firearms training: In learning how to use a gun for self-defense, something that seems like it might give you confidence and a sense of safety, people end up feeling more afraid than before.”

My initial response to reading this was to invoke (on Twitter – my bad) a humorous parable that circulates widely in Gun Culture 2.0: Grandmother gets pulled over by a cop. Tells cop she has a gun in the car. Cop asks what she’s so afraid of. Grandma responds, “Absolutely nothing.”

Although I thought this comment was funnier than gun violence prevention luminary Daniel Webster did (see above), there is truth underlying this quip: Scholars for years have struggled to establish a clear and consistent empirical connection between owning guns and being fearful. Over 9 years ago I wrote about a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology in 2013 that found fear of crime was higher among those who did NOT own a gun.

A more recent study using a broader dataset concluded:

people who own guns tend to report lower levels of phobias and victimization fears than people who do not own guns. This general pattern is observed across multiple indicators of fear (e.g., of animals, heights, zombies, and muggings), multiple outcome specifications (continuous and count), and with adjustments for age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income, marital status, the presence of children, religious identity, religiosity, religious attendance, political orientation, region of residence, and urban residence.

Benjamin Dowd-Arrow, Terrence Hill, and Amy Burdette, “Gun Ownership and Fear” (2019)

Of course, this does not systematically compare fear in relation to taking defensive gun training classes, but in my decade-plus of fieldwork on Gun Culture 2.0, I have not seen a systemic connection between these classes and excessive fear.

The lack of a systemic connection either between gun ownership/fear or gun training/fear may help explain why cases like the recent Kansas City porch and upstate New York driveway shootings grab our attention. It’s not their frequency but their rarity (human bites dog, not dog bites human). Of the millions of people who have taken thousands of training courses like Shapira observed — courses which allegedly “prepared [students] to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences” — why are there so few bad shoots?

Considering Shapira’s psychological disposition in relation to his empirical conclusions, the study of “Gun Ownership and Fear” quoted above is potentially helpful. “[P]eople who own guns tend to report lower levels of phobias and victimization fears than people who do not own guns . . . across multiple indicators of fear.” One reason people do not own guns — and react negatively to their use (e.g., having to shoot someone on purpose) — is that they are afraid of guns, just as they are afraid of lots of things in the world (animals, heights, zombies).

This can be interpreted social psychologically, as Jonathan Haidt would, or socio-culturally, as scholars associated with the “cultural cognition” perspective like Dan Kahan would. From the cultural cognition perspective, our worldviews shape our sense of what risks are real and what their potential consequences are. Egalitarians and communitarians, as sociologists tend to be, rate the risk of guns to be high and so favor their control. These assessments are prior to facts, and trump them.

The missing empirical link in Shapira’s argument is especially crucial because of the dire consequences he sees following from firearms class-inspired fear.

[7] The Guns Erode Democracy Master Narrative

As noted in point #4, 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.”

This is a take on what I have just recently taken to calling the master narrative of democracy destroying right-wing gun politics. I see the narrative (more or less) in the work of Ryan Busse, Matthew Lacombe, Robert Spitzer, Patrick Blanchfield, Andrew McKevitt, and Jennifer Carlson — all of whom have recently published or will soon publish books on guns in America.

And this narrative sells. Big time. As reported in Publishers Marketplace, Pantheon acquired Shapira’s Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America in “a major deal.” This means an advance of more than $500,000 was paid for the book. This is a huge advance for an academic author and means the publisher thinks they can sell a shit-ton of Shapira’s book.

This contrasts sharply and, to be honest, painfully with my experience of 30+ publishers passing on the opportunity to publish my less inflammatory take on gun culture in America.

[8] A Different Mirror

But what if we look at guns, gun training, and gun culture through what the legendary UC-Berkeley historian Ron Takaki (and fellow Japanese-American FWIW) 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.

From Brian Hill of The Complete Combatant and many others, I learned the value of having a diverse skill set — including pistolcraft, knife skills, martial arts, pepper spray, flashlights, phones, basic medical, and even the defensive value of “Run Fu.” These skills give people the power of choice, including the choice to fully and actively participate in social interactions in public. This, not coincidentally, is how those immersed in Gun Culture 2.0 that I have studied generally live their lives.

