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Why Are Americans Buying All Those Guns?

May 12, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              I just got done listening to an hour-long interview with an academic, David Yamane, who considers himself to be uniquely situated in the gun debate because he claims to be the only scholar who is interested in what he refers to as the ‘sociology’ of gun ownership. He’s not a criminologist, he’s not a public health researcher, he’s doing something very different from the academics in both those fields. He’s trying to figure out why, in many part of the country, guns are considered a ‘normal part of life.’

              What he believes he has figured out since he started the sociological investigation into guns is that roughly one-third of all Americans haven’t figured out how they feel about guns. One-third of Americans are strongly against guns; one-third are strongly in favor guns; and one-third, according to Professor Yamane’s sociological research, haven’t made up their minds one way or the other. Yamane explains this breakdown in an interview that you can access right here.

              This division of opinion about gun ownership, according to Yamane, explains the tremendous upsurge in guy sales that has occurred alongside the spread of Covid-19. Yamane argues that the demand for guns reflects not just current gun owners buying more guns, but members of the ‘I haven’t made up my mind about guns’ group buying their first gun.

              Like everyone else who writes about guns, I have also been trying to figure out who is buying all those guns over the past year. And since Yamane claims to be a scholar and a researcher, I assumed that somewhere I would find the research he has conducted to not only divide Americans into three groups in terms of what they think about guns, but I would also be able to look at his research which explains why so many new gun owners are buying their first guns.

              Unless Yamane has updated but not yet posted his academic CV on the Wake Forest website, which is where he happens to teach, his last scholarly article was published in 2018, which is well before the ‘Chinese flu’ came ashore.  He did publish an article in 2020 that covered the shift in gun advertisements in American Rifleman magazine from hunting to self-defense guns, but this article didn’t identify who was even reading those ads, never mind going out and buying all those self-defense guns.

              So how does Yamane know that the 2020 spike in gun sales can be explained because one-third of Americans who previously did or maybe didn’t like guns, all of a sudden decide that they wanted to own a gun? 

              First, Yamane went to some gun shows where he met people who told him they were buying their first gun. Then he accessed a really reliable source, the gun-industry’s trade group, the NSSF, which estimates “that 40% of all gun purchasers in 2020 did not currently own guns.”

              That’s how a tenured academic does sociological research which he claims is based on the demographics of people who buy guns? By walking around a couple of guns shows and then repeating an ‘estimate’ by an outfit which promotes the gun industry?

              Again, I’m not saying that Yamane’s right, or that Yamane’s wrong. But if he really wants to conduct some serious and valid research on what he calls Gun Culture 2.0, particularly on whether people previously uninvolved with this culture are now buying guns, there’s a very simple way to go about conducting such work.

              All Yamane has to do is walk into a few gun shops and tell the owner he would like to take a look at the store’s collection of 4473 forms. These forms contain the date of birth and the gender of every person who ever bought a gun in that store. You can even get the buyer’s height and weight. Most gun shops also keep their record in Excel, so Yamane could do a word search and quickly figure out how many customers bought guns in that shop for the first time.

              I’m still waiting for David Yamane or any other academic scholar to learn a little something about the gun industry before they go out to do their research.  As always, I’m happy to help them out.

Buy on Amazon. The Deadliest Pathogen: Guns and Homicide (Guns in America Book 10) – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

A New Gun Group To Protect Gun ‘Rights.’

May 3, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 6 Comments

              Last year I began giving out an award for the dumbest gun law proposed in any state. The winner was Matt Gaetz, who proposed a law requiring owners of commercial spaces which didn’t allow guns to compensate any customer who was gunned down because a bad guy walked into the space with a gun, but no good guy was allowed to carry a gun.

              I am now starting a new contest, which will give an award to whomever comes up with the dumbest idea for creating an organization that will promote gun ‘rights,’ something that I see happening more frequently, given the apparent demise of the NRA.

              And the award this year goes to – The Center for Gun Rights and Responsibility (CGRR) founded by Dan Gross and Rob Pincus, an effort kicked off at a rally in front of the Capitol in 2019, attended it was said by ‘thousands’ of folks, even though the video of the event showed many less people milling about.

              What does the CGRR want to accomplish?  You can read all about the group in an op-ed published last month by Gross in (where else?) The New York Times, where Gross, the ex-head of the Brady Campaign, explains why what he and Pincus want to accomplish will work because it will “end the culture war” on guns.

