Blue America is done with guns. In every state where Democrats reliably & unequivocally command the state government, there is a fresh surge to eliminate “weapons of war” -whatever those might be- from the streets, nightstands, closets or gun safes of the citizenry. My current home state of Washington recently passed what is (I think as of this writing) the strongest ban on semiautomatic “assault rifles” yet. I could take this entire article to analyze its details, but for the sake of brevity, imagine something like the 18th Amendment, but for semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines:
Immediately upon the governor’s signature the sale or transfer of assault weapons within, or the importation thereof into, Washington State and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for non-military or non-law enforcement purposes is hereby prohibited.
Thanks to the 2nd Amendment, you can still sell these prohibited items out of state, which I’m sure other blue states that have yet to pass their own bans appreciate. A group of Colorado Moms is now vowing not to leave the grounds of the state capitol until the governor executive orders an end to all civilian gun ownership in the state.
And in red-meat, independent-legislature, Orange God ‘Murica, lawyers are working overtime to ensure that people with a history of violence and/or irresponsibility with guns can’t get them taken away. If not for the federal background check system in all 50 states, I could see the day when red states green-light gun vending machines and Amazon-like Internet gun sales. Where is the “well-regulated” in well-regulated militia in Trump’s America?
Belly crawling from shell crater to shell crater in the No Man’s Land between Everytown and the NRA are folks like me. The series I’m introducing is a record of my thinking on The Gun Issue in America, beginning with annotated bibliography of works that have shaped my thinking. The blue states celebrate ever-tighter ratcheting down of their gun laws, the red states respond by stripping out what regulations they may have had in addition to federal law, but what I see is a debate that has been frozen in amber since the 1960s, leading to a national stalemate that, in my view, only truly benefits bad actors.
I’m mostly writing this series for my family and friends, who are liberals and wonder why the hell I have such “dirty, dangerous” things as guns in my home (albeit locked away in a safe to which only myself and my spouse have the combination).
My Bi(as)ography
Before I take you on this journey, it is critical for you to understand that I am biased and employ motivated reasoning to shield my identity and tribal relationships. More important is to acknowledge that all of us fall somewhere on a continuum from “tin foil hat conspiracy nutter” to “politically tilted scientist.” So here is a description of the station I’m broadcasting to you from.
I grew up in a conservative gun-owning family in the very conservative gun-owning state of Wyoming. Two-thirds of adult Wyomingites are legal gun owners, just a fraction of a percent less than top-ranked Montana. It is the odd duck in Wyoming who doesn’t have a gun. In Wyoming, the typical question about guns is not “do you have a gun” but “how many and what kind of guns do you have?” In terms of gun laws, Wyoming doesn’t really have any restrictions of its own. I’m sure there are “do not discharge your firearm in the town square” type ordinances in just about every community in the state, but by and large the only restriction is what I refer to as the “federal minimum” of background checks through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). You can have a machine gun in Wyoming if you meet federal requirements. In the time and place I grew up in, guns were (and are) normal to the point of banality. One Christmas during my high school years brought me a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 lever action rifle, sans compass in the stock and the thing that tells time. Other Christmases and birthdays brought more additions to my rapidly growing collection.
We went into the hills, found a safe backdrop, and made tin cans dance or exploded blocks of ice made in cottage cheese containers in the chest-style freezer on the enclosed back porch (we cleaned up afterwards). Or hunting (almost always unsuccessfully-it is one thing to be able to shoot, quite another to really know the ways of game), or trap shooting, or cowboy action shooting, or other gun sports. I spent the better part of my formative years in a cigarette-smoke filled back alley gun shop in Cheyenne, WY. The proprietor and gunsmith was a family friend. We talked guns, handled guns, admired guns. I marinated in the Clinton-hating, antigovernment, black-helicopter conspiracy talk of the proprietor, my mother, and the shop’s other patrons. Proponents of gun control were evil, looking for any opportunity, any negative outcome involving guns, to deprive us of our rights. I wasn’t totally ignorant when it came to negative outcomes with guns-for example, we learned about such events as the assassinations of political figures and civil rights leaders during the 1960s in school-but such events were in the “way back” time. More recent problems, like rising crime during the 1960s through the 1980s, were the result of insane hippie murderers (think Charles Manson) with no moral compass, or inner city (black) drug dealers gunning each other down. Insofar as the patrons of the gun shop were concerned, such inner city shootouts were simply a case of rats killing rats, and good riddance to the lot (the racism of this view does not escape me today). Mass shootings were an occasional evil perpetrated by maniacs. Gun laws wouldn’t stop them, because criminals don’t obey laws.
The Epiphany
I “came out” as a liberal while attending college at the University of Wyoming. This wasn’t the right wing stereotype of being strapped into a chair with Clockwork- Orange-style eyelid clamps while being subjected to a steady blast of leftist propaganda. College simply gave me permission to explore, and at the end of that exploration I found myself left of center. Wyomingite to the core, however, I still loved guns.
The Columbine High School mass shooting was my first real awareness that gun use wasn’t somehow magically limited to ringing steel targets, seeing how tight a group you could get at 200 (or far more) yards, powdering clay targets, protecting home and family, or putting meat on the table. Because I’d been raised to respect the power of firearms, because I am an empath by nature, it would never occur to me to mass murder my schoolmates. It was utterly beyond my imagination, my comprehension, that others would plan and carry out such an attack.