From Craig Douglas and others, I learned the power of “social literacy” in navigating public space. As we live our lives in society, we ought not scream at strangers to “get the fuck away!” or draw down on people just because they approach us. Sometimes people need help. They lose their kids or their way, they need medical help or a hand. Being aware of who is around us and being able to recognize pre-assault cues (that Douglas also teaches) can help us determine whether we want to engage an unknown contact and dictate the terms of that engagement in socially literate ways.

For me, the most important part of having social literacy is that it allows us not to treat public space as a battlefield to be negotiated but as a place to be enjoyed. As 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.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA – the liberal Lutheran denomination in the US) is planning to issue considering [correction 2-26-23] a statement on gun violence and the LEN wants to inform that work. So I was invited to join them at their 31st annual gathering at the famous Palmer House in Chicago to discuss “Guns, Violence, and Security in the U.S.: What Might the ELCA Say Now?”

In response to the invitation, I made clear that “I do take a somewhat different approach to the issue of guns in America than most scholars, which is not to focus exclusively on the negative aspects.” My main line of research is on the normal use of guns by normal gun owners, and this also influences my approach to gun violence.

They welcomed my approach and I give them a lot of credit for that. It would have been very easy for them to invite a gun violence prevention (GVP) scholar or a criminologist to speak with them about everything wrong with guns or have a representative of one of the many GVP advocacy organizations present them a pre-packaged suite of “commonsense gun laws” designed to “protect children not guns.”

It turns out that one of the members of the program committee was familiar with my written work and the videos on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel. He wanted me to speak to them precisely because of my approach to understanding American gun culture.

As I picked up my suitcase at O’Hare airport in Chicago, I noticed I had a bag tag on it that I picked up during my one and (so far) only trip to the SHOT Show in Las Vegas in 2019. It read: “HAVE A BRAVE CONVERSATION.”

The bag tag was part of a joint campaign by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the American Federation for Suicide Prevention, but it occurred to me that this meeting with Lutheran ethicists would also be an opportunity to have a brave conversation about guns across lines of experiential/political/ethical/ideological difference.

Having such conversations are much easier face-to-face than in mediated settings (especially social media) because face-to-face conversations benefit from and promote empathy. This is a central point of a book I was reading on my way to Chicago, Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

For my 90-minute session, we settled on the title “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence.” I will post the details of my talk separately. Here I will just note that I began my talk by asking how many of the 20ish attendees were gun owners? Three. How many owned guns for defensive purposes? One. How many oppose gun violence? All.

The benefits of beginning a conversation about guns and gun violence by highlighting this commonality between gun owners and non-owners is something I had just experienced the previous fall at a panel on gun violence organized by Deseret News at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Although I was only asked to attend my own session, I gratefully accepted the LEN’s invitation to attend any and all of the sessions. Doing so reinforced the benefit of having difficult but empathetic conversations across lines of difference.

I spoke across lines of difference between gun owners and non-owners, which are also related to political differences. In the session following mine on “Gun Violence Prevention, Locally & Beyond,” a representative of the Industrial Areas Foundation talked about the importance of making connections with neighbors, especially those who might differ from us racially or economically. A representative from a local Moms Demand Action chapter encouraged difficult conversations with other parents about children’s possible access to firearms in the home. And a representative of OneAIM Illinois spoke about their work reducing gun violence by facilitating restorative conversations between offenders and victims.

The differences I have with some of the political activities of these organizations notwithstanding, empathically listening to them describe their work and aspirations helped me see the considerable common ground we share.

More on my talk about “Understanding and Misunderstanding American Gun Culture and Violence” forthcoming. Stay tuned!

As with all things, I try to avoid extremes. I’m sure there is something deeply evolutionary that makes our brains favor binaries (either/or), but the nice thing about being evolved is that we don’t have to just accept that. I am constantly trying to see issues as both/and or “yes, but…” or “no, however…” This is reflected in my most recent “Light Over Heat” video in which I discuss race and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

Seeing the complexity of the world is aided by relationships with people from diverse backgrounds. Feedback I received on my initial post-Buffalo video led me to share some “further thoughts on the Buffalo massacre thanks to intellectual diversity” on “Light Over Heat.”

One of the points I made in that video in response to feedback is, “Yes, there is Black supremacist violence in America.” Immediately followed by, “But, it is not as deeply rooted as White supremacist violence.”

