I shot a gun for the first time in January 2011. On that day, I began a personal and sociological journey into America’s gun culture that culminated in the June 2024 publication of my book, Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture.

Trying to fit more than a decade’s observations in a single book was difficult. Harder still was to write a TL:DR for those for whom a book is too many words.

But I recently published a 900-word essay in The Conversation: “Guns in America: A liberal gun-owning sociologist offers 5 observations to understand America’s culture of firearms.”

Please have a look and share the essay using the sharing links on the article page. The Conversation (and my employer) tracks these metrics.

And let me know what you think!

Light Over Heat with Professor David Yamane was launched in January 2022 in the guest bedroom of my childhood home in California. The audio and video then left much to be desired — as you can see in Light Over Heat #1: Just How Normal are Guns and Gun Owners, Anyway? — but as my consigliere John Correia of Active Self Protection told me, “It’s easier to steer a moving car.”

Three years and 118 full length videos (and a couple of dozen shorts) later, I think I’ve gotten a little better. Judge for yourself: Light Over Heat #119: Closing the Book on 2024 and Looking Forward to 2025.

If you’re new to the “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel, WELCOME! Below is a short introductory video.

Later this week I will post a list here of the top 10 videos on the Light Over Heat YouTube channel in 2024.

I usually post new content on Wednesdays at 11:00 am Eastern time, but that schedule is not always possible to keep.

I have tried to keep the videos on my channel organized in playlists. I hope you find those useful.

I’d also like to do more “THE PROFESSOR IS IN” videos this year. These videos are like office hours where I take people’s questions and try to answer them intelligently from my perspective. The questions can be about guns, of course, or anything else I might speak to intelligently as a 25-year veteran of teaching in American higher education. An example is my video responding to the question, “How do I get started writing a book?” 

So, if you have a question you think I can answer, please send it my way.

NOTE ON SUPPORT

Putting out materials like this is part of my mission to educate people and enrich conversations about guns. I have never pay-walled my work, so it is free to you. But the work is not free to me. If you would like to support my efforts, please consider the following:

• Please like and share my blog posts and videos. This helps others see this work which is my main goal.
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Publishers and media outlets look at how many subscribers I have to assess my “platform” when considering my work.
• Buy my book: Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture.
• Make a direct financial contribution to help offset my costs through Buy Me A Coffee or PayPal Donate.

This effort notwithstanding, visitor and page views declined for the 6th consecutive year (peaking in 2018). Still, I persisted.

As my page views work their way back toward where they were when I began, I too return to the attitude I had when I began. I am putting my thoughts on guns out into the world. If people find them useful, that’s a bonus.

Below are the Top 10 most viewed posts on this blog published in 2024. I will also post separately about the Top 10 most viewed videos on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel.

[1] Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground (Still) Do Not Allow You To Murder People

[2] Limited Vision, Limited Interest in Understanding American Gun Culture

[3] I Hope I Never Become Cynical

[4] Read the Preface to My Book Gun Curious FREE

[5] How Can Liberal Gun Owners Vote for Democrats?

[6] The Paradox of Guns

[7] Proving a Basic Books Editor Wrong One Purchase at a Time

[8] Complete Set of Recordings of Free Public Webinar on Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America

[9] My Podcast (and Related) Appearances – Cumulative List and Links

[10] Civil Conversations about Guns Die in Darkness

I still enjoy blogging, so thanks to those who read and engage my work here. I am not going anywhere (yet), so on to 2025.

NOTE ON SUPPORT

Putting out materials like this is part of my mission to educate people and enrich conversations about guns. I have never pay-walled my work, so it is free to you. But the work is not free to me. If you would like to support my efforts, please consider the following:

• Please like and share my blog posts and videos. This helps others see this work which is my main goal.
• Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Publishers and media outlets look at how many subscribers I have to assess my “platform” when considering my work.
• Buy my book: Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture.
• Make a direct financial contribution to help offset my costs through Buy Me A Coffee or PayPal Donate.

Even as I have been finishing, publishing, and promoting Gun Curious these past 5 years, I have often thought about the book I set aside to pursue a trade book written from a first-person perspective. Gun Culture 2.0 the book is my more academic treatment of American gun culture. It engages more directly with the dominant scholarly perspective on guns, what I call “The Master Narrative of Democracy Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture.”

