Here is a Washington Post gift link to the article so you can decide for yourself.

I was pleased that my point captured in the title of this and the original post made it in the story:

“What’s happening today among trans people is in the tradition of people demanding their rights and saying that they’re willing to defend those rights with force if necessary,” Yamane said.

As a reminder, I am transitioning my writing on guns from this blog to my “Light Over Heat” Substack this spring. As here, there is no paywall over there so please sign up for a free subscription. (Of course, you can also opt to pay for a subscription if it fits your budget and you value my work.)

Original Post Follows

That’s it. That’s the post. That’s my answer to why so many nontraditional gun owners bought guns after November 6, 2024. And why other marginalized people have done so before them. As told to someone writing for the Washington Post yesterday. I hope it makes the cut.

Curator Danny Michael was good enough to give me a tour of the museum and I later went back and filmed some additional bits to create three (planned) videos for my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel.

In this first video, I highlight how the museum was redesigned with gun novices and the gun curious in mind.

Please excuse the audio. I was filming while the museum was open to the public so was trying to speak quietly, and my lav mic was not getting along with my phone that day.

For those who don’t want to watch the video, I wrote more about this aspect of my visit on the Gun Culture 2.0 blog.

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In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

Day 4 of my Travels with Sandy took us from Kellogg, Iowa (population 600) to Henderson, Nebraska. This long drive on Interstate 80 took us right through Omaha, which meant I needed to stop and see a gun industry acquaintance from years back, Mike.

I first met Mike 6 years ago, in the summer of 2017, when he was working at Suarez International in Prescott, Arizona. He has since moved to be closer to family and landed at Guns Unlimited, a retail gun store on Omaha’s east side.

The owner Tom Nichols opened Guns Unlimited in 1970 and still comes into the store most days. He introduced himself to me during my visit, in fact. He was also smart enough to buy not just his building, but he owns the entire Sports Plaza which includes a Golf USA store, an Outdoor Living Pool & Spa, and a very cool Irish pub and restaurant – where Sandy and I had lunch at Mike’s recommendation.

The first thing Mike wanted to show me, and easily the most remarkable thing I have seen in any retail gun store is the number of Browning sporting shotguns on hand.

Beyond what is displayed in the Browning shotgun room, the store has a seemingly unlimited supply of Brownings on hand for sale. The picture below shows just some of the boxes of just Browning Citoris. These over/under shotguns come in five different barrel lengths (24, 26, 28, 30, or 32 inches) and five different gauges (12, 16, 20, 28, and .410 bore), so it’s to understand how the stock can multiply. But having literally hundreds in stock is something else.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Guns Unlimited is the #1 independent retailer of Browning shotguns in the United States.

Guns Unlimited has a presence at big events like The Grand American World Trapshooting Championships held annually in Sparta, Illinois at the World Shooting & Recreational Complex. Tom Nichols has an Illinois Federal Firearms License to facilitate the hundreds of shotguns he sells there.

There is a strong hunting and sporting bent to Guns Unlimited. Trap, skeet, and sporting clays are among the most apolitical of gun hobbies. Even those who strongly support gun control rarely take aim at these honest, innocent sporting pursuits.

The store also has an incredible number of Henry lever action rifles, the assault weapon of its day, that you could load on Sunday and shoot all week.

But defensive firearms are also well represented. Like all retailers, they were swarmed during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020 with people wanting to buy handguns especially, including many new and non-traditional gun buyers.

Mike recounted the story of a married couple who came in to buy a firearm. The “husband” was a male-to-female transgender person (a.k.a. a trans woman). The sales clerk needed to indicate the person’s gender (male or female) on the ATF Form 4473. Rather than making a big deal out of the situation the clerk simply asked the buyer what box to check. The buyer, who had not yet had gender reassignment surgery, said male to match what was on her state identification.

Interestingly, even before the COVID gun buying spree, the ATF had proposed adding a third “non-binary” category to Form 4473 for people whose identifications (drivers license, state id, passport) list gender as “X.” This went into effect in May 2020.

