"Gun Culture 2.0" as a Two-Edged Sword
When an insight becomes a blindness
Most of my work on guns these past 13 years has been explaining and applying the idea of “Gun Culture 2.0” (that I stole from Michael Bane).
This includes over 1,000 posts at my Gun Culture 2.0 blog, over 100 videos on the “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel, several dozen podcast appearances, and other significant presentations and articles listed here.
As the concept has diffused, I’ve come to see it more and more as a two-edged sword.
On the one hand, “Gun Culture 2.0” is a useful heuristic device to understand how gun culture in the United States has evolved over time to center on self-defense and armed citizenship.
It unquestionably captures something real, as summarized in the diagram below and my article, “Gun Culture 2.0: Evolution and Contours of Defensive Gun Ownership in America.”
But, as I learned as an undergraduate studying sociology, “every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” and “every insight contains its own special kind of blindness” (according to literary critic Kenneth Burke).
The Gun Culture 2.0 concept is insightful, but also limited.
A simplistic reading obscures the reality that American gun culture has always been and continues to be internally diverse. Self-defense has always been a part of American gun culture, and guns remain practical tools, sporting goods, or recreational equipment for many.
I sometimes get so caught up in my research on defensive gun ownership and culture that I forget this essential point. Which is especially odd since my point of entry into gun culture was recreational and to this day I mostly shoot my guns for pleasure.
As I discuss in the conclusion to Gun Curious, the first of the five lessons I learned in my surprising journey inside American gun culture is: Shooting is fun.
In posts to follow I am going to explore some of the data I have been looking at that paints a more complex picture of contemporary gun ownership and culture. I’m also excited to tell the story of my first foray into the Gun Culture 1.0 practice of hunting.
So, stay tuned. And if you know of anyone else who might be interested in these ideas, please don’t hesitate to share the “Light Over Heat” Substack with them.
As I was reading the beginning of your post and looking at the figure, it seemed to me that it was inadequate in many ways, that while gun culture may have evolved as you noted, the arrows in the chart needed to point both ways. The boxes may highlight the predominant motivations for gun ownership over those periods - perhaps largely as a reflection of societal and cultural change - but each of those motivations have been there throughout. It is likely more insightful to see each of those boxes not as discrete, but as overlapping distributions.
A double-barreled shotgun