Customer Reviews

Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book and long overdue. As a Marine Corps combat veteran and ardent handgun enthusiast I shoot because I enjoy it and because I believe in self-defense. Unlike many of the people I shoot with I am very liberal politically and even though I am a member of the NRA I don't care for alot of their rhetoric. I knew there was a middle ground to being pro or anti-gun and this book illustrates that perfectly. Highly recommended whatever side of the debate you are on but especially if like most Americans you are in the middle ground of this issue.

I have several criticisms of this book.

First, Abigail Kohn's ("AK") sampling approach is not scientific. When one does a study exploring the nature of something like America's gun culture, being objective means you study more than just one sample. Here, AK concentrates on an outlier within an outlier. As she admits in her introduction, San Francisco is not representative of America's culture in general so then why should it be the basis for sampling America's gun culture? And then to compound things, the bulk of her interviews are with members of the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) which itself is an outlier within America's gun culture. It would be very hard to draw an accurate conclusion, indeed to generalize to the rest of gun owning America with this sample. SASS members may like to be called shooters, other gun enthusiasts may not.

Second, the book's subtitle is "Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures". What I expected then was a book describing how people that don't own guns view people that do and then the research would either confirm or deny those views. Her book does attempt to do this, but it starts two thirds of the way through and is mostly covered in the Conclusion. Through the first two-thirds of the book she delves into describing how gun owners view themselves and then primarily through the eyes of the SASS. What we get then from her research is that gun owners want to relive the glory days of the cowboy, a conclusion that is pretty much the same as the knee jerk reaction of unarmed America. Really, what did she expect from the SASS?

In praise of the book, AK does have a decent number of quotes from gun owners that should essentially work to achieve a glimpse into at least one sampling of America's "gun culture" (AK's methodology and nearsightedness notwithstanding). Without those quotes in there for the non gun owning reader to get a glimpse of gun owning America, they would be at AK's mercy.

Third, whereas she does a good job of remaining neutral through the first three chapters, AK's objectivity begins to lapse a little in Chapter 4 and then lapses entirely in Chapter 5. Chapter 5 is what I call the straw man chapter. This is where she seems to cherry pick certain statements made by her SASS interviewees and paint a picture of who she thinks gun owners are. A reader might draw a conclusion from AK that gun owners are racist, sexist, misanthropic white males - just the bogeymen anti-gunners would expect. She does not state this directly but instead writes that SASS is mostly white males reliving the good ole cowboy days, which, as she explains, was a time when white men, through violence, dominated women and blacks. At least in this chapter, she does not bother to let the reader know whether she thinks her interviewees themselves are racist or sexist, though on page 162 she tells you that their ideology is bigotted because they don't care to offer solutions for inner-city crime. Beyond this, if you ignore AK's conclusions and read just the quotes (many from minority and female gun owners) you just might conclude something different.

Fourth, she either contradicts or does not support herself in a few places. This leads me to believe some of the work was either rushed or not edited properly. For example, the introduction states that the greatest per capita populations of gun owners are in the rural South which we all know is largely represented by America's lower economic classes. Yet, her chapter entitled, "Cowboy Lawmen" concludes that gun owners are too blind to see that they are really part of the advantaged class (middle class to AK). No big deal, but then in another example she repeats more than a few times that America's gun culture likes "regeneration/change in America through violence". She actually uses the word "violence" several times. So we are to think that gun owners like violence, and yet she does not tell us what violent histories her interviewees have had or do not have? She does not tell us what the crime rate is for gun owners vs. the rest of the population? If she wants to draw a conclusion about gun owners liking violence, shouldn't I see some proof? Did she feel unsafe doing the interviews? Not from what I can tell.

She does not support and accepts as given the conclusion that gun control will decrease violence in the long run (but would increase violence in the short run). She accepts without challenge the anti-gun lobby's assertion that Britian and Australia have lower crime rates than America after instituting gun control. I find it interesting that she did not know that the crime rate in Britain is so bad that British politicians have pushed knife ban legislation in that country; and, on top of that, gun crime itself has not stopped. We get more unsupported claims in her Conclusions chapter discussed below.

