This is the eleventh of many student gun range field trip reflection essays from my fall 2023 Sociology of Guns seminar (see Reflection #1, Reflection #2, Reflection #3, Reflection #4, Reflection #5, Reflection #6, Reflection #7, Reflection #8, Reflection #9, and Reflection #10). The assignment to which students are responding can be found here. I am grateful to these students for their willingness to have their thoughts shared publicly.
By Aimee Lents
Before visiting the gun range last Wednesday, I had never before been within five feet of a real unholstered gun, much less touched and shot a loaded gun. Though my father enjoys shooting at ranges, I had never asked to accompany him, nor had he ever invited me to go with him. This was due perhaps to a stereotyping on both of our parts: he thought that his liberal daughter had no interest in shooting guns, and I was afraid of condescension from people I thought would dominate the gun ranges; i.e., the likes of my conservative, white father. Despite this, however, I found the field trip to be very enjoyable and informative, and though I was a little nervous leading up to the trip, I felt safe the entire time at the range.
As mentioned, I previously had no real-life experience with guns. Although I knew that pulling the trigger led to the explosive release of the ammunition, I had never had any particular interest in the mechanics or physics of guns and their firing. For this reason, I was surprised that smaller handguns had more recoil than the larger semi-automatic rifle. From what I have seen by watching film and television, cops seem to barely react from firing their handguns, while the rifles of military snipers look to abruptly kick back into the shooters’ chests.
The pistols were a good introduction to shooting for the first time, though I thought the AR-15 was the easiest to aim with, given its red dot sight.
Nonetheless, this trip occurred a mere two days after the shooting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While holding and firing the 9mm handgun, I was well aware that this exact type of weapon (though admittedly a very common one) was used to kill the UNC professor last Monday.
Semi-automatic rifles, like the AR-15, have also been used in many mass shootings. And yet, because I have been privileged/lucky enough so far in life to live rather unscathed by violence-related trauma and/or tragedies, this knowledge was rather abstract. Similar to the way that I am distantly aware of fatal vehicular accidents every time I drive. Of course, the vast majority of times one enters a car, their subsequent passage will be safe and uneventful, just as many people use guns safely and in an unremarkable manner. As a society, we have laws against driving while under the influence in some attempt to preserve life when we can, but we endure a base level of deaths to keep speed limits as high as they are. While vehicular safety and traffic laws are complicated issues, we have ultimately accepted that driving fast is worth a certain amount of deaths.
I do not believe in banning guns any more than I care for a ban on alcohol, which clearly did not go well. But this still begs the question: what then, if any, is the acceptable number of gun-related deaths?
Gun Curious 
Aimee should try going to the gun range with her father. I think her preconceptions of the people there could easily be proven wrong.
Her closing question is quite an abstract, and one may as well ask how many obesity-related cardiovascular deaths we should tolerate for the choice of eating what we want and exercising(or not) when we want(or not).
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I would like to hear that question separated into more specific questions, because of different approaches and tradeoffs needed for each:
1) How many suicides are acceptable? 2) How many gang- related homicides are acceptable? 3) Should we accept fewer defensive gun uses, if we start pushing for federal licensing, registration, mandatory fees and costs that price out income-constrained persons like single mothers and fixed-income seniors? And so on… #AcceptableTradeoffs #LibertyOverSecurity
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One can definitely get into the tall grass on the subject of the tradeoffs between strict and liberal gun regulation, and much of those weeds are hardly explored at all. ex: how much genocide does widespread gun ownership actually prevent? https://hwfo.substack.com/p/weighing-us-homicide-rates-vs-european
Comparison is hard because there is a lot more difference from continent to continent than many people think, especially in our highly-connected age.
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“But this still begs the question: what then, if any, is the acceptable number of gun-related deaths?”
An issue in the question is it assumes a premise, that it is actually possible to realistically control the number of “gun deaths”. Which is itself not really a coherent concept.
The car accident analogy is only applicable to firearm accidents, which are thankfully already very rare. Almost statistical noise given the size of the population and the number of guns in circulation. Since “accident” in this context includes true accidents, which by definition are essentially unavoidable occurrences, and negligent actions, the only way to even nibble around the edges is to look at negligence. But we already know how to address that, widespread ongoing education. Which would require actively teaching gun safety in schools at age-appropriate levels, since, as we know, “abstinence only” doesn’t seem to work. Punitive laws aren’t really effective in deterring negligent behavior, once the non-negligent people are educated. Negligent people are habitually negligent in most of their behaviors.
Suicide by firearms are similarly difficult to address, as it can be hard to predict suicidal ideation, and many of the people who choose firearms to do so either already owned the firearm, making purchase restrictions unfeasible, or are not a prohibited person, making access easy. Those who use firearms also tend to have serious suicidal ideations, they are not making “cries for help,” they sincerely desire and want to ensure their own destruction and thus are willing to plan and wait if necessary to achieve it. Substitution of means is highly likely and falls from great heights and strangulation/hanging are essentially as effective as firearms.
The final form of “gun death” is from criminal activity, which, in the case of homicide and serious assault, is heavily concentrated within criminal subcultures and their associates. Criminals take turns being victim and perpetrator in escalating cycles of mutual violence. Realistically, there is no way to remove firearms, which are a durable good and easily manufactured, from the equation in the US, and criminals will access whatever tools they feel necessary to accomplish their goals. Absent addressing the social factors which contribute to criminality and sub-cultures of violence, many of which are rooted in or exacerbated by well-meaning but ill-thought out social policies, the ability of specific and general deterrence to limit violent human behavior is, well, limited.
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The student’s final musing (“What then, if any, is the acceptable number of gun-related deaths?) is either irrelevant, or not well thought out. If the question is, “How many gun-related murders are acceptable?” the answer is none. However, murder is already 100% prohibited by law.
On the other extreme, “How many people are killed without an intentional act by a human being?” then the answer is already zero. More fluently, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
But for some reason many in our society think of guns as a self-actuating instrumentality. By that reasoning we should eliminate many instrumentalities that cause far more deaths than guns. From cars, to cheeseburgers, to many of the paints, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals in daily use.
It’s not the gun – it’s the murderer.
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I read it as a rhetorical question that takes the discussion of gun control out of isolation and places it in a broader societal context.
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I greatly enjoy reading these essays, as each offers me a chance to ponder how guns look from different perspectives, or to remind me of something easy for me to forget.
Ms. Lents reminds us that Hollywood’s portrayal of guns is most often unrealistic, clichéd and contributes to common misperceptions.
I was impressed by how quickly and matter-of-factly she discarded certain stereotypes she’d harbored, moving straight on to a pragmatic rhetorical question on the broader social policy aspect. If annual auto and gun fatalities are equal in number, why is the one deemed acceptable, while the other not?
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