David Yamane is a sociology professor at Wake Forest University, where he’s spent more than a decade studying gun culture through the lens of the soft science of sociology. He teaches a very unique college course on this topic that includes an optional range trip where students in the class get hands-on experience with guns. His new book Gun Curious summarizes what he’s learned so far. My work on understanding what percentage of gun owners are motivated to train beyond a state minimum requirement is referenced in his book.
Like most people, I wasn’t really sure what makes sociology different from psychology or anthropology or what sociology researchers do. Let’s start with the Britannica definition:
sociology, a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution.
My Version of the History of Gun Culture
Over the past 100 years there were a lot of changes in the gun culture, some driven by external events, some by technological innovation, some in response to legislation, and some from within the gun community itself. As a student of the history of firearms training, my version of the Sociological History of Gun Culture is this:
1700’s-1940’s – Gun ownership is common and normal, for both long guns used for hunting and home defense, and pistols carried “on or about the person” for self defense when away from home. This blog contains reviews of dozens of books written prior to 1940 (look in the Historical Handgun tab). The Founding Fathers considered the right to keep and bear arms so important that it was the 2nd amendment to our Constitution. Firearms training is typically done at the family or informal gun club level.
1940-1945 – World War 2 was the biggest firearms training program in US history, as the military put every recruit, including men and women in combat support roles, through formal firearms instruction.
1945-1965 – Westerns were the most popular form of genre entertainment, Fast Draw, in the 1950’s, was statistically the most popular shooting sport in US history, with participation by TV and movie celebrities. The Baby Boomer generation grew up with cap guns, toy guns, BB guns, playing cowboy and “Army”. Gun ownership was common and normal, but the conversion of the US economy to crowded cities, suburban living, factory work and low crime did lead to a (likely) decrease in people carrying outside their home or vehicle. Gun magazines mostly wrote about target shooting and hunting, both of which were considered mainstream normal activities. Police firearms training standards largely derive from bullseye shooting competition and the new sport of Police Pistol Combat shooting.
1965-1985 – The Vietnam War and the start of the Culture War between the Progressive (Marxist) Left and the Establishment begins. In major cities on the East and West coast, riots, street violence, poverty, drug abuse and urban crime increase. The political “Gun Control” movement begins, first motivated by assassinations in the 1960’s but significantly increased in response to the murder of 60’s icon John Lennon. Gun ownership and defensive gun use becomes slowly marginalized by the entertainment media as TV, movie and influential journalists all begin to lead more and more to the political Left. Heroes in action movies and crime dramas are no longer noble and virtuous – many are troubled loners committing violence for revenge. The Lone Ranger and Matt Dillon fade as anti-heroes Charles Bronson (in the Death Wish films) and Rambo become the new archetype.
The Reagan era produces a dramatic political re-alignment as rural and Southern Democrats leave the party to join the GOP. The emerging more left-wing Democratic party slowly drives out pro-gun members and makes “Gun Control” a priority issue. But the Reagan era GOP is mostly focused on Big Business and the fiscal concerns of the rich coastal elites who are unconcerned with gun rights and cling to the fading idea that “gun rights” is all about hunting and gun collecting.
During this era, largely unnoticed by the general public and most of the mainstream shooting community, Jeff Cooper and other innovative thinkers use the Leatherslap matches and their evolving Southwest Combat Pistol League events to redefine pistol shooting technique and training standards. These changes will take decades to reach the mainstream, with significant pushback from the more traditional elements of the gun culture, including law enforcement trainers. Massad Ayoob begins teaching courses that integrate unarmed, firearms, psychological and legal material to the private sector, and writing extensively about legal and psychological aspects of self-defense in the mainstream gun press.
Cooper’s and Ayoob’s work is the foundation on which Gun Culture 2.0 will emerge.
1985-2000 The sport of Practical Shooting slowly gains acceptance within the traditional firearms culture, and concealed carry laws become the top priority for gun rights groups. This leads to massive growth in the firearms training community, as instructors previously limited to teaching Hunter Safety are now teaching state-mandated defensive pistol courses to a significant portion of the gun owning population. The material being taught derives from Cooper’s and Ayoob’s work, which has now influenced law enforcement training. Urbanization begins to limit hunting and back-pasture target practice opportunities for gun owners, as indoor ranges and practical shooting matches take over as the dominant form of recreational shooting. Gen Xers and Millennials growing up in urban areas to non gun owning families, with no childhood exposure to firearms, gain entry into the firearms culture via instructional videos (via the VHS rental stores) and later, via the World Wide Web and online forums. This leads to significant growth of Gun Culture 2.0.
