OSD 227: Gun orientalism

The New York Times treks into the heart of darkness.

Once a year or so, the New York Times puts a reporter on a river boat to journey deep into the heart of darkness. Secluded in those exotic lands lives the American gun owner, a beguiling but ultimately primitive creature. The NYT reports back on what it finds.

The previous example was a 2022 piece on gun marketing, which we wrote a Twitter thread about. This past Friday, the paper ran a piece titled “Why Some Americans Buy Guns”.

It’s a good question. But as David Yamane notes, instead of addressing it with curiosity, the piece “embodies quite well ‘The Standard Model of the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership’.” Yamane identifies that “standard model” as the way that most researchers approach the study of guns, and he defines the model’s attributes like so:

1. It recognizes Gun Culture 2.0.

2. It discounts the need for and utility of guns for defense.

3. It holds that the opposite is true of owning guns: “In contrast, bringing a gun into one’s home clearly makes it more dangerous: A gun in the home substantially increases the likelihood that a household member will die by a gun, whether by homicide, suicide, or accidental shootings.”

4. Therefore, defensive gun ownership is not rational but irrational. It is irrational both in a psychological sense that motivations for gun ownership are driven by fear instead of the reality of need and utility (Point 2) and in a utility maximization sense that the risks are greater than the rewards (Point 3). Therefore, claiming self-defense as a reason for gun ownership is actually a rationalization. In reality, something else is motivating defensive gun ownership.

5. Scholars from sociology and political science define the something else as:

   1. Downward economic mobility,

   2. Stereotypical/toxic masculinity, or

   3. Racism/racial resentment

6. Psychologists define the something else as a coping mechanism.

Back in “OSD 135: A sociologist walks into a B.A.R.”, we quoted Yamane’s synopsis of the problem:

A quarter-century ago in 1995, sociologist James Wright included among his “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America” that “gun ownership is normative, not deviant, behavior across vast swaths of the social landscape”. The idea that guns are normal and normal people use guns may seem common-sense to those of us gathered here, but it's actually a dramatic departure from the standard social scientific approaches that view guns and gun owners as deviant, and research literatures that are dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. This theme is so constant that the New York Times ran a headline just last week declaring, “Gun Research Is Suddenly Hot”. In fact, the story was about how research on gun violence is suddenly hot. Research on the lawful use of guns is as cold as ever.

So it goes in this latest piece from Friday.

The piece starts with “Who started buying guns?” And that section takes a just-the-facts approach, noting the influx of first-time buyers in the past few years and the demographic shift in that group:

Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021.

Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated.

The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic).

From there it gets into why they bought guns, and that’s where the gun orientialism comes in. There’s a run through of familiar tropes, for example the admonition that bringing a gun into your house makes you ipso facto less safe:

“You are much more likely to be a victim of that gun than to successfully protect yourself,” Ms. Burd-Sharps said, adding that gun owners “are tragically not understanding the risks.”

There’s also a good mention of the under-discussed danger of someone with suicidal ideation often not having an easy way to give their guns to someone else for safe keeping.

But the showpiece is a section titled “To some, guns bring comfort.” It recaps an as-yet unpublished study on the topic:

Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to know whether firearms provided similar comfort to gun owners, serving as a sort of psychological security blanket.

“The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” he said. “Why would somebody want to take this really dangerous thing and bring it into their lives?”

He recruited college students, some of whom came from gun-owning households, to participate in a study in which they would be subjected to very mild electric shocks (he likened the sensation to static electricity).

While the shocks were administered, participants were given a friend’s hand, a metal object or a prop that looked and felt like a pistol but had no firing mechanism. For participants who grew up around guns, holding the prop that resembled a firearm provided the greatest comfort, Dr. Buttrick said.

“If you came from a gun-owning household, just having a gun present makes you feel more at ease,” said Dr. Buttrick, whose study has not yet been published.

For participants unfamiliar with guns, the opposite was true: They became more anxious when holding a replica of a firearm. “If you didn’t come from a gun-owning household, having a gun present made the shock worse,” he said. “You were more on edge.”

“Why would somebody want to take this really dangerous thing and bring it into their lives?” is the animating principle here. Rather than an open-minded inquiry into why people do something, it’s a baffled inquest into why they’d do something so dumb.

Ironically, that last paragraph about the study’s results also explains why this was the mode of inquiry. Guns are scary if you’re not used to them. So of course gun culture seems to outsiders like primitive superstition — if your only cultural exposure to guns is action movies and news headlines, there’s no reason guns wouldn’t be scary. You’ve never been exposed to them as anything other than “this really dangerous thing”, so why would you think it could be any other way?

If you want to spread gun rights, that’s actually good news. The problem is simple, it’s just lack of exposure. So the solution is simple too: expose people to positive experiences with guns. After all, guns are fun. Nobody goes to the anti-gun range. Focus on making sure people have a safe and fun time with guns around you, and gun culture will keep spreading.

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This week’s links

Maryland Supreme Court imposes limits on ballistics evidence used to link guns to crimes

In Maryland, firearms experts will no longer be allowed to testify that a specific gun fired a specific bullet, the state’s highest court ruled in an opinion published Tuesday.

Authored by Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader of the Supreme Court of Maryland, the opinion imposes limits in the courtroom on the practice known as firearm “tool mark” analysis. The forensic technique postulates that machines used to make guns leave tiny imperfections on their components, and that those components imprint unique marks on ammunition — composed of softer metal — when fired.

Until now, it was commonplace for firearms examiners — usually employed in police crime labs — to testify that a gun recovered by law enforcement fired bullets or used casings found at a crime scene, if they believed that to be true based on their observations under a microscope.

But four of seven justices on the state Supreme Court found that the scientific methodology is not reliable enough to allow examiners to testify that a particular gun fired a particular bullet. Examiners can, however, testify “that patterns and markings on bullets are consistent or inconsistent with those on bullets fired from a particular known firearm,” the opinion said.

Dreams of the Future 2nd Amendment

A new blog about a speculative future gun culture. A work of fiction set in the future.

Polenar Tactical ran a brutality-style shooting competition…

…with a bolt-action AR.

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