              Pincus, you should know, considers himself to be a champion of not only the ‘right’ to own a gun, but the ‘right’ to carry the gun around. He cloaks himself in the unquestioned mantle of being a gun ‘educator,’ because who would ever question the value of ‘education,’ right? 

              Pincus earns his living by selling what he refers to as ‘gun safety’ videos which allegedly educate gun owners how to walk around with a gun but only to use it in a ‘safe’ way. So-called gun trainers like Pincus have been inventing totally worthless courses on armed, self-defense since Jeff Cooper first published Principles of Personal Defense back in 1972. Here are the first two sentences of that book: “Some people prey upon other people. Whether we like it or not, this is one of the facts of life.”

              To Coop’s credit, he makes it clear right at the outset that people who don’t want to protect themselves with armed response have no reason to read his book. And most of the folks who have bought and read this book (like me) don’t necessarily always go walking around with a gun.

              But for those who do view human relations in terms of predators and prey, they will find plenty of fun and games in the videos sold by Rob Pincus and other scam trainers just like him. There’s a reason why more than 125,000 people get The United States Concealed Carry Association’s magazine every month.

              Is it just coincidence that Dan Gross and Rob Pincus began ramping up their new approach to ending the gun culture war when the NRA began to fold its tent? I doubt it. If anyone believes there’s a whole bunch of Gun-nut Nation members just waiting to find ‘common ground’ with the tree-huggers on the other side of the gun debate, they are either delusional, totally unaware of how gun owners think about gun control, or both. Probably both.

              I conducted a survey of more than 1,500-gun owners and non-gun owners to determine what types of gun laws were considered effective on both sides to reduce gun violence. More than 60% of all respondents supported CAP laws, more than 70% supported universal background checks.

              Guess what? More than 50% of all respondents favored national concealed-carry and the same percentage supported eliminating gun-free zones. Since roughly 40% of American households contain guns, even some people who don’t own guns support gun laws that are the priorities of the gun ‘rights’ crowd. You can download an analysis of this survey right here.

              Woodrow Wilson’s VP, Thomas Marshall, said “What this country needs is a good, five-cent cigar.” Let’s add to that statement what Dan Gross and Rob Pincus are saying about the gun ‘culture war.’

Read it for free on Amazon: The Deadliest Pathogen: Guns and Homicide (Guns in America Book 10) – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com..

Is There A Gun Culture?

September 13, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 3 Comments

              Back in 2017 a group of gun researchers got together at the University of Arizona and held a symposium for what they referred to as an “open, interdisciplinary debate surrounding the social life of guns.” Following the get-together, three of the participants – Jennifer Carlson, Kristin Goss and Harel Shapira – edited the papers and published them last year in a volume, Gun Studies – Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy and Practice.

              I suspect that I am the only person who is going to review this collection, and for that matter, I may also be the only person who actually bought and read the book in printed form, as the paperback edition costs nearly $50, with the e-book running $45. But how many times do you find articles in the same collection written by opposing scholars like Gary Kleck and David Kopel on the one hand, versus Frank Zimring and Phil Cook on the other? So what the hell, in the interests of academic diversity, why not blow a few bucks?

              The editors state that the purpose of this effort “promote empirical and theoretical understandings of how people live with, experience, and think about guns in their day-to-day lives.” To that end, the volume contains 18 scholarly contributions covering “the evolution of American gun culture from recreation to self-protection; the changing dynamics of the pro-gun and pro-regulation movements; the deeply personal role of guns as sources of both injury and security; and the relationship between gun-wielding individuals, the state, and social order in the United States and abroad.”

              What is culture? We usually define it as a set of beliefs held in common by a group of individuals which shape how these individuals think and behave about certain kinds of things. It is also a set of mental perceptions that are consciously transmitted from older to newer members of the group. So how did these scholars go about trying to figure this out?

              There’s an article about what kind of gun advertising appears in gun magazines; another two articles about how the gun industry develops marketing narratives to sell assault rifles and handguns; another article about marketing research techniques; several articles about advocacy groups both pro and con; several articles about gun culture in other countries which I didn’t bother to read; and various other research efforts on police shootings, gun injuries and guns used in suicide events.

              The editors state that together, these articles examine “difficult and timely questions through the lens of social practice, marketing and commerce, critical theory, political conflict, public policy and criminology. That’s quite a list.