Many of these new buyers, especially those who were Omaha residents, were surprised to find out that they could not just walk into any gun store and walk out with a handgun. Not only does Nebraska require buyers to get a pistol purchase permit from their County Sheriff, but residents of the City of Omaha also need to register their “concealable” handguns with the Omaha Police Department.

(Actually, “Omaha Municipal Code 20-251 requires that all concealable firearms inside the city limits of Omaha be registered. Regardless of where a person resides, concealable firearms inside the city of Omaha are required to be registered with the Omaha Police Department.” Fortunately, those who hold Nebraska concealed carry permits or those who have permits from states Nebraska honors with reciprocity – including North Carolina — are exempt from the registration requirement.)

So, a new gun owner who does not have a Nebraska concealed carry permit who wants to buy a handgun from Guns Unlimited is required to (a) go to the Sheriff’s Office to get screened and buy a pistol purchase permit, (b) take the permit to the gun store and purchase the gun, (c) go to the Omaha Police Department to get screened again and register the gun they just bought, and (d) finally go back to Guns Unlimited to take possession of their handgun.

According to Mike, although it does not happen often, it is possible for someone to get a Nebraska pistol purchase permit but be denied registration by the Omaha Police Department, in which case Guns Unlimited refunds the purchase and just keeps the gun which the buyer has never taken possession of.

About 2020 new gun buyers, Mike also made a couple of other observations. First, few of them became repeat customers. Second, and surely related, he is already starting to see some people bringing their panic-bought to the store to sell back. They are surprised to find that, even though they have never shot the guns, they will only be getting about half of their purchase price back.

Wrapping up another interesting stop on my tour of America’s gun cultures, I bought a small gun safe and souvenir cup on my way out.

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.

Some additional materials on this topic:

Walk the Talk America is doing great work at the intersection of guns and mental health.

My essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Gun Safety’” for The BulletPoints Project.

My take on Guns are Normal and Normal People Use Guns.

A longer presentation on the changing face of gun owners I gave to the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

The episode focused on a recently published study by a group of public health scholars who fielded a national survey of 916 Asian Americans asking about their experiences of racial discrimination and their firearm-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is a lot of anecdata floating around about how anti-Asian discrimination increased during the pandemic (think of people taking the “China virus” and “kung flu” language to the next outgroup level), and that this led to unprecedented gun buying among Asian Americans.

Of course, without historical data, we can’t really speak to “precedent,” but these scholars find that 6.0% of respondents said they purchased a gun during COVID and another 11.2% said they intended to purchase a gun. Of the 6% of COVID gun buyers, 54.6% were first-time gun buyers.

If the survey is accurate and representative, then 3.3% of Asian American adults in the United States became new gun owners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some quick calculations (roughly 20 million Asian Americans, about 75% being over 18) suggests that about half a million Asian Americans became new gun owners.

On the podcast, the authors note that part of the idea of doing the study was a phone call from a gun store owner in Battle Creek, Michigan who was wondering why so many Asian Americans were buying guns all of a sudden. Battle Creek is home to refugees from Burma dating back to the mid-1970s and a couple thousand live in the community today.

According to the abstract, the study found:

Asian Americans who experienced racial discrimination were more likely to purchase a gun and ammunition and intend to purchase more ammunition during the COVID-19 pandemic. AAs who perceived more cultural racism were more likely to purchase a gun. Individuals who reported higher anticipatory racism-related stress reported greater intent to purchase guns.

Examining racism and firearm-related risks among Asian Americans in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic (Preventive Medicine Reports, June 2022)

I was not surprised that the authors are working within The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. This was evident in the podcast appearance if not fully in the associated article. They understand that these Asian Americans are buying guns for personal protection (Point 1 of The Standard Model).