In unearthing my notebooks recently, I found some genuine thought fragments that point to the perspective I want to use to animate Gun Culture 2.0.

The Master Narrative (essentially – this is a dramatic abbreviation) holds that the United States was founded as a racist, settler colonialist cisheteropatriarchy; that this influenced the development of gun culture in the country; and that it continues to shape gun culture today.

Like “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership,” The Master Narrative emphasizes the symbolic nature of guns, a nature driven by political and economic concerns. As Jennifer Carlson writes in her foundational book, Citizen-Protectors, “For the most part, gun carry is symbolic” (p. 112). Why? Because most people will not have to shoot someone in self-defense.

So, what motivates defensive gun ownership today? The fatal intersection of downward economic mobility of white men, toxic masculinity, racial resentment, and right-wing political ideology.

The Master Narrative tells a story of guns in America that holds some truth, like all stories do. Just as telling the story of America from the perspective of dominant groups does. The story of immigration to America told from the perspective of those who came through Jamestown and Ellis Island is a true American story.

But as Ron Takaki — the legendary UC-Berkeley historian and my fellow Japanese-American with Hawaiian roots — highlighted when I was in school, we can also look at American history in “a different mirror.”

What if we looked at guns, gun owners, and gun culture in a different mirror? What if we focused not exclusively on the symbolic dimension of guns but took seriously their practical dimension? Would this move us away from the homogenized view that animates The Master Narrative? Would this help us to see the diversity of gun culture and diversity in gun culture?

I think so. This is the working thesis of Gun Culture 2.0.

I was interested to receive an email from the NRA this morning announcing the results of the board’s decisions on Monday. I already knew the election results so what interested me was the reported attendance at the meetings and exhibits: 72,000.

I have attended the NRA meetings three times previously. The reported attendance at those meetings was as follows:

• 2019 Indianapolis: 77,000+
• 2016 Louisville: 80,000+
• 2013 Houston: 86,000+

All three of those meetings were very crowded, so the numbers seem reasonable to me. I have no idea where the 72,000+ number for Dallas comes from because the show floor never seemed busy the entire weekend. And I was on the floor quite a bit hawking my book and visiting people.

Vendors who spent considerable time and money to be at the exhibits would know better than me. Those I spoke with said the attendance was way off this year. I’ll be interested to hear what, if anything, those vendors say publicly about it.

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.

To wit: Here’s a nearly complete video of debate on a members’ resolution to support moving the NRA to Texas. The resolution was defeated. Some NRA board members spoke against the NRA staff supporting it. Will this reform/resistance carry over to Monday?

I’m not an expert on the NRA or NRA politics, but I was surprised, for example, at the amount of vocal resistance to NRA President Charles Cotton when he tried to dress down board member Amanda Suffacool when she spoke against the resolution.

Cotton also wandered aimlessly into a field of landmines when he, with characteristic hubris, challenged Rob Pincus and gave Pincus an opportunity to ask if board member David Coy had a hand in writing the members’ resolution. Cotton could not even understand Pincus’ question and Coy had to sheepishly admit that he did in fact write the “members'” resolution.

Even here in the deep red gun heart of Texas, the attendance at the NRA annual meeting is clearly down. How far down I can’t say but am interested to see what attendance number the NRA publishes. I’m sure vendors will be able to speak to this.

When I spoke at the National Firearms Law Seminar in 2019 in Indy, there were around 300 attendees IIRC. When I spoke there on Friday, there were 125 registrants and fewer attendees.

I’ll be interested to see how the board of directors meeting on Monday goes. Will the board circle the wagons and support the leadership that, along with WLP, put the organization in its current state? Or will reformers make inroads?

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.

All four of us seek to understand American gun culture, so why do they succeed while I struggle? Certainly, it could be the quality of the writing and ideas, but I honestly think it is something more than that.

When I tried to sell my book Gun Curious to New York-based book editors at large publishing houses, I said there were three audiences for my book:

Gun enthusiasts will be a natural audience for Gun Curious because it tells their story fairly and factually. But firearms skeptics will also want to read this book to understand better the motivations of those who cling so fervently to their guns. And interested outsiders—the broad and deep middle, including the gun curious—will appreciate how the book richly describes an unfamiliar but intriguing social world.