              Unfortunately, there’s only one thing entirely missing from these articles, and its absence makes me wonder how this collection can be described as a contribution to ‘gun culture’ at all. What’s missing is any research which uses as its source or sources contact with individuals who actually own guns.

              I own a little gun shop in Massachusetts.  Between 2001 and 2014 I sold guns to more than 7,000 people who came into my shop.  I also sold ammunition, optics, and other crap to maybe another several thousand individuals who owned guns. I didn’t need to read a single one of those 18 articles to tell me how, what, and why individuals own and use guns.

              Of the millions of guns that were sold between January and August of this year, at least 75% of them were bought in small, independent retail shops just like mine. You’ll find a gun shop like my shop in just about every small town outside the big, urban metropolitan centers throughout the United States.

              Take a 300-mile drive on old U.S. Route 20, which was the major east-west road connecting Boston to Portland until I-90 was built. Once you get 50 miles away from Boston, there’s a small, slightly decaying  urban center about every 20 miles, and there’s a gun shop in just about every one of those towns.

              Want to learn about gun culture? Spend a day in some of those gun shops and just listen to what the customers say. Don’t conduct any interviews, don’t ask them why they are buying another gun, don’t ask what they think about their 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Just listen to how they talk to each other about their guns.

Is There Something Called ‘Gun Culture?’

May 20, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              I went to my first gun show in 1976 in Charlotte, NC.  Since then, I have probably been to 200 gun shows in maybe 20 states.  I like gun shows. I wander around, talk to a few dealers and gun nuts, maybe buy something I don’t need, always have a coffee and a bite to eat.

              Do you suppose that going to these shows makes me part of gun ‘culture?’ I hear that phrase all the time on both sides of the gun debate. Gun-nut Nation uses it to set themselves apart from folks who don’t own or like guns; my friends in the gun-control gang use the same phrase when describing their fears about whether or not gun violence will increase.

              I happen to think that the phrase has about as much to do with reality as the veritable man in the moon. The word ‘culture’ means a set of beliefs and traditions held in common by a group of people which define how these individuals think, act, and behave. Know what gun owners have in common? They went out at some point and bought themselves a gun.

              I have had retail gun stores in three different states. I opened my first shop in South Carolina in 1978, my second shop in New York in 1985 and my third shop in Massachusetts in 1991. Together, I probably sold guns to more than 12,000 customers and if I ever asked any of those customers why they  just bought a gun, I can guarantee you the answer would have been, “because I like guns.”

              Now if a GVP-minded gun researcher happened to be in my shop and asked one of my customers the same question, the response would have been something having to do with needing a gun for self-defense, or wanting to maintain 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ or some other answer that would appear to reflect at least a minute’s thought. After all, the guy who just plunked down six hundred bucks isn’t about to tell a gun researcher that he just spent that kind of dough for the hell of it, right? And he doesn’t want to look like a fool because he knows that such a question would only be asked by someone who doesn’t own guns. If you believe that a gun guy would ask another gun guy why he’s buying a gun, then you don’t have the faintest idea about anything having to do with guns.

              If I went into a shoe store to buy myself a pair of Merrell shoes, would anyone say that I was part of ‘shoe culture?’ Of course not. I buy Merrell shows because I like the way they look and feel.  I need another pair of Merrell shoes like I need a hole in my head, but I like Merrell shoes. And the fact that Merrell shoes cost more than other brands of similar shoes, so what?

              Know those guys who have been tromping around lately protesting lock-down orders with their AR-15’s strapped to their backs?  They’ll tell you that the gun is what keeps them free. And that’s what they really believe, or at least they say it’s what they believe. But those jerks aren’t part of any ‘gun culture’ because if they didn’t own a gun, they would still stand in front of the government building and wave one of those stupid, ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags.

              About 20 miles from where I live, there’s a fairground that’s the location of a gun show every three or four months. It’s also the location of a model train show twice a year. Are the folks who go to the model train show part of some kind of ‘model train’ culture? No. They’re simply men and boys who like model trains.

              And that’s guns. Men and boys like guns. If the two sides in the gun debate would stop taking themselves so seriously, they might sit down and have a cogent discussion about how to reduce the injuries caused by all those guns.

Guns And American Culture Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean.

