Gun Owners: Who They Are…
Date: Mar 3, 2005 9:04 PM
FYI (copy below):
http://www.reason.com/0502/cr.ed.humanizing.shtml

AOL users click here
************************************************************
February 2005

Humanizing Gun Nuts
An anthropologist shoots down stereotypes about gun enthusiasts.
Eric Dzinski

Shooters: Myths and Realities of America?s Gun Cultures, by
Abigail A. Kohn, New York: Oxford University Press, 224
pages, $29.95

If there?s a gun in a scene, an old writer?s adage says, it
had better go off. As that bit of advice suggests, there
are few symbols more powerful than guns. They can represent
liberation from oppression or serve as a weighty physical
reminder of a lurking existential threat. No matter the
association, the powerful emotional responses that guns
elicit are largely responsible for the stagnant and
vitriolic nature of the current gun control debate.

In Shooters, anthropologist Abigail Kohn argues that both
sides of the debate have become so alienated from one
another that they effectively form subcultures, and she
studies them accordingly. Kohn calls Shooters an
ethnography, an anthropological study conducted from within
a culture to gain the ?natives? point of view.? Rather than
studying gun enthusiasts though literature and statistics,
or from behind a duck blind to ensure ?objectivity,? Kohn
spent time with enthusiasts, interviewing them, taking
classes with them, and shooting with them.

Her research methods appear to be scrupulous. She confined
her survey to a particular area (the San Francisco Bay area)
rather than glossing the gun culture as a whole. She
published her standard questionnaire as an appendix to the
book, and the citations she offers to support her claims
seem to come from both sides of the gun control debate. The
result is a fascinating look into the world(s) of gun
enthusiasm that puts real, human faces on a gun debate
dominated by antiseptic statistics and abstract principles.
After reading Shooters, you?ll wonder why no one has done
such a study before.

The omission may stem from the typical attitude toward guns
among academics, which Kohn addresses in her preface. From
?public health? articles proposing gun control as a cure for
the ?epidemic? of gun violence to highly regarded
sociologists who argue that gun research should be informed
by ?moral principles? rather than hard facts, she confesses
her surprise at the ill-informed and often tendentious
research conducted by academics. Kohn?s own research for
Shooters, some of which appeared in this magazine (?Their
Aim Is True,? May 2001), elicited predictable responses.
One colleague said she was performing a ?social service by
researching ?such disgusting people.?? Another said that
unless Kohn acknowledged the ?inherent pathology? of gun
enthusiasm, she was disrespecting victims of gun violence.

The characters that emerge from Kohn?s interviews and
observations are far more complex and interesting than the
?gun nut? stereotypes that such comments suggest. The
shooters in Shooters are diverse, including doctors,
lawyers, artists, and men and women of various ages and
races. Even their political persuasions are not as
predictable as you might expect. While most of the people
in Kohn?s book describe themselves as conservative, a few
are politically liberal and say they regularly vote
Democrat.

Kohn focuses particular attention on the women shooters,
trying to determine what makes them want to be a part of the
?boys? club? of gun enthusiasm. The women that Kohn takes
shooting classes with (and from) say owning firearms makes
them feel less vulnerable, less like potential victims, and
more like people in control of their own destinies. While
some feminist scholars argue that female gun enthusiasts
just reinforce violent and aggressive patriarchal
tendencies, these shooters argue that by being armed they
discourage male violence without the need for aggression.

It is here that Kohn?s work takes its most interesting turn.
The women and minorities in Kohn?s book are acutely aware of
the link between gun ownership and citizenship in the United
States. Several of her subjects point to historical periods
when certain segments of the population?blacks in the
post?Civil War South, for example?were disarmed and enjoyed
fewer rights and liberties than whites who had guns. That
guns can and have been used by the oppressed to ward off
their oppressors suggests that they can be a tool for
equality as well as freedom.

Even today, gun control has a disproportionate impact on
poor people and minorities. Laws that target inexpensive
guns (supposedly used more often in crimes) unfairly disarm
people without the means to afford more costly firearms.
Poor people are also disproportionately the victims of gun
violence, meaning they have a greater stake in the right to
self-defense.

The alternative that some anti-gun activists have suggested
is reliance on the police, rather than guns, for protection.
Shooters and gun scholars alike note that this solution is
promoted by white middle-class gun critics for whom violence
is not a daily reality and for whom the police are polite
and responsive rather than menacing. They also note that in
times of crisis, the minutes a police officer may take to
respond could mean the difference between life and death.
Shooters prefer the independence and reliability of
self-defense.

These doctrines of self-reliance, toughness, and
independence underlie a subculture that Kohn investigates
thoroughly in Shooters: cowboy action shooting. More than
an antique gun club, cowboy action shooting is a sport
devoted to preserving the styles and ideals as well as the
weapons of the Old West. Participants dress up in boots and
hats and run through elaborate courses using period weapons.

Some of the most colorful characters in Kohn?s book populate
her chapter on cowboy action shooting. Shooters with names
like ?Wild Bill Hiccup? run through target courses with
cigars clenched in their teeth, playing out Old West
fantasies. Kohn?s analysis occasionally drifts toward
questionable psychosocial generalizations, such as her claim
that cowboy action shooting is an attempt to reclaim a
?white, middle-class identity? through Wild West
re-enactments, despite participation by minorities and
people of various economic classes. But by and large her
account of this sport is delightfully thorough, especially
to readers who had no idea it existed.

The chief weakness in this otherwise excellent book is
Kohn?s ambitious linking of ideas. Describing a shooter who
thinks the world of gun enthusiasm is not demarcated by
color, class, or gender, she writes, ?This belief in the
inherent diversity of gun enthusiasm as it?s practiced is
interesting for several reasons.? Here and elsewhere, she
uses the word inherent to link one belief held by a shooter
to a wider, more abstract idea about shooting in general.
The problem is that in the world of ideas (and certainly in
the world of anthropology) there is no such thing as
inherent connections.

People in different cultures will form entirely different
concepts around the same object. Even two people in the
same culture will make different connections between sets of
ideas. At least once in Shooters, one of Kohn?s subjects
makes the point that while shooters all share at least
aspects of the hobby, they come to it from different
backgrounds and for different reasons. Kohn?s emphasis on
?inherent? beliefs seems out of place in a book that tries
to map the diversity of ideas within the gun culture.

Although Shooters is supposed to be an ethnographic study of
a particular subculture, near the end Kohn leaps to
conclusions about the broader gun control debate. She
argues that both sides of the debate must be willing to give
up some fundamental assumptions and tactics in order to make
gun legislation work for everyone.

She emphasizes, for example, that guns have been an integral
part of American culture at least since the nation?s
founding and that no amount of gun control will ever bring
about the fundamental change its proponents imagine. On the
other side, she argues that gun enthusiasts must give up the
belief that gun control has no effect on crime, citing laws
that prohibit felons from owning firearms as an example of
effective gun control. (She fails to mention that those
same felons can still get guns illegally.)

Although Kohn?s conclusions are thought-provoking and
display a wealth of research about the subject, they depart
substantially from her avowed purpose. They frame a
discussion more suited to a general debate about the merits
of gun control than to a targeted study of gun enthusiasm.

Those weaknesses aside, Kohn paints a fascinating portrait
of gun enthusiasts. Studying people who are often maligned
as racist, jingoistic troglodytes, she portrays a lively and
diverse group brought together by common interests in
history, mechanics, and liberty. Her colleagues in academia
should take her insights to heart, replacing their blind
disgust with a more dispassionate understanding of citizens
who see a gun as a tool, not a menace.

Eric Dzinski is a writer living in Denver.