To be fair to AK, there are examples of her own text where she seems to understand that gun owners are not the monsters the main stream media portrays them to be. She does have a very good section describing the anti-gun lobby's attempt to co-opt the medical industry into their camp so as to reframe the gun control issue into a health issue. Those few sentences alone deserve a star, but efforts like these are few and far between.

In Chapter 6, "Tough Americans", there is a section subtitled, "Some Traditions Die Hard" where she refers to men's desire to "be good protector(s)" as a "phenomenon" - a word with connotations of the strange. And yet what is so strange about someone wanting to assume responsibility for protecting their own? After reading chapters 4 and 5 and the first few pages of chapter 6 a reader would conclude that AK's own philosophy is somewhat anti-gun, but starting from about the middle of chapter 6 on, her philosophy seems to do an about face when she discusses gun ownership by women (and gays and blacks). Now we see that AK becomes more critical of arguments against gun ownership. I walked away from this chapter thinking: white men own guns - not good; women and minorities own guns - not bad.

Her Conclusions chapter contains more contradictions. Here she basically tells gun owners to lighten up about their gun rights because no one will take their guns away. She states that the 4th Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures will likely allow gun owners to keep their guns even if gun control comes back on the list of high priority political agendas. And yet, on the top of page 162 she writes about registration being a historical precursor to gun confiscation. Governments have used registration lists to track once legal guns after they have been made illegal. Governments then won't need to worry about silly Constitutional encumbrances because they could mandate that gun owners deliver their guns to their local police station. Why worry about searching homes?

Furthermore, she shows some naivete around the degree to which the anti-gun lobby has been successful pursuing other avenues aside from outright confiscation. The anti-gun lobby is not dumb enough to go for the home run (gun ban) with every swing, so they pursue legislation like taxes on ammunition, lead shot bans, and expansion of gun free zones. They push for high tech sensor requirements and stamping mechanisms that are capital intensive and which gun manufacturers cannot afford. She either ignores or dismisses as weak the many other ways to "get rid of the guns" such as when the anti-gun lobby (and local governments using taxpayer dollars) wanted to bankrupt America's gun manufacturer's with product liability suits. Essentially, the plan was that these manufacturers would be so bogged down with legal fees that they would be forced to close their doors or face bankruptcy. No number of appeals to the 4th Amendment and the Emerson case, as AK does, can stop the creativity of the anti-gun lobby and anti-gun politicians. It is precisely all these anti-gun schemes that necessitate organizations like the NRA; which, by the way, AK likes taking swipes at (I could only presume she thinks this gives her more credibility. The anti-gun lobby, though criticised throughout her book, doesn't get the same contemptuous treatment). Anyway, I found it interesting that she is so flippant about gun owner paranoia when the back cover to her book tells us that AK works in Washington D.C., a city which, up until recently had banned all handguns and had made all long guns practically inoperable and to this date is still skirting its way with legal finaglings to get to the same place they were before the recent Heller decision (and all the while keeping the notorious distinction of murder capital of America).

And...A.K. tells us that there are not a few unscrupulous gun dealers that sell to known straw purchasers. She accepts this without question. I suspect that she does not bother to investigate this allegation because to do so would put her in a position where she might find herself advocating racial profiling. She does not elaborate on just how a gun dealer would know who is or is not a straw purchaser. After all, what does a gun dealer know about any purchaser except the information on their ID card and what they look like? Oh yes, with a background check, he would know that the buyer had no criminal record. I guess gun dealers don't discrimate on the basis of race. Of course indicating as much would conflict with AK's insinuations of gun owner racism throughout the book.

Lastly, all the above would still earn Shooters 3 - 3 ½ stars, for it does have some value (I do not regret buying or reading the book); but then, just a few pages from the end of the book she writes:

"But at the end of the day, a simple glance at statistical tables on who is most greatly affected by gun violence in the U.S. demonstrates that those who are most victimized are usually poor and disenfranchised, and are often people of color. These are quantifiable facts that accurately reflect the nature of gun violence in American society, facts that neither shooters nor the NRA have seriously contested. The question, then, to put to shooters and the NRA is this: If guns are not responsible for this situation, what is?"

