About

My name is David Yamane. I am a sociology professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I also own and use guns. In this blog I write about guns and gun culture in the United States from my perspective as a blue bubble academic who became a gun owner and concealed carry licensee later in life.

As someone who had little exposure to and no interest in guns for most of my life, I know what it is like not to understand guns and gun culture. For nearly a decade now, I have burrowed deeper and deeper into American gun culture. I hope to translate what I have learned to the gun curious – those interested in but unsure about guns.

This uncertainty about guns can be coupled with attraction, repulsion, or neutrality. Whatever your orientation, if you are open-minded and hope to learn more about guns and gun culture, you should find something of interest here. I welcome your comments on my posts, and if you have a question you would like me to answer, please ask via the contact page on this site.

“I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.”

Baruch Spinoza

My involvement with guns is both personal and professional. Those looking for a more analytical, academic approach to this topic should explore my original blog, Gun Culture 2.0, as well as my scholarly publications on the sociology of guns:

• “The Sociology of U.S. Gun Culture,” Sociology Compass (2017).
• “What’s Next? Understanding and Misunderstanding America’s Gun Culture,” in Understanding America’s Gun Cultures (2021).
• “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertisements: The American Rifleman, 1920-2019,” with Riley Satterwhite and Paul Yamane in Understanding America’s Gun Culture (2021).
• “Who Are the Liberal Gun Owners?” with Jesse DeDeyne and Alonso Aravena Mendez in Sociological Inquiry, (2020).
• “Targeted Advertising: Documenting the Emergence of Gun Culture 2.0 in Guns Magazine, 1955–2019,” with Paul Yamane and Sebastian Ivory in Palgrave Communications (2020).
• “‘The First Rule of Gunfighting is Have a Gun: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0,” in The Lives of Guns (2019).
• “The Rise of Self-Defense in Gun Advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918-2017,” with Sebastian Ivory and Paul Yamane in Guns: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (2019).
• “Awash in a Sea of Faith and Firearms: Rediscovering the Connection between Religion and Gun Ownership in America,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2017).