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In the white-hot debate over guns and gun control in America, there is one fact on which both sides in this increasingly polarized conflict can agree: Americans love their guns. 73 million Americans own guns. This translates to 1 gun owner out of every 4 citizens, many of whom, to account for the 250 million weapons currently in circulation, own several. While these facts are undisputed, a related but different question is endlessly contested: why do Americans so love their guns? Broadly speaking, what exactly is the appeal of the gun?
In this important work, Abigail Kohn immerses herself in the world of "shooters." Emphasizing that not all owners are necessarily enthusiasts, Kohn dispenses with the knee-jerk dogma and rhetoric that has too often passed for reportage to travel directly to the heart of American gun culture. Frequenting gun shops and shooting ranges, and devoting particular attention to those whose interest in weaponry extends beyond the casual, she captures in finegrained and often entertaining, yet always humane, detail how gun owners actually think and feel about their guns. Through her conversations--with cowboy action shooters at a regional match, sport shooters, hunters, with shooters of all ages and races--we hear of the "savage beauty" of a beautifully crafted long gun, of the powerful historical import owners attach to their guns, of the sense of empowerment that comes with shooting skill, and the visceral thrill of discharging a dangerous weapon. Kohn convincingly brings out the myths, norms, and beliefs of gun ownership, stressing how values such as individualism, toughness, and liberty are intricately linked with the gun and exploring how these core values connect pro-gun ideology to wider cultural and political concerns.
Cutting through the cliches that link gun ownership with violent, criminal subcultures and portray shooters as "gun nuts" or potential terrorists, Abigail Kohn provides us with a lively and untainted portrait of American gun enthusiasts.
- Sales Rank: #1596792 in Books
- Published on: 2004-06-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.00" h x 1.10" w x 9.30" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review
"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, youll wonder why no one has done such a study before."--Reason
Shooters constitutes a true break-through: readers will discover an even-handed analysis that examines the gun amid these American landscapes."--The Electric Review
"While academics continue to convince each other of their brilliant rationality in condemning guns and gun owners, Abby Kohn takes a courageous step to "the other side," beginning a discourse in which the massive appeal of guns can finally start to be appreciated. Her empirical investigation of the appeal of guns to enthusiasts is a long overdue movement in the only direction that can actually lead to policies that might reduce criminal violence."-- Jack Katz, author of Seductions of Crime
"Abigail Kohn's Shooters opens wide a window into the diverse and much misunderstood world of gun enthusiasts. Kohn provides a rich account of the subculture of the men and women who use guns recreationally as well as for self-defense. Her exploration of their motives and satisfactions is subtle and insightful. Moreover, Kohn deftly situates the current debate over guns in the context of the role guns have played in shaping American culture and character. Shooters deserves a wide audience. It may not change the hardened positions in the debate over guns, but no one will put this book down without having had to rethink their attitude toward guns and the men and women who use them."--Jan Dizard, co-editor of Guns in America
"Abigail Kohn brings a fresh, and extraordinarily well-informed, voice to the gun control debate. Her research into the world of gun enthusiasts lends depth and richness to this complex segment of American society, giving the lie to the often demeaning caricatures of gun-owners that tend to dominate the popular media. Kohn's concluding suggestions about ways both sides of the debate can advance beyond "good guy"/"bad guy" stereotypes are constructive, level-headed, and thought-provoking in the best sense of the term. A timely and important contribution to the national conversation about firearms and violence."--Mary Zeiss Stange, author of Woman The Hunter and Gun Women: Firearms And Feminism In Contemporary America
"The first anthropologist to study gun use in America, Abigail Kohn interrogates American gun culture in an even-handed analysis of what guns mean to Americans. Building on a study of gun enthusiasts, she explores the attraction of guns and examines the attitudes and approaches Americans take toward guns. This incisive, thoughtful work is a major contribution to Americas gun debate. It lays out the issues in a direct, easily accessible way. Shooters should be required reading for anyone concerned about guns, regardless of where they stand."--Gay Becker, author of Disrupted Lives and The Elusive Embryo
About the Author
Abigail Kohn is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney Law School. She has published articles in Reason Magazine as well as a number of academic journals.
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Must read for shooters and non-shooters.
By A Customer
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.
18 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Some criticisms are due
By Albatross
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 � 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.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A round of shooters
By Donal Fagan
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."
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