After reading the first 150 pages with accompanying footnotes, I was blown away by the lack of depth in this last question. Guns do not make people poor and guns do not make people minorities. Guns do not make choices. How exactly do inanimate objects compel a specific group of people to lead a life of crime? Are guns picking on poor minorities and hypnotizing them into committing crimes? Is a gun some kind of nefarious rabbit's foot? And, hasn't AK already told us that gun owners are by and large middle class white males and not from the lower class? If this is true, then shouldn't we expect to see even higher crime rates among that demographic? Of course we don't, but AK doesn't want to touch that one. So then, let's be absolutely clear: guns do not cause crime.

After that quote she goes on with another straw man paragraph about gun owners and their cowboys and Indians dream, and then writes:

"I believe it is a cop-out to argue [as gun owners do] that people who perpetuate the majority of gun violence do so because they suffer from a lack of moral character from birth, or they've made unfortunate "lifestyle choices", or they're simply bad people."

Here she sets up another straw man by claiming gun owners believe that criminals are bad "from birth". I find it hard to believe that this was even remotely a consensus on the part of her interviewees. There is not a little bit of irony, by the way, in writing about gun owners being cop-outs when in the previous paragraph she blamed an inanimate object for causing crime. Could it be that AK's writing is tainted by the fear of being called racist?

Further on, her objectivity lapses once more:

"The fact of the matter is that no one chooses to be born poor or grow up in a decaying inner-city environment. These are two important factors that contribute seriously to the extreme violence in the U.S."

Aside from this being another red herring, again, she does not support her statement. A good majority of poor minorities in fact do NOT commit crimes. While one does not choose to be a poor person born into a bad neighborhood, one does choose to be or not be a criminal.

And,

"When shooters fail to seriously consider how and why violence is occurring, and dismiss the problem as not their concern, they affirm for their critics that they don't really care about violence in American society. If shooters really are going to continue to argue that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," then shooters need to start thinking about and investing in people."

I wonder what AK would say to a man who blames a woman for being raped on the fact that she wore a short skirt? Why then hold people who like guns and do not commit crimes accountable for the actions of those people that choose to use guns to commit crimes?

What AK needs to understand is that it is not that gun owners do not care about violence in society (just the opposite is true), but that they do not care to be apologists for rapists and murderers. They know the difference between right and wrong and hold people accountable for their choices. It is fundamentally the opposite of being racist to expect that everyone (poor minorities included) live up to one standard level of human decency. It is patently discriminatory to hold them to a different moral standard and offer excuses because of their race or economic status, which AK patronizingly does in her last couple of pages.

My suggestion to those wishing to learn about America's gun culture is to go to the source. Visit the various gun blogs on the internet and get a sense of the character of the people that post on those boards. You can tell a lot about people by what they write/say, their choice of words and whether they value loyalty above truth or truth above loyalty. Alternatively, visit a public gun range more than just one time. My personal experience has been that gun enthusiasts are honest to the core; they are obsessed with gun safety (as they should be); they don't sugar coat much; and, the vast majority most certainly are NOT racist.

Although Abigail Kohn was raised in a liberal Jewish background, it would be hard to reduce her to a cultural stereotype after reading Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Culture. The book followed from her UCSF dissertation in anthropology, Shooters: The Moral World of Gun Enthusiasts. In May 2001 she posted an article for Reason Magazine: Their Aim Is True - Taking stock of America's real gun culture, and in May 2005 she participated in a Reason Debate: Straight Shooting on Gun Control.

Her book was published in December 2005, but I only ran across it because some folks were touting More Guns, Less Crime. Based on the Amazon reviews I had a feeling I already knew what Lott's book was going to say, and Shooters was one of their alternate suggestions. I disregarded the peach schnapps jokes that were running through my head and sent for a copy.

Kohn sought to define what owning guns means to American gun owners. Any city would have had quirks, but I have to admit that San Francisco seemed like an outlier of a place for a study of American gun culture. I'm relatively new to guns myself, but in MD and PA I know a lot of guys that hunt and frequent gun ranges, and even some that shoot paintball. But I had no idea that Cowboy Action Shooting and SASS even existed - and I've never met anyone that calls himself, or herself, a shooter. But America is a big place, and she started near her campus at U Cal SF.