These book editors — and other liberal cultural elite gatekeepers like those at the WaPo, NYTBR, Atlantic, and New Yorker — are definitely among the firearms skeptics I had in mind as an audience for my book.

What I miscalculated was the lack of desire of firearms skeptics to understand gun owners and gun culture on its own terms.

I have often said that one of the challenges we have in the U.S. today around guns is that many people only see one side of their paradoxical existence. This week I realized that it is not just a matter of seeing only one side of the paradox. Many people only care about one side and are perfectly happy to play the Chinese finger trap game (h/t Randy Miyan, Liberal Gun Owners).

This certainly applies to both sides of the gun debate, because gun enthusiasts are no more interested in my discussions of negative outcomes than gun skeptics are in the normality of firearms. But gun enthusiasts don’t control the major organs of cultural production in the United States. Gun skeptics do.

Hence, I am coming to the realization that people whose only interest in guns is in their negative outcomes have no desire to read a book that does not primarily address that interest. They only relate to firearms from the perspective of negative outcomes – and they only want to relate to them that way.

This made me think back to comments by editors who rejected my book proposal by saying they might read an article about the topic but not a whole book. They are just not interested in a book-length treatment of the normality of guns and gun owners. I wonder whether they would even read an article.

Although this does still sting, it’s also a helpful realization because it puts me in touch with reality and tempers my expectations. I thought 2024 of all years would be a time for light over heat on this issue, but I’m afraid that people on both sides are much more interested in partisan red meat to chew on.

It’s not just AR-15s that are “a cultural chew toy for angry partisans,” to quote McWhirter and Eilson’s American Gun. It’s guns and gun culture in general.

CYNICAL: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives

I understand why people get cynical, especially in fraught areas of our social and political life like guns.

Although I can’t guarantee I won’t, I hope I never become cynical. If I start down that path, I hope I (or someone who loves me) will recognize it in time for me to step off.

To be sure, sarcasm is a key that I sing easily in, and I have been known to invoke Dostoyevsky’s idea that, “I love humanity, it’s the people I can’t stand.”

But I generally consider myself earnest and optimistic, even if I become more of a tragic optimist as I age.

Why am I thinking about this right now?

Tracy Chapman joined Luke Combs to perform her song, “Fast Car,” at the recent Grammy Awards. I got goosebumps watching it.

Tracy Chapman’s eponymous 1988 album was released when I was a sophomore in college on my way to studying sociology in no small part because of the economic inequality I had witnessed on “skid row” in Los Angeles and on the streets of Washington, DC. So songs like “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” and “Mountains O’Things,” along with “Fast Car,” really struck a chord with me at the time and continue to give me feels.

Of course, heterosexual cisgender male country music star Luke Combs was criticized for cultural appropriation for covering a song by a Black queer woman, and those responses were re-triggered by the performance.

For me, I found the moment hopeful for its recognition of Tracy Chapman as an artist and its potential to bring people from different backgrounds together in common cause.

Sure, Luke Combs used the Confederate flag before. He also apologized for that. Humans can change and grow. Human culture can, too.

We could use more of this in many areas of our social and cultural life, not least of which as concerns my main concern these days, guns.

Like I said, I hope I never become cynical.

Much like The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership, this Master Narrative underlies much of what is written about guns and gun culture in America.

I see the narrative (in some cases more and in some cases less) in the work of Ryan Busse, Harel Shapira, Matthew Lacombe, Robert Spitzer, Patrick Blanchfield, Jennifer Carlson, and Andrew McKevitt (whose book we’re reading in Virtual Book Club starting next week!) — all of whom have recently published or will soon publish books on guns in America.

Most recent case in point: Dominic Erdozain’s “takedown of American gun culture” in his recently released book, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy (affiliate links on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com).

The title says it all.

I haven’t yet written up anything on The Master Narrative, since I may not write another book about guns and gun culture. But if I do, it will start here.

That was July. The mini-documentary ran on Spectrum News 1 in December and this week the producer let me know.

I found the piece among the fairest treatments of American gun culture I’ve seen in a major media outlet. Certainly, they gave me more than my fair share of opportunity to speak. But most of the other experts and individuals interviewed expressed their views in thoughtful and moderate ways, and the editorial perspective represented overall was balanced.

You can certainly judge for yourself, thought. Watch the 20-minute video.