Of course, this is an empirical question. A recent opinion by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post provides some evidence that helps answer it.

Milbank begins with the story of Garnell Whitfield who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his mother, Ruth, who was killed in the Buffalo supermarket massacre.

“What are you doing?” Whitfield demanded of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at their hearing on Tuesday. “Is there nothing that you personally are willing to do to stop the cancer of white supremacy and the domestic terrorism it inspires?” With breaking voice and sniffles, he added: “My mother’s life mattered. Your actions here today will tell us how much it matters to you.”

Much like those who responded to my initial video talking race and guns post-Buffalo, Milbank observes, “Then, Republicans on the panel answered — with accounts of violence committed by Black people and antifa.” They notably included two cases that were mentioned in comments on my own video: the Brooklyn subway shooter and the Waukesha Christmas parade car attacker.

“The Brooklyn subway shooter was a known Black supremacist who called for racial violence,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). “The Waukesha attacker … was a viciously left-wing Black nationalist bigot. Another Black nationalist gunned down five police officers in Dallas.” Cruz went on, about “the violence of the antifa riots and the Black Lives Matter riots.”

As noted, the relative balance of left-wing Black nationalist violence and right-wing White nationalist violence is an empirical question. Milbank addresses it as follows:

Since 2015, when the recent upsurge in political violence began, the brutality has been overwhelmingly perpetrated by the far right. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, right-wing extremists (generally either white supremacist or anti-government) were involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities from 2015 through 2020. Far-left extremists (anarchists, anti-fascists) were involved in 66 incidents and 19 deaths. The proportion of left-wing attacks and plots increased in 2021 (40 percent of the total, compared to 49 percent by right-wing extremists), but right-wing attacks remained far deadlier, accounting for 28 of 30 political-violence fatalities in 2021.

These data are in line with the overall point I tried to make in my follow-up video: this is not an inverse of Trump’s “good people on both sides” situation. There are bad people on all sides, but not in equal amounts or to equal extents.

If there are other DATA that address the issue of extremist violence, I am happy to learn about it. Please share in the comments or email me.

A commentator on that video distinguished between violence being virtuous and violence being desirable. I don’t see violence as desirable, i.e., being subjectively pleasing or worth seeking in and of itself. It is a means to the end of protecting life, family, or friends. That is what makes it virtuous.

This reminded me of Tim Larkin’s book When Violence is the Answer, about which I have written previously. Larkin argues BOTH that when violence is the answer, it’s the only answer, AND that violence is rarely the answer.

In this video, I connect these ideas to a training course I took at The Complete Combatant in Georgia called “Force Readiness” (see my review) in which I learned that skillset = choice, and that in the end, I am the weapon.

Further supporting documentation for this video includes Tamara Keel on “can’t lose a fight you’re not in,” the idea of Pascal’s Wager applied to self-defense, and John Steinbeck’s saying that the brain is the final weapon.

In addition to The Complete Combatant, other training courses I have attended that emphasize when violence is and is not the answer include: Extreme Close Quarters Combat with Craig Douglas of Shivworks (read my review) and Concealed Carry: Advanced Skills and Tactics with John Murphy of FPF Training (read my review).

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.

Related to this is the fact that there are many people who have little-to-no direct experience using violence. These people often only see the downsides of violence and, by extension, think of guns as fundamentally bad because they see violence as fundamentally bad.

But, as I suggest in this week’s video, violence can be virtuous.

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.

By Kierra Law

Overall, I would say that my experience going to the gun range did not fit with my prior understanding of guns in the U.S.

Our field trip to the gun range was my first experience handling a gun. I appreciated this trip because it made me realize some things that I had not realized before. There were also parts of the experience that I enjoyed and parts that still made me feel uncomfortable being around guns.

One of the first things that surprised me was how loud the guns were when they were fired. This made me reflect on how scary and traumatizing shootings can be for people who find themselves in those situations.

I was also surprised by the power of the guns, especially the 9mm handgun. Although I already knew how dangerous guns can be, feeling the power of the guns in my hands made it more real to me.

I was also surprised at how accurately I was able to shoot considering that I have never even held a gun before. For me, the 9mm was the hardest gun to shoot so it was shocking to me that it is a commonly owned gun. I also did not like that the 9mm handgun did not have any external safety like the other guns we shot.