What? How could you not know about (list of previous mass shootings beginning in 1903 or gang shootouts or suicide or armed robbery or…?)
Remember the bubble I grew up in?
Columbine wasn’t the first mass shooting, of course -not even the first of my living memory- but it was the first I really remember. It was the first to feature wall-to-wall, balls-to-the-wall, split screen AND chyron coverage on every channel (especially cable news) 24-7. This was in the pre-Facebook era, but a potent portent of things to come. There’s a legitimate role for professional, competent, ethical journalism in keeping the public informed, and there’s wading in gore because, well, money (ad revenue from ratings or clicks). We crossed a Rubicon with Columbine, and while legacy/mainstream media has been trying to walk it back, it’s still pretty easy to find the image, name, and crazy manifestos of mass murderers, particularly if you ask powerful search algorithms on the internet for such things.
And if Columbine cracked the door for me on negative outcomes with guns, the slaughter of schoolchildren at Newtown blew my awareness wide open-I began to pay much more attention to the negatives of incompetent and criminal gun use-gang shootings and accidents. In my distress I briefly contemplated destroying my guns and turning my back on my upbringing, culture, interests and philosophy-in short, much of what makes me, well, me. In the end, I never bought a cutting torch. I decided that since I was mentally stable and basically good (certainly not homicidal) that destroying my guns was unnecessary and performative. I did, however, at least begin to think outside my bubble and interrogate gun culture and my own role within it. I plan to write more, with this just being an introduction, but I will leave you with the academic and intellectual breadcrumbs I’ve followed to get here, and hope you explore at least some of them. They’ve led me to the conclusion that doing much better in reducing negative outcomes with guns is doable and necessary, but doing so will require all stakeholders to struggle, on a core level, to challenge our priors and grapple with the complexity of guns in America. If suicide and homicide with guns were an easy problem for our society to solve, we’d have solved it by now. Even so, just because it is very hard to do much better doesn’t mean it is impossible.
One more thing: I do write from a pro- 2nd-Amendment-as-individual-right perspective, but I am also wired to be an empath, and certainly will try to understand the position of those who disagree with me. If you’re looking for a “we need to ban guns” perspective you won’t find it here, but if you want confirmation in that point of view, believe me, it’s not hard to find. I try to cultivate diversity across the political spectrum in my intellectual diet, but I won’t lie and say I don’t have any favorite “foods.”
Five Favorites Bibliography
The work of sociologist David Yamane.
When I began to interrogate my own place in America’s gun cultures (because there are more than one) and started paying more attention to liberal critiques of guns, it led me to ponder whether one could even be both a decent human being and a gun owner. The vast bulk of liberal commentary on the matter more or less said “No.” (see Dr. Yamane’s discussion of the Standard Model of academic gun discourse). On a day when my cognitive dissonance ran high, I asked the Google algorithm genie if liberal gun owners were real. Somewhat to my surprise, and then to my satisfaction, one of the top hits was:
Dr. Yamane’s website, Gun Culture 2.0
Dr. Yamane’s OTHER website, Gun Curious
Eventually he launched a YouTube video series, Light Over Heat, which is, I think, the most hopeful approach to reducing negative outcomes with guns.
Much of the work that has guided my thinking on guns is not only Dr. Yamane’s, but works he cites, so you will find a lot of the works I discuss are ones I discovered through his work.
I’m a high school history teacher. Public health isn’t really my wheelhouse, I’m not a lawyer, nor am I a criminologist. I do have a great deal of confidence in saying that the gun debate in America is as old as the country, and that since at least the 1960s the core arguments, on either side, haven’t really changed. Just about any argument either side uses today is a variant or a descendant of arguments from the 1960s (or before). In that vein, an old, out of print, yet fascinating work is The Gun in America: The Origins of a National Dilemma by historians Lee Kennett and James LaVerne Anderson (1975). Written not long after the shocking political assassinations of the late 1960s (MLK and RFK) and during an era when the overall crime rate, and rate of gun violence, was considerably higher than today (believe it or not), the work does a pretty good job of chronicling the history of America’s gun debate and antecedents-even going as far back as the European experience-up to the time of publication. It’s mostly nonpartisan in tone, although they do tip their hand in the conclusion when they argue that in the wondrous computer-driven future they contemplated guns would fade away as unnecessary for self defense. Computers would help law enforcement solve or prevent nearly 100% of crimes.
Sociologist James D. Wright’s articles Second Thoughts About Gun Control (1988) and Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America (1995)-if you know ProQuest-Fu you may have to use it to access Ten Essential Observations. While many of the stats have changed since Wright published these musings, I think his ideas are still relevant. Wright started out solidly in the “ban ‘em all” camp but, through his research, came to appreciate the complexity of the issue. We could all do more of this.
Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America by Adam Winkler (2013). Dr. Yamane has called this the best single volume treatment of the gun debate in America. Using the Heller decision as a springboard, Winkler explores the history of guns and gun control in America, and argues that the two can, indeed have, coexisted since the founding era.
Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures by Abigail A. Kohn (2004). Kohn is an ethnographer who journeyed to the Heart of Darkness of American gun culture and discovered a reality more complex than stereotypes admit. I found this book very well balanced. Kohn avoids clichés of gun owners and at the same time squarely faces the realities of violence and accidents involving guns. If you only have time to read one chapter, make it Chapter 7: Conclusions. Solid gold, in my opinion.
Until next time.
Yours in complexity,
Ed
Good essay. No man's land in this discussion is a depressing place to hang out.