They highlight the frequency of gun carry by their gun-owning respondents:

Finally, 38.2% (n = 39) of individual gun owners indicated that they had carried a gun more frequently since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the top reason was for protection (Table 2). Furthermore, more than 1/3 of gun owners (38.5%, n = 15) reported that they carried a gun over half of the time (greater than 45 days) in the last three months.

They suggest (on the podcast) that guns are rarely used for self-defense (Point 2 of The Standard Model) and instead “the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent racism directed toward Asian Americans increased their risk for firearm injury through increased gun and ammunition purchase and unsafe storage” (Point 3 of The Standard Model).

They conclude by characterizing their study as one of the first to consider “the effects of discrimination of firearm-related risks,” there of course not being associated benefits worthy of mentioning.

Which recalls the conclusion of Studdert and his colleagues in their recent article on handgun ownership and suicide: “This information is also important for current and prospective firearm owners seeking to weigh the risks and perceived benefits of ownership.” Objective risk vs. perceived benefits, if any.

In the podcast, they advocate what Eric Ruben (SMU Law School) called in a Twitter exchange with me a “softer version” of The Standard Model. They don’t condemn gun ownership outright but highlight the need for better firearms safety education, especially around issues of safe storage. That’s something I can definitely get on board with.

ORIGINAL POST FROM APRIL 2022:

The animating idea of this blog is to speak (primarily) to those who are neither totally bought into the idea of guns nor totally opposed to it. That is, to the gun curious.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with just such a person. Mark McNease is a politically liberal gay man living in rural NJ. Mark found me because he is a member of the Liberal Gun Club (LGC), which syndicates this blog. He is a member of the LGC even though he is not a gun owner. Mark is part of roughly 1/3 of the population who don’t currently own guns but don’t rule them out. He is gun curious.

Mark recorded our conversation for his podcast, One Thing or Another (16 February 2022).

This is a very informative podcast not so much because of my answers but because of the host’s questions. A lot of people out there have the same questions about guns and gun culture as Mark, so I hope I answered them well.

In fact, I was discussing the diversity of Gun Culture 2.0 even before COVID, as in my lunchtime keynote lecture to the National Firearms Law Seminar in April 2019.

Beyond recognizing the diversity of new gun buyers, I have also argued that being a person who owns a gun does not automatically make someone a “gun owner” in terms of their identity. Not developing a gun owner identity could limit new gun owners’ engagement with gun culture more broadly or with Second Amendment advocacy specifically (per political scientist Matthew Lacombe).

Some recent data on new gun owners and gun policy preferences (H/T The Trace’s Daily Bulletin) show that I may be, as is often the case, only half-right.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago recently included some questions about gun buying in their ongoing AmeriSpeak Panel survey (March 3-7, 2022). In a press release yesterday, they highlight two key findings.

First, compared to pre-pandemic gun owners, pandemic gun buyers are younger, more racially diverse, and more likely to be unmarried. These findings are not surprising but it is good to see them confirmed once again.

I will be interested to see what the AmeriSpeak data show with respect to gender and political leanings, too.

Second, and here is where I may have gotten things wrong, pandemic first-time gun buyers look very much like pre-pandemic gun owners in favoring permissive gun policies such as allowing people to carry concealed guns in more places, allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools, allowing people to carry concealed guns without a permit, and shortening waiting periods for people who want to buy guns legally.

Whether their similarity to pre-pandemic gun owners made them more likely to become pandemic first-time gun buyers in the first place (selection) or whether buying a gun brought them in line with existing gun owners in terms of policy preferences (treatment) or some combination of both is unknown.

Whether I am actually wrong in my speculation about the 2A politics of new gun owners also remains to be seen. But these data definitely temper my earlier views.

That said, John Johnston’s Ballistic Radio has been at the top of my diminishing list of must listen to podcasts for some time now. Recently he had on a guest who is an extremely high-level shooter, K.A. Clark. This is not unusual for Ballistic Radio, of course. What I found interesting was the advice Clark had for new gun owners.

