Why I Almost Abandoned My Effort to Bring Light and Turn Down the Heat on Guns (Light Over Heat #49)

What was supposed to be a brief hiatus from my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel almost became permanent. This video explains why.

A lot of it had to do with my feeling like I was talking into a void, and a lot of that feeling had to do with negative responses I have been receiving to the proposal for my book, Gun Curious: A Journey into America’s Evolving Culture of Firearms.

In this video I read from some of those responses so you can get an idea of the uphill battle I am fighting to publish a book that tries to turn down the heat on the great gun debates in America and occupy the vast but (I now realize) lonely middle ground.

If I have given you some value and you would like to support my work, please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow. You can also RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

Coming Back to Lower the Heat and Address Frustration and Fatigue Over Guns (Light Over Heat #48)

I have been on a 5-month hiatus from my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and seriously thought about not coming back. (More on that in a later video.)

But seeing the frustration and fatigue in my son while talking about all of the recent shootings in America (Kansas City, upstate New York, Austin, Charlotte, Louisville, Dadeville) helped me see I need to press on trying to lower the temperature in our debates over guns and to increase conversation, mutual understanding, and empathy across our differences.

I apologize in advance for my low energy in this video. I know they say the camera sucks your energy so you need to go 125%, but I’ve been going at 150% for a week straight and I’m tired.

If I have given you some value and you would like to support my work, please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow. You can also RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

Talking About Violence in the Asian American Community, Especially the Recent Half Moon Bay Mass Murder

RE-POSTING FROM MY GUN CULTURE 2.0 BLOG

I am Asian-American (half Japanese-American on my father’s side) and grew up in Half Moon Bay, California. The coincidence of this with the mass murder of 7 people in Half Moon Bay by an Asian man led to a conversation recently with Randy Miyan on the Liberal Gun Owners podcast.

My appearance was broken into two separate segments (S2G35 and S2G36) and followed two segments with fellow half-Japanese-American (but also half-Chinese American) Chris Cheng (S2G33 and S2G34).

Although I am not an expert in mass violence, I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on issues that hit very close to home and do so from a very personal perspective at times.

Of course, I typically turn to statistics before getting personal on these issues. The following is the documentation for some of the empirical claims I make during these episodes.

From Relative Risk to Absolute Risk of Negative Outcomes with Firearms – And Back

I have been writing quite a bit lately about negative outcomes with firearms for my book on American gun culture. As I’ve stated repeatedly state on this blog and in various publications over the years, unlike most scholars studying guns, my starting point is not the deviance of guns but their normality.

But people care about negative outcomes with firearms such as homicide and suicide, including myself and other gun owners, so here we are.

I recently posted about the importance of considering absolute risk compared to relative risk when looking at negative outcomes with firearms. I mentioned, for example, that the relative risk of dying from an unintentional firearms injury in the U.S. is TWICE that of Italy. But the absolute risk of dying from an unintentional firearms injury in Italy is 1 in a million and in the U.S. it is 2 in a million, so some perspective is in order not to spark irrational fear.

In retrospect, the title “absolute vs. relative risk” was not the best, especially for someone who is constantly preaching the importance of both/and in understanding guns and gun culture rather than either/or. We need to understand BOTH relative risk AND absolute risk.

One of my top former students at Wake Forest read the absolute/relative risk post on my Facebook page and commented:

I think these numbers would be more meaningful too compared to some baseline that people can relate to more easily – say, the risk of being injured in a car accident.

I don’t disagree, though this does take us back to the question of relative risk.

Further Exploring American Exceptionalism via the Global Burden of Disease Study (Suicide)

Yesterday I explored America’s violent exceptionalism by looking at homicide data for the 38 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collected by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Today I want to see what these data tell us about the problem of suicide in the United States relative to our peer nations. Are we exceptional here, too?

As with my examination of homicide, this is admittedly a very simplistic analysis. But for my work, it is important to be able to say something about the big picture of negative outcomes with firearms in the United States as a starting point for more sophisticated analyses.

Exploring America’s Violent Exceptionalism via the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network (Homicide)

Lately, I have been working on the chapter of my book on American gun culture that explores negative outcomes with firearms.

Although I differ from most scholars studying guns by beginning not with gun deviance but with the normality of guns and gun owners, I do take negative outcomes seriously.

America is exceptional in the world for the number of firearms legally owned by its citizens, as well as the laws and culture that support widespread civilian gun ownership. Understanding this has been central to my work over the years.

America is also exceptional among its peer nations in its rate of firearm-related deaths. Here I will focus on homicide using 2019 data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study for the 38 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These are high-income, high human development index, developed nations which provide an appropriate peer comparison group for understanding homicide rates in the United States.

Thinking About Absolute vs. Relative Risk of Negative Outcomes with Firearms

Lately, I have been working on the chapter of my book on American gun culture that explores negative outcomes with firearms.

Although I differ from most scholars studying guns by beginning not with gun deviance but with the normality of guns and gun owners, I do take negative outcomes seriously.

Trying to get a better understanding of how the United States compares to other countries in the world in terms of negative outcomes with firearms, I recently stumbled upon the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and its cross-national Global Burden of Disease (GBD) database (more about IHME GBD at the end).

Visiting the National Gun Owners Association of Kenya Range in Kiambu

One of the students in my Sociology of Guns seminar last fall grew up in Nairobi, Kenya and still has family there. She is what I would call an open-minded critic of guns, or perhaps a gun skeptic, as reflected in her class range field trip reflection, “The Gun Felt More Like a Dangerous Tool Instead of the Killing Machine I Thought It Was.”

At the end of the semester, she said she was visiting family in Kenya over the break and was planning to visit the gun range with her Guka (Grandfather). I asked her to send me a report if she did and she did.

“Americans F*&$a^# Love Guns”

I don’t post much about guns and electoral/party politics on my blogs because I find them frustrating and impediments to understanding gun culture. But I was visiting one of my best friends recently and talking about paths forward for my gun culture book. One path we discussed was engaging conventional gun politics more directly.

A fellow sociologist, my friend is a left-leaning centrist who has become a political junkie of sorts in recent years. This includes consuming a healthy diet not just of liberals like Alex Wagner and Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC but also the ideas of conservatives via media like the Michael Steele Podcast and Charlie Sykes’ The Bulwark.

He mentioned during our discussion that I should look at the brief bit about guns in Republican strategist Rick Wilson’s 2018 book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.

Wilson’s bottom line: “Americans fucking love guns” (p. 75).

My Overview of a Workshop on Firearms and Self-Defense (Light Over Heat #47)

This video offers an overview of the 14 papers presented at a workshop on “The Ethics, Law, and Social Science of Firearms and Self-Defense” convened by the Center for Ethics in Society at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH.

Out of respect for the privacy of the participants in this closed workshop, I did not give their names or affiliations in this video. But the organizers are supposed to be putting together a web page highlighting the works presented, and when they do I will come back here and add a link.

Also at this workshop I presented a rough draft of my paper systematizing the dominant academic approach to understanding Gun Culture 2.0, what I call “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership” (see my “Light Over Heat” YouTube video playlist on the topic).