What Academics Consistently Miss When Examining America’s Gun Culture

Fourteen years into my personal and sociological journey through American gun culture, I am constantly reminded of how difficult it is to find scholarship on everyday firearm use. Despite the longstanding presence of a robust legal gun culture, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence.

To be fair, criminologists study crime, and public health scholars study pathology. Sociologists tend to study what’s wrong with society rather than what’s right. We teach courses on “Social Problems” and “Deviant Behavior”; the unproblematic or nondeviant often remain unexamined. Studying the positive aspects of guns and of the communal life organized around their use falls out-side sociology’s analytic wheelhouse.

I understand the prevailing disciplinary view, to a point. Guns are, in fact, lethal tools. This is “a feature, not a bug,” as tech people say. Firearm lethality explains why, although the United States has only a moderate overall suicide rate compared to other developed countries, it has a firearm suicide rate that substantially exceeds these other nations. When people attempt suicide using guns, they die in up to 90% of cases. Firearm lethality also explains why, although the United States is not exceedingly violent or criminal, its criminal violence is more deadly.

The reality that 80 to 90 millionAmerican civilians own an estimated 400 million of these lethal tools means that guns will play a role in negative outcomes like suicide and homicide. But understanding the fun and community that can emerge from the responsible use of firearms is an important part of the story, too—and one that sociologists have neglected to tell.

In my analysis, guns resist simple categorization as either universally good or bad, dangerous or protective, fun or frightening. Instead, they are best understood through a “kaleidoscopic view,” considering the issue from multiple angles. To be sure, this requires maintaining a clear-eyed understanding of the lethal capabilities of firearms. But an exclusive focus on firearms-related harms fails to acknowledge—much less appreciate—the complex social realities of guns. As with other “serious leisure” activities, we need to appreciate the individual and communal pleasures associated with shooting—the pleasures that led me to fall for guns.

— David Yamane in How I Fell for Guns