2000-present 9/11 shakes US culture out of its “it can’t happen to me” comfort zone and wakes many up to the need to be more capable and self-reliant. Social media, youTube, and gun-centric video games provide more on-ramps for the Gun Curious with no gun owning/gun culture family to join the gun culture. Shows on cable channels such as Shooting Gallery and Top Shot present shooting and firearms ownership as normal, safe and entertaining. As a result of the concealed carry revolution (also the title of Dr. Yamane’s first book), firearms instruction is more accessible to the general public than at any time in US history.
The Gun Curious book
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Gun Curious book is not the book’s content but the struggle involved in getting it published. One aspect of the Culture War that began in the 1960’s is that the journalism, academic, and entertainment media have all been dominated by the far Left, where opposition to Gun Culture has become a sacrament that Cannot Be Questioned. The vast majority of studies, articles, books, and other media all share a editorial bias against guns, gun culture and gun owners. They all support what Dr. Yamane has called “The Master Narrative of Democracy-Destroying Right Wing Gun Culture”. I strongly encourage you to read all the parts of that article series.
That meant that there was little interest in, or support for, a book detailing the story of how a mostly liberal college professor studying gun culture through an unbiased lens discovered that some of the deeply-held beliefs of the gun control movement should be questioned. It’s a byproduct of the dominant belief in academe that journalists and researchers on any topic should not be impartial, drawing conclusions where the data leads, but should be activists seeking paths of study that lead to conclusions that support the preferred narrative. (For a deeper dive into this, I suggest articles by Bari Weiss and Uri Berliner detailing their experiences being driven out of the NY Times and NPR by radical activists.)
Chapters
- Guns are Normal and Normal People Use Guns
- Top Shot and the Human-Weapon Relationship
- Becoming a Gun Super-Owner
- Living with AR-15s
- Swept Up in the Concealed Carry Revolution
- Pascal’s Wager and Firearms
- Guns as Risk Factors for Negative Outcomes
- Being Responsibly Armed
From the chapter titles you can get a good idea of what the book contains. Yamane makes the case that gun ownership, in the 21st century, is still normal, and normal people use guns. An attitude I’ve encountered many times in discussions of gun politics online is the anti-gun belief that gun ownership, and being armed & capable of self defense is not “civilized”. The attitude comes with a certain amount of smugness, often tied to other luxury beliefs. Essentially it’s “I am civilized and do not own or need a gun, thus you are uncivilized and abnormal for thinking that you need or want one”. Its second cousin is the popular but incorrect “regular people are too incompetent to ever be successful using a gun for self defense, so you shouldn’t have one”.
Aside: for those unfamiliar with the term luxury beliefs, the term means “an idea that confers social status on people who hold it but injures others in its practical consequences”. Those that live in affluent gated communities, who can afford private security, or are protected by police by virtue of their positions in government, gain social status within elite circles for being anti-gun. Disarming the general population, often while supporting “defunding the police” and soft-on-crime prosecutors, absolutely injures others – not just physically but also economically.
He discusses how the Top Shot show got him interested in studying gun culture in his professional life, and how that eventually led to owning multiple guns, both for his own enjoyment and as tools needed to teach his academic coursework. He revisits the material from his earlier book (Concealed Carry Revolution), and dives deeper into the statistics related to crime and negative outcomes that occur to gun owners and the unarmed.
He does a good job of maintaining a moderate perspective on all the issues, acknowledging that some points raised by the gun control movement are valid but countering some of their claims with data from his own research.
Who Should Read this Book?
If you teach people about guns, or are in the gun business, or are an activist in the gun rights movement, you should buy a copy of this book and read it — if for no other reason than to support Dr. Yamane’s research and disprove the “conventional wisdom” of the publishing elites that there was no market for a book like this.
It’s a book you can hand your Gun Curious friends or co-workers who maybe don’t understand why you carry or why you don’t support “common sense gun safety laws” like banning the AR-15. They might be more receptive to his commentary on those issues since he is presenting the information from an academic, not activist, perspective.
Would someone that opposes gun ownership and concealed carry read this book? They should, but people with strongly held beliefs are highly resistant to information that doesn’t support their pre-existing views, and are likely to dismiss it as “NRA propaganda” even though the author clearly states that on most issues he still leans left of center and has no affiliations (and no funding from) any pro-gun groups. Having a loaner copy lying around might be worth it.
Read More About It
David’s Gun Culture 2.0 blog is here. He has shared many presentations and podcast appearances there and I recommend exploring the resources on it.
David visited John and I at the A-Zone Range back in 2022. Here’s some video highlights from our fun shooting session.