As I come away from the book, I feel that I learned some interesting history and was exposed to many new ideas, which reflects well on the book. But I also feel that the book was actually less balanced than the dispassionate anthropological tone would indicate. Kohn immersed herself in gun culture - and liked it. She made friends and though the weapons still scare her a bit, she found the shooting challenging and exciting. Through Kohn, these SF shooters come across as the sort of people you'd want to meet and have fun with on vacation, and in many ways she seems to have become one of them. That isn't a bad thing, but I don't really see her in the white lab coat.

Towards the end, Kohn switched gears fairly quickly from observer to political adviser and peacemaker, and while I think she tried very hard to be practical, it is very, very hard to get past the intractable positions on each side. For example, Gun Control Australia, where Kohn is now researching gun culture, writes, "Kohn is trying to trick the public into believing that American shooters are taking the high moral ground by purchasing, and practicing to use guns. This is a trick and a trick which should be condemned."

But Shooters gets a more positive review at the TotalDrek blog, "What makes the book truly useful, however, are her remarks about her fellow academics, as well as anti-gun liberals generally. Seen through her eyes, many of the arguments these people make seem hysterical and ridiculous, born out of ignorance and a lack of thought. This is not to say that gun owners get a thorough white-washing, but rather only that she uses a book likely to be read primarily by academic audiences to make it clear why those same academics are sometimes seen as irrational lunatics."

This book is a scholarly piece of academia that's well thought out and well cited. Overall, the book has a strong message with clear thoughts and examples. Even the pro-gun control parts are well in line with most pro-gun ideology.

The only thing I strongly disagree with is the ending, which calls for the criminalization of private gun transfers in lieu of "professional transfers" for a "nominal fee." Clearly Abagail has never encountered the gun dealers that charge fifty to a hundred dollars for the BS NICS paperwork. And if the paperwork is mandatory, you can bet prices will rise. Just look at class 3/ NFA items transfers. The CHEAPEST I've paid is 50 dollars per. But I digress.

Good book, it's nice for a liberal to see the light as I myself am neither liberal nor conservative but parts of both. I often say education of an issue will show the true nature of it, and this book will educate people who're presumably not into guns such as gun-debate-illiterate liberals and give them an objective view of the entire subject. For gun owners, it will offer a reasonable argument towards sensible gun control (yes, I can't believe I said it either), sensible gun control being things like felons and children not owning guns, and straw purchasers being sent to jail, basically things that are already illegal. Her conclusion is also a good one, though I disagree with the private transfers part strongly.

For that to come close to working, there'd have to be no central NICS check-in for "professional" transfers. I'm sorry, but you just don't know where the information your NICS check goes to. Tin Foil hat off.

As to the ideas contained in the book for advancing the entire gun debate, I think anti-gun liberals would have to get their heads out of their collective asses and look at guns and gun control objectively, and show proof of this educated stance by LAYING OFF irrational, emotionally driven gun control for the next 10-20 years. IF that somehow happened (which it won't), then perhaps us gun owners can deal with a theoretically sensible gun control.

Will that happen? Of course not. Both parties in our corrupt two-party system in america are emotionally driven about certain topics, and liberals will never stop trying to tread all over the rights of gun owners. Obama might have, for a moment, but that's just because he wants a 2nd term. Mark my words... just look at his voting record.

Claptrap, from start to finish.

Typical -

"This hesitancy is a by-product of a patriarchal system that is invested in women's submission and fear of self-empowerment." [Wow. Great line. Doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's still a great line.]

...

"It is important to recall, too, that while guns can be a symbol of masculine aggression for some, and have indeed historically bolstered and maintained the traditional patriarchal framework of domination and submission in the American context, within this same framework, gun ownership has also historically signified personhood and status in American society (one of the reasons that guns [sic] owners have traditionally been white and male)." [Or maybe it's because most Americans are white, whether anyone likes that or not; and the males are the ones who use tools, like hammers and saws and microscopes and voltmeters and rocket engines and scalpels and guns. Ooh, look at the time - I have to get my guns and threaten the wife and kids - but maintaining that traditional patriarchal framework of domination shouldn't take an old hand like me too long - be right back ...]

...

"The point to make most resoundingly on this issue is that whereas patriarchy has indeed been sustained in part because of guns, even in the modern register, it is equally true that the patriarchy is sustained in part because of gun control." [So The Patriarchy is maintained by guns AND by gun control. This thesis doesn't leave much room for a sensible dose of Weberian falsifiability, does it?]