After shooting I could not imagine carrying a gun let alone being able to use one outside of a gun range, but it also made me realize that owning a gun does not have to be a bad thing.

This experience made me aware that in a lot of ways I lack knowledge of guns, and the representations of guns that I have seen in my life and in the media have always shined a negative light on guns. I believe the prevalence of guns in the media has normalized gun violence.

These are some of the main reasons why guns have made me feel uncomfortable.

I live in a community that has been majorly affected by gun violence and one of my family members was held at gunpoint by police officers after being mistaken for someone else, so I came into this experience with a very negative view of guns.

I was surprised that I enjoyed my experience at the gun range but I felt comfortable at the range because it was informative and there were safety precautions in place.

This experience was valuable for me because I have been considering whether I should purchase a gun after college for safety as I will probably be living on my own. Through this experience I learned that if I were to purchase a gun later, I would probably feel more comfortable starting off with a .22 handgun or something similar, whereas before I assumed and was advised that I should start off with a 9mm handgun.

I am still not completely comfortable around guns, and I am still conflicted on whether I would be comfortable owning one, but I am interested in learning more about guns and possibly even going to a gun range again.

Although it is not my area of scholarly expertise, like many I am concerned about high levels of violence in the United States, especially the most lethal and injurious forms. As I have previously written on this blog, I find myself returning repeatedly to an important truth: Everyday criminal violence in the United States is concentrated in places and among people that are most affected by economic and racial inequality. As the Rocket Armory t-shirt says, “Guns don’t kill people, systemic inequality does.”

One module in Alcorn’s class takes this issue of PLACE far more seriously than I had thought to myself.

Unbeknownst to me, there is a scholarly literature on the positive role played by “place-based interventions” in preventing/reducing criminal violence. Alcorn covers this in his Session 12, reproduced below.

Charles Branas, chair of the department of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School, appears to be playing a leading role in this research. Consider two recent articles on which Branas was the first author:

SOURCE: Branas, Charles C., Eugenia South, Michelle C. Kondo, Bernadette C. Hohl, Philippe Bourgois, Douglas J. Wiebe, and John M. MacDonald. 2018. “Citywide Cluster Randomized Trial to Restore Blighted Vacant Land and Its Effects on Violence, Crime, and Fear.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(12):2946–51. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1718503115.

ABSTRACT: Vacant and blighted urban land is a widespread and potentially risky environmental condition encountered by millions of people on a daily basis. About 15% of the land in US cities is deemed vacant or abandoned, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. In a citywide cluster randomized controlled trial, we investigated the effects of standardized, reproducible interventions that restore vacant land on the commission of violence, crime, and the perceptions of fear and safety. Quantitative and ethnographic analyses were included in a mixed-methods approach to more fully test and explicate our findings. A total of 541 randomly sampled vacant lots were randomly assigned into treatment and control study arms; outcomes from police and 445 randomly sampled participants were analyzed over a 38-month study period. Participants living near treated vacant lots reported significantly reduced perceptions of crime (−36.8%, P < 0.05), vandalism (−39.3%, P < 0.05), and safety concerns when going outside their homes (−57.8%, P < 0.05), as well as significantly increased use of outside spaces for relaxing and socializing (75.7%, P < 0.01). Significant reductions in crime overall (−13.3%, P < 0.01), gun violence (−29.1%, P < 0.001), burglary (−21.9%, P < 0.001), and nuisances (−30.3%, P < 0.05) were also found after the treatment of vacant lots in neighborhoods below the poverty line. Blighted and vacant urban land affects people’s perceptions of safety, and their actual, physical safety. Restoration of this land can be an effective and scalable infrastructure intervention for gun violence, crime, and fear in urban neighborhoods.

SOURCE: Branas, Charles C., Michelle C. Kondo, Sean M. Murphy, Eugenia C. South, Daniel Polsky, and John M. MacDonald. 2016. “Urban Blight Remediation as a Cost-Beneficial Solution to Firearm Violence.” American Journal of Public Health 106(12):2158–64. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303434.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives. To determine if blight remediation of abandoned buildings and vacant lots can be a cost-beneficial solution to firearm violence in US cities.