June 28, 2018

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , 1 Comment

The Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA is currently running an exhibition, Gun Country, comprised of photos, paintings, drawings and other visual artifacts about guns. The museum refers to this collection as showing ‘America’s fascination with the gun,’ but a staff writer for the art blog Hyperallergic, Seph Rodney, has decided that what this exhibition really shows is that “guns are a principal symbol of our sense of masculinity and power for our culture.”

addison            Even though it has become a watchword of the gun-control movement that America’s love affair with guns is a function of the degree to which our society is still controlled by power-hungry, white men (read: Donald Trump), I think that what Rodney is saying happens to be a load of crap. And the reason I say that is because if America’s socio-economic-political structures reflect the dominance of white males who use guns to symbolize their masculinity and strength, how come the rest of Western civilization isn’t also awash in guns?

Oh, I forgot. We are the only Western country where white men settled a whole frontier armed with their trusty six-shooters and Winchester repeating rifles, so guns play a special role in our culture and historical consciousness that they don’t play anywhere else.  Another load of crap.

In 1934, then-Attorney General Homer Cummings proposed the first piece of federal legislation to regulate the ownership of small arms, a bill which became law and is known as the National Firearms Act, a.k.a. the NFA.  Given the existence of the 2nd Amendment, Cummings wanted a law that would make it legal for Americans to own guns, as long as these weapons were not too dangerous for civilian use. Hence, the appearance of the NFA list of ‘prohibited’ weapons (machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, silencers and a few other things) which still exists today.

What is not generally known about the NFA was that Cummings initially put handguns on the ‘prohibited’ list. These particular products were then removed from the NFA list before the bill became law. Now it is usually assumed that the decision to let Americans have free access to handguns (thus creating the contemporary problem known as ‘gun violence’) was because of successful lobbying by the NRA, as well as the genuine love and devotion that our culture promoted regarding the existence and use of guns.  More crap.

The reason why the U.S. government didn’t disarm the civilian population in 1934, whereas other Western governments disarmed their civilian populations shortly after World War II by copying the NFA but putting handguns and semi-automatic rifles on the ‘prohibited’ list, is because America was the only industrialized country whose political system hadn’t been threatened by armed, mobilized, mass protests from the Left.  We were the only advanced country whose labor movement wasn’t tied to revolutionary Socialist and Communist political parties; we were the only advanced country which never suffered from violent, countrywide work stoppages and strikes; we were the only advanced country in which personal ownership of weapons wasn’t ever considered to be a threat to the security of the state.

What I find so funny and ironic about the dopes walking around with an AR slung over their shoulder and tell us that it’s the gun that keeps them ‘free,’ is that these are the same jerks who tell you that they need a gun to protect themselves from the ‘tyranny’ of government, except that the current government adopts and promotes social and economic policies which happen to be based on what that same government believes will be supported by the more guns = more freedoms crowd.

The first and last time a President believed that protestors outside the White House represented a threat to law and order was when the President was named Nixon and remember what happened to him. Now maybe the idiot in the Oval Office also represents a threat to the Constitution,  and if so, he’s a much bigger threat to the country than all the noise and nonsense coming from the NRA.

 

 

Sign Up To Take This Survey.

April 23, 2018

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SOcial gUn cuLture

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Khalil Spencer: The Gun War Is Joined.

February 26, 2018

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I’ve said before that the firearms community should be involved in firearms violence prevention. Two reasons come to mind. One, we know more about firearms than the typical non-shooter. Two, we need to engage and try to reduce the harm out there while moderating the discussion. Unfortunately, the loudest voices are not always the most careful ones. While some of the gun violence prevention folks tend to suggest ideas that many gun owners loathe, the 2nd Amendment purists are typically the Party of No, regardless of the question.

spencer2As a result of the latest high school shooting in Florida, all Hell is breaking loose on the “gun prevention”, so to speak, side. An example is the Sunday editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican, which pretty much threw everything the Editorial Board could think of at gun owners and then tossed the kitchen sink along for good measure. Given the blood-soaked circumstances, who can blame them? Among the suggestions are”…bans on assault weapons, limits on high-capacity magazines, better background checks and numerous other laws…an amendment to the state constitution removing the prohibition on local governments passing any gun restrictions, or even rewriting a provision upholding gun rights…” A law abiding citizen who has never raised a gun in anger might find himself or herself suddenly on the wrong side of the law simply by virtue of having bought a gun with a 12 rd magazine. Its not even about “common sense gun laws” but about retaliation for the NRA and GOP’s intransigence and, as many Progressives would like to do, make many if not most of today’s modern, high capacity semiauto guns (see below) scarce and inconvenient to own.

