I have just finished reading the single dumbest, most pretentiously stupid article about gun violence which I have ever read. The article, ‘Camouflaged Collectives: Managing Stigma and Identity at Gun Events,’ is the handiwork of two faculty members at the University of Nevada, who visited a grand total of 3 gun shows where they observed how gun owners deal with the issue of ‘stigma,’ meaning negative concerns about the existence and use of guns.
The two women who wrote this nonsense go out of their way to assure everyone that their “relationship to guns is complicated. Neither of us supports taking away all guns from civilians, and neither of us supports unfettered rights to firearm ownership. [p. 120.] That’s complicated?
The lead author knows all about guns because she grew up within a few miles from where three mass shootings occurred in Colorado – Columbine, Aurora, Centennial. The second author is married to a United States Marine. So, they know how to analyze what they refer to as ‘gun culture,’ right?
” At each show, we observed some prevalent subgroups (such as hunters, veterans, survivalists, conceal and carry advocates, the NRA, historical artifact collectors, women, and machine gun enthusiasts).” [p. 121.]
What these two researchers forgot to mention because they don’t know anything about guns or gun owners, was that virtually all of those subgroups can be lumped together into one basic group: hobbyists. And because gun owners overwhelmingly own guns as a hobby, they are basically indifferent to the efforts to stigmatize them for engaging in this hobby, unless the stigmatizing strategy takes the form of preventing them from doing all the things that people who are active in any hobby like to do.
What is the single activity which attracts individuals who enjoy a particular hobby? Getting together with other like-minded hobbyists to talk about their hobby; buying, selling, or trading the items and paraphernalia whose ownership identifies someone as a hobbyist in that particular category, and forming social relations with other like-minded hobbyists which are sustained by attending social events which cater to the tastes and proclivities of a particular group.
Ask a gun owner why he likes guns and he’ll spout all the usual bromides about ‘2nd-Amendmwent rights,’ or ‘armed, self-defense,’ or some blab-blab-blab about the Constitution and freedom and liberty and justice for all.
What every gun owner immediately knows is that anyone who asks him to explain what he’s doing at a gun show isn’t a member of the gun-owning tribe, probably doesn’t feel comfortable around guns, and would be just as happy if all the privately-owned guns in America were scooped up tomorrow, loaded on some C-5 Galaxies, and dumped somewhere out at sea.
I love how the various gun-control organizations and gun-control researchers always make a point of saying how they’re not ‘against guns;’ they just want guns to be owned and used in a more responsible way. Which happens to be about the most insulting thing you can say to any gun owner, incidentally, whether you know it or not.
This may come as a great shock to the authors of this article and everyone else in Gun-control Nation who want to figure out some strategy which will somehow reduce the 100,000-plus injuries and deaths every year caused by the use of guns. Ready? There isn’t a single gun owner out there who doesn’t understand that his gun represents a serious risk to community safety and public health.
But when was the last time our species demonstrated any risk-aversion behavior at all? Is there one, single person under age 50 who didn’t sit in a classroom and listen to endless lectures about heathy eating? Is there one, single person in this country who wasn’t told again and again to avoid cigarettes? Is there one, single person in this country who wasn’t told about safe sex?
So, tell me, how come Americans keep getting fatter year after year, continue to buy smokes and vapes, and show up at the local health clinic with the teenage, pregnant girl in tow?
If the two academics who wrote this paper had the slightest understanding of how to conduct some valid research on the so-called gun ‘culture,’ what they should have done is spend some time at a couple of model train shows, or a model toy show, or a ham radio show.
They would see the same people at those shows that they saw at the gun shows.
But no academic journal would have been interested in publishing an article about the ‘stigma’ attached to model trains, because folks who don’t own model trains haven’t yet decided that such objects might represent a risk to community safety and health.
Tell that one to the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, okay?
Mar 09, 2023 @ 16:42:43
I read that article a while ago and came away as baffled and astounded as Michael did that such a paper got published. It is as if these two authors, who seem way outside their academic literacy zone, think that every gun owner is an ersatz Catholic who is self-flagellating over coping with the original sin, or as they say, having to “manage stigma” over one’s enjoyment of the shooting sports.
Maybe I missed it, but nowhere did I see in the references (at least half of which are not academic papers) citations to well studied sociology of gun culture, since what the authors are talking about is gun culture. No sign of David Yamane or of Jennifer Carlson, who, regardless of what anyone thinks of them, are well published. Jenn just won a MacArthur Genius Award for her study of gun owner sociology and her first important book came out in 2015. How can one publish something and not cite the literature in the field? (I checked the “revised manuscript”, not there, either).
I’ve been to plenty of gun shows, shooting matches, and am on the executive board of a 1200 member gun club. I’ve yet to see anyone looking for a confessional booth unless they scored sub par at the clay pigeons. Yes, some folks are annoyed with the gun control crowd, but not out of a sense of stigma.
Like that Lancet paper back in 2016, I wonder how this stuff gets past peer review. Except the peer reviewers are usually as clueless as the authors when it comes to guns or people who enjoy owning and shooting them.
Shaking my head…
Mar 09, 2023 @ 17:53:57
Well, it’s my understanding that Assistant Professors have several requirements that are expected of them. They must conduct their own research, and write a dissertation, publish articles & journals. I believe this fits that bill. Good for them, truth, accuracy, or even rightness has nothing to do with keeping their job. Again, follow the money.
Mar 10, 2023 @ 13:13:06
It is supposed to be *good* research. I once kicked a graduate student out of my laboratory for taking shortcuts on his mass spec analyses.
Trouble is, academic research on gun owners almost always has a negative spin; it is not uncommon for people to engage in a little bit of confirmation bias. So we gun owners are bad people, so we must have guilty consciences. Now, how do the authors prove their preconceived conclusions rather than impartially test a hypothesis? Like some other social science research, it is sometimes hard to tell a spoof from the real thing. Check this one out:
What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia
Three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions.
By Yascha Mounk
Atlantic Magazine, October 5, 2018
“Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.”