Methods. We performed quasi-experimental analyses of the impacts and economic returns on investment of urban blight remediation programs involving 5112 abandoned buildings and vacant lots on the occurrence of firearm and nonfirearm violence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2013. We adjusted before–after percent changes and returns on investment in treated versus control groups for sociodemographic factors.

Results. Abandoned building remediation significantly reduced firearm violence −39% (95% confidence interval [CI] = −28%, −50%; P < .05) as did vacant lot remediation (−4.6%; 95% CI = −4.2%, −5.0%; P < .001). Neither program significantly affected nonfirearm violence. Respectively, taxpayer and societal returns on investment for the prevention of firearm violence were $5 and $79 for every dollar spent on abandoned building remediation and $26 and $333 for every dollar spent on vacant lot remediation.

Conclusions. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots are blighted structures seen daily by urban residents that may create physical opportunities for violence by sheltering illegal activity and illegal firearms. Urban blight remediation programs can be cost-beneficial strategies that significantly and sustainably reduce firearm violence.

Of course, not everyone is down with this sort of investment in the country’s infrastructure, but for those who are looking for ways to reduce criminal violence that don’t involve either (1) further criminalizing people (for the liberals) or (2) targeting guns in general (for the pro-gun side), this approach to place-based root cause mitigation has some great potential.

This marks a return to the old, pre-pandemic normal in America in which extremely rare cases of large-scale homicide bring efforts to regulate guns and gun parts in ways so general they are unlikely to have the desired effect of dramatically reducing gun violence.

As tragic as they are, overemphasis on these dramatic but rare events diverts our attention from the vast majority of homicides which involve fewer than four victims, victims who are shot with regular old handguns that are acquired in transactions not covered by criminal background checks.

Having studied American gun culture for a decade now, I find myself returning repeatedly to an important truth: Everyday gun violence in the United States is concentrated in places and among people that are most affected by economic and racial inequality. Efforts to reduce this violence should, therefore, be equally concentrated on addressing its causes in these same areas. Doing so shifts efforts at intervention away from guns per se, a move that allows us to circumvent federal gridlock on gun legislation and as well as legal challenges to gun regulation. We can carve a political path forward right now by decoupling violence reduction from gun control.

Among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member nations ranked as high-income by the World Bank, the United States has the highest overall homicide rate, which is driven by gun homicides. But the problem with these national-level statistics is that no one lives in the U.S. overall. We live in particular cities that have very different homicide rates.

While Baltimore looks like Guatemala or El Salvador, Austin is more similar to Canada or Sweden. There is `also considerable variation within cities. 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.

Focusing attention on mass public shootings and the overall homicide rate leads to advocacy for blanket policies passed at the federal level, like AR-style rifle bans and universal background checks. But neither of these policies are guaranteed to reduce highly concentrated, everyday violence, according to the RAND Corporation’s comprehensive 2018 evaluation of gun policy in America.  Even if these policies were effective, under current filibuster rules in the U.S. Senate, neither is likely to pass.

An alternative approach accepts that there are many Americas, some of which are like our high-income OECD counterparts and others more resembling the developing world. Resources, not untargeted gun regulations, should flow to the areas of greatest need. This is exactly what President Biden’s recently announced “American Jobs Plan” seeks to do in allocating $5 billion to community-based violence prevention programs.

Although the details remain to be worked out, 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.

These community-based efforts have the additional political benefit of not requiring across-the-board efforts to regulate guns themselves. As such, they could garner support from the gun-owning population, especially its moderate to left-wing. An article I recently co-authored shows that 20% of gun owners in America self-identify as politically liberal. Another two in five see themselves as political moderates. Thousands of these gun owners are members of the Liberal Gun Club (LGC). Although not as large and loud as the National Rifle Association, the LGC advocates for reducing violence involving firearms through root cause mitigation. This entails specifically addressing systemic inequality and directing our resources to the most problematic behaviors and most affected people.

Investing in violence-affected neighborhoods is certainly not a cure all. It will not eliminate all community, workplace, intimate partner, or mass public violence. But by emphasizing violence and its causes we can bypass the unending debate over controlling guns and immediately begin to address the problem where it is most needed. As a t-shirt sold by the liberal-owned gun store Rocket Armory reads, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Systemic Inequality Does.”