But protecting the 2A, and the state constitution’s analog, from emasculation should not have as a price tag more and more bullet-spattered schools, theatres, and churches. Something is going seriously wrong in the country and its not just one issue but as our Los Alamos Catholic priest said yesterday, a host of variables are responsible of which the firearm is the enabler, even if the culture is the ultimate culprit. As anyone who reads knows, we have always had guns. Lots of them. Actual household ownership rates are probably down even as sheer numbers have gone up (based on recent research). What’s changed?

When I was a teen, I legally carried a box of 22 Long Rifle ammo to school in my book bag as I was a member of the Rifle Club. One could mail order a rifle or walk into the local K Mart and see racks and racks of military surplus, “NRA-Fair-Good-Excellent” rifles that could be had for a few greenbacks. Indeed, these could be had without telling your life story to the FBI’s NICS system as these were pre-background check days.  Most of those surplus guns were purchased to be modified to be sporting and hunting rifles. We didn’t have endless mass shootings by me-too youths, or self-styled militias of the right and left parading under banners of intolerance. Its the culture that has changed, and in part, the kinds of guns flying off the shelves reflects the change in culture. Guns used to be primarily for sport and secondarily for guarding the hearth. Nowdays, Gun Culture 2.0, as Wake Forest Sociology Professor David Yamane calls it, is about self defense and even the shooting sports reflect that, i.e., NRA Precision Pistol has given way to International Defensive Pistol Association matches. The look and function of the guns follows the paradigm shift. Black rifles, high capacity or pocket pistols, and short barrelled shotguns with only a pistol grip to make them street legal replace Grandpa or Dad’s Model 70 Winchester or Smith and Wesson revolver.When you are planning for a personal defense moment, more bullets are better. My concern, articulated here before, is that Maslow’s Hammer has become, in part due to this paradigm-shift in gun culture, Maslow’s Handgun.

I think those of us who enjoy firearms need to hustle over to the Middle of the Road and help find some solutions. For the life of me, I don’t know why an immature nineteen year old with emotional problems should be able to walk out of a gun store with a weapon designed to control a battlefield, no questions, other than the innocuous NICS ones, asked. As I have said before, anyone old enough to get a driver’s license can drive. Not everyone is allowed to drive a Freightliner. If I want to drive a Freightliner, I owe it to society to show I can handle it safely.

As far as armed teachers and the like? Aside from the fact that teachers are underpaid as it is while not being asked to get into firefights with heavily armed terrorists, surprise matters. Pearl Harbor showed that its not enough to be armed. A school shooting is a surprise attack, and will succeed just as the Japanese naval air forces succeeded. Sure, someone can eventually shoot back to limit the damage but meanwhile, people are getting shot. More guns is not the answer. More sanity, perhaps, is.

What Would Happen If Americans Didn’t Own Guns?

June 28, 2016

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The NRA keeps saying that if HRC is elected, the first thing she will do is confiscate all the guns.  So that got me thinking.  What would happen if the guns were taken away?  Or to put it more specifically, what would happen if America implemented licensing for gun ownership similar to what exists in the rest of the OECD?  Such a system would mean the immediate disappearance of assault weapons, the gradual disappearance of small, concealable handguns and the remaining firearms (true sporting rifles and shotguns) being regulated to varying degrees. The number of guns manufactured and imported each year would drop by more than half, but the revenue loss of roughly $13 billion in a GDP of almost $18 trillion would hardly be noticed at all.

conference-program-pic            On the other hand, what would the absence of guns mean to public health and crime?  As to the former, there would probably be some drop in the 20,000 suicides that occur each year with guns, but the evidence also suggests that there would be a ‘substitution’ effect, meaning that many, if not most suicide-prone individuals would find other means for ending their lives.  As for unintentional injuries from guns, as the total number of guns in civilian hands declined, so would the number of injuries, but the medical costs of gun accidents is less than .001% of the medical costs racked up each year for treating all unintentional injuries, hardly a major component in driving costs of medical care.

As for intentional gun injuries, for the sake of argument, let’s place annual gun assaults midway between FBI and CDC, or roughly 100,000.  That’s still only 15% of all serious assaults which might not be committed if guns couldn’t be used, but I suspect that the ‘substitution’ effect here would also render the difference less, because our overall assault rate is not much different than average assault rates throughout the OECD.  As for the argument that our homicide rate would be much lower if we didn’t have easy access to guns, this is perhaps true.  But in 2014 the U.S. still racked up almost 5,000 homicides without guns, substantially higher than most of the OECD.

