This is the eighth of several student gun range field trip reflection essays from my fall 2022 Sociology of Guns seminar (see reflection #1 and reflection #2 and reflection #3 and reflection #4 and reflection #5 and reflection #6 and reflection #7). 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.
Sociology of Guns student at the range, Fall 2022. Photo by Sandra Stroud Yamane
By Connor Stanley
When I arrived at the gun range, I was oddly nervous for the next 45 minutes. Until this field trip, I had never touched a gun, let alone shot one. I watched all the training videos and took careful notes, but much like many aspects of life, you need to actually do it. I can watch as many videos as I want about gun safety, but actually shooting a gun is a very different experience.
As with gun safety, safe storage of firearms is something that people on all sides of the Great Gun Debates in America agree is important. But the way some gun violence prevention organizations, like Brady United Against Gun Violence in the “End Family Fire” initiative, define “safe storage” is not acceptable to many responsible gun owners.
A recent editorial in the American Journal of Public Health included gun educator Rob Pincus and the definition it proposes is more adequate to the reality of how responsible gun owners want to store (and stage) their firearms at home.
As I discuss in this week’s Episode 8 of “Light Over Heat,” the sort of dialogue and collaboration that yielded this editorial may be a good path to promoting light over heat on the issue of guns.
Gun safety is something that people on all sides of the Great Gun Debates in America agree is important. But I find different understandings of “safety” in play when people discuss guns.
As I have noted previously, people within the gun culture tend to focus on safety WITH guns, while people from the gun control or gun violence prevention side focus on safety FROM guns.
As noted earlier, the final assignment of the semester in my Sociology of Guns seminar is for the students to write an essay reflecting on their personal experience with and understanding of guns in light of what they learned in the course.
This is the eighth and final final reflection essays, written by a student whose initial reflections on our field trip to the gun range can be found here. (Link to the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh reflection essays.)
Reflection essay author presenting her work to Sociology of Guns seminar, November 2021. Photo by David Yamane
This is the eighth and final student gun range field trip reflection essay I will be posting from my fall 2021 Sociology of Guns seminar (see reflection #1, reflection #2, reflection #3, reflection #4, reflection #5, reflection #6, and reflection #7). 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.
Guns have never played a big role in my life. There were certainly no guns in my house when I was growing up. If I ever talked to my parents about guns, it was usually after a terrible tragedy, like a school shooting, or as we headed out to a protest, like a rally we attended on the Boston Common that was organized by Parkland High students.
That does not mean I had no personal connection to guns, or that I never thought about their popularity. My mother grew up in Vermont, and her father (my grandfather) and her older brother (my Uncle) were big hunters, so her childhood was filled with talk about guns and hunting, and she used to tell me about that, even though she hates guns.
Many years ago, when we went to visit my Uncle in Boise, Idaho, where he lives now, he showed us some of his rifles and the safes he kept them in. I also remember him talking a lot about gun safety, and how worried he was that someone might break into his house and steal his guns, which is why he always disassembled them and kept them in different safes.
When we went on our field trip, I wondered what the experience would be like and how it would affect me. Would I feel the sense of excitement that I know lots of people feel when they shoot guns? Would I surprise myself and actually enjoy firing a gun? Physically, would the guns be heavy or hard to hold? Would I understand better why people might want to own not just one gun, but five or ten different guns?
The author shooting at Veterans Range, September 2021. Photo by David Yamane
This is the seventh of several student gun range field trip reflection essays from my fall 2021 Sociology of Guns seminar (see reflection #1, reflection #2, reflection #3, reflection #4, reflection #5, and reflection #6). 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 Adam Porth
Ever since I was little, my dad always taught me about gun safety and how to act around guns. Starting with nerf guns, all the way up to his prized Remington 870s, I was taught about the great pleasure that shooting guns can be if I follow all the rules to make sure myself and everyone around me were safe.
When it came to the field trip, however, I felt like half of the knowledge I had saved up over the years about gun safety had dwindled. As someone who handles guns relatively frequently, I was surprised to find out that I barely knew how to operate a simple .22 pistol that was so similar to the one I own at home. From this, I felt that no matter how acclimated you are (or think you are) to guns, there is still a rather startling feeling about picking up a new gun for the first time.
The author shooting at Veterans Range, September 2021. Photo by David Yamane
A Tweet I saw yesterday directed my attention to an op-ed written by a leading suicide researcher created a nice bridge between these two chapters. It had to do with preventing gun “violence” (to include suicide and accidents) via safe storage. For me the most interesting part was the last paragraph, so either read or skip to the end and find the following:
Firearms are here to stay. Just as we encourage safe sex rather than abstinence to reduce the burden of teenage pregnancy, we can encourage safe firearm storage rather than simply discouraging firearm ownership altogether in our efforts to reduce gun violence.
Michael Anestis
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I learn something every semester from each of my students, but one student’s work this semester was more of a revelation to me. Bevin Burns drew on her experience promoting sexual health and education on college campuses to highlight some potential negative consequences of adopting an abstinence-based approach to gun safety education.
This really resonated with me because I have noted the two different approaches to gun safety: safety WITH guns vs. safety FROM guns. The #gunsafety and #gunsense movement is really promoting the gun equivalent to “abstinence only” sex education, and we know how well that worked over the years.
Sociology of Guns student at range. Photo by Robin Lindner/RLI Media
I was privileged to be invited recently to contribute to an ongoing series of videos produced by the Duke Center for Firearms Law on COVID-19 and guns.
I was asked to speak about my approach to studying guns, to speculate about why people are buying guns during the COVID-19 pandemic, what misconceptions people have about gun acquisition, and what advice I have for new guns owners.
Motivated by those who would reduce gun culture in the United States to the National Rifle Association (NRA), I have tried as much as possible to think and write about gun culture without paying too much attention to the NRA. In fact, when I sent out a book proposal a while ago, one of the reviewers took me to task for not discussing the NRA enough.
I have a couple of reasons for downplaying the NRA in my work.
Gun Curious 