Welcome to this Q&A with Margaret Kelley, author of the new book, A Gun of Her Own: The Everyday Lives of Women Who Shoot.
As you will see in the course of this hour-long discussion, this is a very special book and Professor Kelley is a special author. Please buy a copy of her book to support good work on guns in America.
If you are not familiar with the Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club, I started it back in 2024 after my sister told me about a virtual book club she participated in with a friend in Ireland. I thought it would be fun to take books I have to read anyway for my research on guns and share the experience with people I know who are also interested in guns.
We read 4 books a year, two in the spring and two in the fall. Margaret Kelley’s is the 9th book we’ve read together.
The core panelists are a diverse group, ranging from someone who works for the Brady Campaign to someone on the NRA Board of Directors. We have other professors on the panel, but I’ve avoided having a majority of academics. Beyond the panel, people can join us as observers, listening along and engaging in the conversation via the chat function. And we often have great written chats paralleling our spoken book discussions.
We typically have 3 meetings on the Zoom webinar platform to discuss each book and then sometimes have a 4th session like this one for a Q&A with the author.
Previous author Q&A sessions include:
Kellie Carter Jackson on her book We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
Ryan Davis on Why It’s OK to Own a Gun
Our next book will be The Walking Wounded: Festering and Ricocheting Trauma After Gun Violence by Los Angeles native and University of Toronto sociologist Jooyoung Lee. The book, to be released on April 20th, is based on his field research among survivors of gun violence in Philadelphia. Our dates are TBD so stay tuned.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our conversation with Margaret Kelley.
Thanks for reading to the end. If you are interested in supporting this work financially — for example, subsidizing the cost of my field research on civilian gun training — please consider using the button below to become a paid subscriber to this Substack, or you can make periodic or ongoing contributions through my Buy Me a Coffee patron page or PayPal.