The old saw has it that “those who can’t do, teach.” This is mostly false with a dash of truth mixed in, but so too is the opposite: “those can do, can’t teach.” When I was in graduate school there was a legendary story of one of the world’s top quantitative researchers in sociology who got so frustrated trying to teach graduate statistics that he flung an eraser across the room. Later when I was working at the University of Notre Dame, I tried to have one of the top 20 college tennis players in the country help me with my serve. I hit a few serves for him under his watchful eye as he formulated his advice: “Swing harder.” Uhhhh, okaaaayyyy.

It is a particular gift to be able to reach novices as an instructor, especially if you as the instructor are highly proficient at what you are teaching. Glenn Seaborg earned a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his (co-)discovery of ten transuranium elements including plutonium and element 106 which was subsequently named seaborgium in his honor. He also taught freshman chemistry at my alma mater, UC-Berkeley, long after he needed to. In his words, “The education of young people in science is at least as important, maybe more so, than the research itself.”

This brings me back to K.A. Clark on Ballistic Radio. He is a Glenn Seaborg-level shooter. He and Johnston review his credentials at the start of the show. But when asked to talk about goal setting, his advice for new gun owners — of which there are an abundance these days — was spot on.

Johnston asked Clark if there was a difference in goal setting for new shooters. Clark responded that goal setting is even more important for the novice. And the particular approach to goal setting he advises is worth quoting at length:

I think the first place to start, piggybacking off the work of Claude Werner, is avoiding negative outcomes. The first goal is your involvement with firearms and firearms training should be a value-add and a positive to your life. Not a negative. And if you buy gun and you’re unsafe with it and you don’t know anything about negative outcomes and you don’t get training and you don’t take it seriously, man, it can mess up your life. It can ruin your life. And people don’t realize that. They just say, “Well, I got a gun, I’m good.” And it’s like, well, maybe. Now it’s just random. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s not. So setting that goal of “I want to be able to protect my family.” Fantastic. So, guns are good place to start. Get some training. But you’ve got to learn about safe storage, you’ve got to learn about negative outcomes, you’ve got to listen to Ballistic Radio. That’s where you start. That’s much more important than, “Well, I want to do a two-second Bill Drill tomorrow.” One, that’s not going to happen. And two, it doesn’t matter that much, right? So the beginners really need to hone in on what’s important. They really need to get their goals together early. And that’s a challenge. How do we do that as a training community? How do we help those new people set realistic goals and relevant goals to make firearms ownership and their involvement in this community a net add to their life.

K.A. Clark on Ballistic Radio (Ep. 354)

As host John Johnston said by way of reinforcing Clark’s take, “A lot of people, lately especially, get into guns as some form of risk mitigation. Now, whether or not the risk is real or imagined doesn’t really matter. When you [get a gun] you’re not necessarily mitigating risk so much as setting it to random. Like maybe you’re good, maybe you’re not. And, and I agree with you completely that if you’re introducing any level of new risk in your life and you don’t mitigate it, that is probably not a net value-added.”

Whether you’re already deeply involved or are new to guns, there is a lot of value-added to listening to the Ballistic Radio podcast. And if you are outside or critical of American gun culture, you should listen also so you can see what thoughtful gun owners sound like when they talk to each other.

I was fairly certain that the presentation would not be recorded, so before I left for Jay, Vermont I recorded an abbreviated (15 minute) version of my talk from my basement studio and uploaded it to YouTube.

In the talk I briefly review the concept of Gun Culture 2.0 then discuss its implications for the changing face of gun owners in the United States.

Gun owners are becoming more diverse because Gun Culture 2.0 is more inclusive than Gun Culture 1.0. It is more inclusive because the self-defense at the core of Gun Culture 2.0 is a universal concern. I document this using national data on gun owners and show that the trend that has been developing over a number of years was amplified during the Great Gun Buying Spree of 2020+.

I appreciate your taking a moment to watch the video. If you find this and the other work I do of value, please give the video a thumbs up on YouTube and share it through your own networks.