NOTE: I recently unpacked my hodgepodge of notebooks about gun culture to begin thinking about writing another book in 2025. Seeing John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa in a local bookstore inspired me to empty those notebooks here. Be advised: These are truly notes and not composed ideas.
January 28, 2019: “Looking at yet another instance of gun violence, partisans will no doubt be swept up in the kind of either/or thinking that obscures more than it enlightens. Gun control advocates will point to the gun as the key culprit. Gun rights proponents will note the suspect’s prior arrest record and the futility of signs posted at every entrance to campus reading, ‘No concealed or other weapons permitted.’ The event provides an opportunity for more subtle thinking.”
February 19, 2018: “After every high profile mass homicide in America – or at least those perpetrated with guns – people take to social media to express their disdain for “the other side.” As a blue bubble, liberal gun owners who also studies American gun culture, I have many friends on both sides. So I just scroll through my Twitter and Facebook feeds and SMH. It is impossible to address the issue of mass shootings in any critical way without being accused of defending them.”
February 20, 2018: “Why I Don’t Favor an Assault Weapon Ban. About me: 49-year-old, married, Asian-American man with three children. Lived a very happy life for 42 years without ever seeing, touching, or firing a gun. Becoming a gun owner, hanging out in gun culture, and reading a lot of scholarship about guns have led me to this conclusion. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but it seems that we have a Bill of Rights at least in part to protect citizens from the government deciding we don’t need certain things.”
May 30, 2022: “Maybe something will come out of the bipartisan talks happening in the Senate, or maybe it won’t. But while gun rights and gun control activists harden their positions, why not move forward with policies and practices we know can reduce gun death and do not require restricting guns?”
June 6, 2022: “These are the worst of times and the best of times to shed light on American gun culture. There already exists a strong bias in academic studies of guns toward negative outcomes. Mass public shootings like those in Buffalo (racist) and Uvalde (children) only heighten the emotionalism. As the smoke dissipates from yet another mass shooting and another meeting of the National Rifle Association, what do I have to say?”
Gun Culture 2.0 
On the subject of mass murder… For a long time the most deadly incident in the US had been by way of arson and the Happy Land Fire, which had been accomplished with $1 worth of gasoline in 1990.
Then there are all of the examples of SUVs and Trucks and vehicles generally
From New Orleans in 2025, and Germany in 2024 (the Christmas market attack) to Zhuhai, Guangdong, China also in 2024 to Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2021.
As far as I can tell, no one (except some extreme green activists) want to outlaw gasoline or private vehicles.
LikeLiked by 1 person
On the assault weapon bans… “Why does anyone need an AR-15?”
Why did Rosa Parks need to sit in the front of the bus?
If you talk to all too many people on the Left today, they will have trouble answering the question “Why do you need free speech?” (I’m old enough to remember when the Left was all about free speech, free expression, etc.) But then I lived suburban Chicago in the late 1970s when a certain political group tried to march through Skokie, Illinois – which is how that same questionable political group ended up being lampooned in the movie The Blues Brothers (1980)
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is interesting that there is a long list of rights that “liberals” want protected, but they work to deny those that others value. I might even say, to react to your earlier post about defending rights, by force if necessary, that it seems a rather exclusive approach to 2A rights. Personal choice is an expansive concept. That is, those who might, at some point want them banned, see their necessity when they want to defend what they envision as THEIR personal rights, when THEIR personal concerns or safety are paramount.
It would be more accurate to say that “We have a violence” problem and some violence is done with guns, but it is also done by other means. In countries with severe restrictions, violence still occurs with the tools available (and sometimes “illegal” firearms). As recent events show, they happen here with alternatives, as well. Thus, violence is the problem and the focus on guns is the favored position of those who do not want them. Attempting to solve violence that involves firearms by restricting them is admitting that we have no idea or inclination to curtail violent actors in our culture, so we must create a society that limits their tools. It is too difficult to dispassionately evaluate our culture, to look at the individual predictors of violence, for people to do so willingly….when they can simply blame something or someone else. We need a more in-depth evaluation causes, beyond means.
LikeLiked by 1 person