I am trying to break the grip the current moment has on my attention, and thought a good way to do that would be to have a brief look at my year ahead.
For the spring semester, I am on a research leave, meaning I am excused from my normal teaching and service obligations as a faculty member at Wake Forest University. My main goal during this leave is to make serious progress on my (long-awaited?) book on American gun culture.
I am going to try to wrap up as many ongoing projects as possible in January so that beginning in February the bulk of my attention and energy will be on the book. Among these ongoing projects is a short book on the history of concealed carry laws and their implementation. The book will be available as a print and eBook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other online channels, and by special order through local book stores.
I will also be giving free electronic copies to everyone who supports me as a member on Buy Me a Coffee ($5/month or $60/year).
Although I am focusing on writing, my data collection will continue, both for my first book as well as for a planned second book on diversity within the gun owning population/community. Most of the support I receive on Buy Me A Coffee goes toward the cost of data collection (travel, tuition, transcription, technology).
For example, I expect to travel to Texas in April to attend Karl Rehn’s “Historical Handgun” course (co-taught with Tom Givens). This is a course I have been wanting to take for years, and am hopeful that it will happen this year. There is obviously a ton of gun stuff happening in Texas, so I plan to do some other interviews/observations the week I am there.
On the academic front, I am co-editing a special issue of the journal Sociological Perspectives on “A Sociology of Firearms for the 21st Century” and contributing a couple of chapters to the second edition of an edited volume called Understanding America’s Gun Culture.
Of course, I will continue to post on this and my Gun Culture 2.0 blog, though I may slow that down a bit in the interest of book-writing.
Last, in addition to Buy Me A Coffee, I raise a little money for my work (and some attention for non-deviant aspects of gun culture) by selling print on-demand t-shirts and stickers through Teespring.
Gun Curious 