...

"But at the end of the day, a simple glance at statistical tables on who is most greatly affected by gun violence in the United States demonstrates that those who are most victimized are usually poor and disenfranchised, and are often young people of color. These are quantifiable facts that accurately reflect the nature of gun violence in American society, facts that neither shooters nor the NRA have seriously contested. The question, then, to put to shooters and the NRA is this: If guns are not responsible for this situation, what is?" [Perhaps the most malevolently outrageous statement in the entire book. Just to make a wild-assed guess, here, maybe it has a little something to do with a proclivity toward violence in a certain subset of the population of "young people of color". The homicide rate among urban blacks is a national embarrassment, but it's not easy for an honest observer to pin that on either whitey or the hardware.]

...

The author carries on at length about the "mythic history" of the West, without any real explanation of just what she thinks that mythic history is. Perhaps she believes that the authentic historical face of the West was Roy Rodgers - there's no way to tell from the text, though by this point a reader might suspect that it has something to do with white patriarchy. In any case, the author makes no serious argument that this mythos has anything to do with "America's Gun Culture," though I imagine it has rather a lot to do with the very tiny subset of that culture - one chapter of a SAA shooting/reenactment society - which the author uses as a very feeble proxy for the hundred million-plus American gun owners, most of whom have no interest at all in reenactment events.

Another unexplored peculiarity is the author's odd faith in the efficacy of gun registration. What exact benefits she fancies that this might have for law enforcement are never mentioned; apparently, she simply assumes that something wonderful would happen, but seems unable or unwilling to say just what that something might be.

Anyone who claims to be able to take over 200 pages of this stuff has certainly earned my skeptical admiration.

Hello--thanks for taking a look at Shooters. I wanted to respond to one of the reviews here, the one by Albatross, because it truly misrepresents the book, my position, and the gun enthusiasts I worked with. It makes dishonest claims about the book and the people described in it. I have responded at length in an "Author's Blog," which people can see by clicking on my name above. But in short, let me say this here:

This book is an anthropological study of gun enthusiasts--it's not a sociological study of all gun owners across America. The point was to do a small-scale, in-depth study of a group of people who love guns. The gun enthusiasts I met were highly intelligent, thoughtful people who had a lot of interesting things to say about guns. I respect them highly and agree with much of what they had to say to me. They argued--and I agree--that guns do not cause crime, that gun enthusiasts are not racist, evil people, that much gun control unfairly penalizes gun owners, and gun crime is a complex problem for which gun enthusiasts are often blamed. They own guns because they have a right to own guns, and because they believe it helps them be good American citizens.

This is what this book is about. Gun owners might not agree with everything I say, or all the ways I portray their position, and that's fine. But I wanted readers to understand what the book was about. Thanks.

This is an excellent ethnographic study of major aspects of American gun culture. Kohn is careful to point out that this is not a statistical study of gun owners and gun ownership, but rather an anthropological attempt to discover a native's view of "gun enthusiasm," or as Kohn herself writes, "to learn which issues and concepts are most important to gun enthusiasts." Contrary to what negative reviewers have to say here, often by taking quotes out of context or reversing their meaning entirely, Kohn delves into several aspects of gun enthusiasm that contradict the statistical stereotypical gun enthusiast. In fact, she explores the complex nature of gun ownership, generational differences between gun owners and the sharply divisive political issues that occur in public discussions about gun control. What I found most interesting was Kohn assertion that law abiding gun owners and gang members who possess guns share reasons for gun ownership: self-protection and self-empowerment. And, as a foreign scholar, Kohn places into broad context the constitutional conflict between Second and Fourth Amendment rights as policy makers either deal with or ignore the significant issue of gun violence in America.

this is a well written, fair and balanced ( really), insightful book that speaks to both pro and anti gun forces as well as to new and experienced shooters. She is the Massad Ayoob of ethnographers. it should be required reading for ccw classes. As a social psychologist who is also a shooter, I am impressed with her works scope and quality. Put this on your must read list.

This book provides a balanced perpective and a must read for anyone wanting to understand the realities behind the debate.