As I discussed recently, I had the opportunity to share my views on American gun culture and gun violence at the 31st annual gathering of the Lutheran Ethicists’ Network (LEN) in January.
A written version of my talk will be published in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics later this year. For the time-being, I have put a preprint of the paper online as a free download at SocArxiv.
Following the break, I will summarize the paper.
A colleague, Ryan Jerome Lecount of Hamline University, pointed me to a recently published study of how race, support for Black Lives Matter, and gun ownership shape people’s views of protesters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The results are interesting and complex and complement a few previous videos on this channel (see below).
I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on these findings, particularly whether the findings seem generalizable from this limited sample.
As mentioned the other day, I have finally gotten the pitch for my book on Gun Culture 2.0 into the hands of some literary agents. Now the waiting game begins.
In the mean time, below you will find the provisional table of contents for the book to whet your appetite.
Preface. On Being a Truth Advocate
Introduction. How a Liberal Professor Became an Armed American
1. Guns are Normal, Normal People Use Guns
2. Building an Arsenal
3. Living with AR-15s
4. Top Shot and the Human-Weapon Relationship
5. Swept Up in the Concealed Carry Revolution
6. Pascal’s Wager and Firearms
7. Serious Mistakes and Negative Outcomes
8. Training in Applied Violence
9. The Changing Face of Gun Owners in America
Conclusion. What the Professor Learned
I stepped out of the social media fray for a few days this past weekend to commemorate the moment when my wife Sandy and I committed our lives to each other at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC in 2013.
But I didn’t stop working on my book, provisionally titled Gun Culture 2.0: Inside America’s Evolving Culture of Firearms. On the long drive from Winston-Salem to Washington and back, and during quiet moments at our hotel, I worked on my author query letter, book proposal, and the first four chapters of the book.
This week I will be sending a query letter to 6-8 agents along with the proposal and sample chapters to try to get literary representation for the project. The literary agent will then try to sell the book to a publisher.
For the past 18 months, I have been co-editing, with Trent Steidley of the University of Denver, a special issue of the scholarly journal, Sociological Perspectives. The theme is “A Sociology of Firearms for the 21st Century.”
A major goal we had in soliciting and selecting articles for the special issue was to expand the narrow sociological literature by appreciating the multifaceted role guns play in society and culture beyond crime, deviance, and injury. This is the sort of project I called for in my original “Sociology of U.S. Gun Culture” article.
The printed edition of the journal will be available later this year, but the articles are being posted online once they are finalized. One that I am particularly proud to have had an editorial hand in is “Queers with Guns? Against the LGBT Grain” by University of Texas graduate student Thatcher Combs.
In all the years I have taught the Sociology of Guns (since 2015), I have not been able to assign a peer-reviewed sociological study of LGBT gun owners. I typically assign Rolling Stone’s story on the Pink Pistols and tell the students that some day a sociologist will give their attention to this important topic.
I am preparing my syllabus for this fall’s Version 7 of Sociology of Guns and am happy to have Thatcher Combs’s work to assign at last.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to write the concluding chapter to a book called Understanding America’s Gun Culture. My chapter would be titled, “What’s Next?”
Unfortunately, chapters in edited scholarly books are where ideas go to die. As one scholar put it: “Quite simply, if you write a chapter for an edited book, you might as well write the paper and then bury it in a hole in the ground.”
In the interest of NOT burying my ideas, here’s my chapter on “Understanding and Misunderstanding America’s Gun Culture.”
Gun Curious 