In all of the arguments being made about strictly regulating guns however, what seems to be missed is the effects of gun absence on gun owners themselves.  Because there are somewhere around 30 million households that contain legal guns, and of the 60 million or so legal gun owners, at least 5 million define their life-styles, the social milieu, their culture and cultural beliefs in terms of guns. So what happens to these folks and their everyday existence if they can’t have access to guns?

When I was growing up in the 1950s, I had lots of toy guns but what I really took pride in was my collection of Lionel trains.  The trains and the room-wide track display eventually disappeared, both for me and for just about everyone else who loved model trains.  By the time my children were old enough to play with model trains, they were sitting in front of a television set playing Nintendo and collecting video games.

For that matter, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I don’t recall all that many cars on I-91 going towards New Hampshire and Vermont with kayaks on top or backpacks and tents behind.  Times change, styles change, leisure activities change – the market will always find a way to satisfy our desire to accumulate objects we really want but don’t need.

Which is exactly the problem with guns.  More than 30,000 people die and another 70,000+ are injured each year because Americans have free access to something they really don’t need.  So the issue of how and why to regulate this product doesn’t come down to numbers at all.  It comes down to a moral imperative which says that we should not sanction the use of violence in the ordinary course of human affairs – neither violence towards ourselves or towards anyone else.

Want More Americans To Buy Guns? Put One In Everyone’s Hands

June 2, 2015

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Back in 1835, the French Chronicler Alexis de Tocqueville published his remarkable portrait of our country, Democracy in America, which retains an extraordinary clarity and insightful awareness to the present day. Based largely on conversations between the author and Americans he met as he went hither and yon, the two-volume work captured much of what we still believe makes America an exceptional country both in terms of word and deed.

Two things that made America exceptional, according to de Tocqueville, was our individualism and our penchant for violence, both of which he believed reflected the degree to which most of America in the 1830s was still largely a frontier zone.  What connected individualism and violence, according to de Tocqueville, was the apparent willingness of Americans to settle disputes without recourse to any government authority, and to use weapons to settle disputes, in particular knives and guns. This strikingly American cultural trait remains true to this day, expressed most directly in the current argument about guns. Stop and think about it: gun-control advocates have established a clear link between elevated homicide rates and access to guns; pro-gun advocates claim that the risks of gun ownership are far outweighed by the degree to which guns protect us from crime. Take your pick either way, the fact is that as regards the current argument about guns, what de Tocqueville understood about American culture in the 1830s appears to be alive and well in the present day.

pink gun                Ultimately what is going to resolve the debate about guns and gun violence is how guns fit into our overall culture, and right now on this issue America seems to be split.  On the one hand for the first time a clear majority of Americans believe that guns keep us safe.  On the other hand, despite the upward spike of gun sales since you-know-who moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the percentage of American homes with guns sitting around continues to decline.  And believe it or not, I believe that these two seemingly contradictory trends will not only continue, but will become even more pronounced over time. Why do I say this?

First, the demographics that are averse to gun ownership will continue to drive the population profile of America as a whole, by which I mean millennials, single women, racial and ethnic minorities, new immigrants, in other words, everyone except older White men.  And White males between ages 30 – 60 still own most of the guns. A recent poll of registered voters in New York State showed that virtually all the groups except older White men overwhelmingly supported the restrictive new SAFE Act that will, at least in the case of New York, no doubt result in fewer guns.

At the same time, the media and popular culture continues to promote guns and gun violence as a basic theme.  Of the ten most popular movies released this year, half involve multiple shooting scenes with good guys getting shot by bad guys or the other way around.  So Hollywood still believes that we respond to settling arguments with guns.

Remember when the local bowling alley was a place where the family would spend Sunday afternoon because the backyard barbeque was rained out?  To be sure, there were always a few lanes being used by serious bowlers who were practicing for their next league match, but most of us went bowling just to have some fun.  I think the idea of shooting ranges becoming destinations for family fun may be coming into its own; an operation like Colonial Shooting is a far cry from the nasty and overly-serious range environments that cater to the hard-core shooting crowd.  If the NRA would stop taking itself so seriously and stop trying to convince everyone that they need to walk around with a gun, the industry might actually begin to attract all those outliers whose natural curiosity will motivate them to shoot guns even if they have no interest in owning one.  And you never know, put a gun in someone’s hands and they might actually want to keep it there.

 

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