What Academia Gets Right and Wrong About Guns
Part 1 of 3: The Dominant Paradigm
As noted yesterday, I recently attended a one-day, invitation-only symposium called “Shared Targets: Supporting Collaboration across Gun Experts and Firearms Researchers” at Arizona State University.
The event was off the record to encourage candor, but that obviously doesn’t prevent me from sharing my own contribution to the event.
I was one of five attendees asked to speak for 5-8 minutes on the topic of “what academia gets right and wrong about guns.”
I ended up writing one version of what academia gets right and two versions of what it gets wrong. Following is the first part of my presentation on what academia gets right. In the coming days I will post both versions of my thoughts on what it gets wrong.
The event was co-sponsored by the Bringing Research and Innovation into the Debate on Guns in Society (BRIDGS) Initiative at Arizona State Univeristy and the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. I’m grateful for their support of this important gathering of people with diverse views on the issue.
“What Academia Gets Right and Wrong”
David Yamane
18 November 2025
Preface
Good morning. I hope everyone got their finger lock toy party favors. I use these toys whenever possible (h/t Randy Miyan of the Liberal Gun Owners) to highlight how we are trapped in false dichotomies like gun rights vs. public safety, “From my cold, dead hands” vs. “You love your guns more than children.”
The only way to escape the finger lock is to release the tension by moving your fingers toward one another. In the case of the great gun debates, by moving ourselves toward one another.
I’m really excited to be here because I think this is exactly what we are doing. Or at least I hope so.
What Academia Gets Right
In 2012, an academic midlife crisis led me to throw away a productive 20-year career as a sociologist of religion to become a sociologist of guns. Imagine my surprise to find that there was no sociology of guns at the time.
An epidemiology of gun harm – yes.
A criminology of guns – absolutely.
But no real sociology of guns as a developed field.
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Fearing I had made a terrible professional decision, I sought advice from a fellow sociologist friend. He told me he was browsing the UC-Berkeley sociology department’s website and had discovered a graduate student studying guns.
I eagerly wrote to this PhD student in the spring of 2013, just before she completed her dissertation. We struck up a correspondence and I was fortunate to host her at Wake Forest for her first visiting lecture in February of 2014. I also learned a lot from reading the manuscript that became her first book, published in 2015.
It’s incredible to think that the leading scholar in the field of gun studies just ten years ago was a newly minted PhD. That’s how underdeveloped the field was.
Of course, Jennifer Carlson is still the leading scholar in the field, but gun studies have matured considerably since then.
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I would even argue that the field is moving toward a framework of shared assumptions, methods, and exemplary achievements that define what counts as legitimate science within the field and guide researchers’ work without being questioned.
That is to say, the field is coalescing into a paradigm, as defined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
This paradigm represents genuine intellectual progress.
(Given the number of public health scholars here, I should note that public health scholarship on guns has its own established paradigm, with roots going back at least to Newton and Zimring’s 1969 report on firearms violence. The aspect of that paradigm that most connects with my work on Gun Culture 2.0 is what I call “The Standard Model of the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership.” See my written articulation (16 pages), my 6-part YouTube series, or my brief blog post overview of The Standard Model.)
Here is my summary of the dominant paradigm in gun studies today:
Normal science in gun studies today centers on the idea that American gun culture is founded on settler colonialism, that it is racist, sexist, and homophobic in its historical foundations, and it remains so at its contemporary core. Because of this, it is aligned with right-wing politics and threatens to undermine civil society and democracy.
As noted, the formation of this paradigm represents real progress. It is what the academic field of gun studies gets right.
But paradigms are double-edged, as I suggest in the second part of my talk.
Stay tuned.
Ok....that last quote of a "paradigm" left me looking for a way to put out my hair, which is on fire. And look for a spare fuse to replace the one that just blew in my brain. What the bleep do you mean that it is "..real progress. It is what the academic field of gun studies gets right"? Please elaborate, as it seems to me that paradigm is fraught with negative stereotypes of gun owners and therefore encourages academics to continue to study gun ownership as a pathology (full disclosure, I am a "super-owner"). Yes, I have read Merchants of the Right cover to cover, but am not convinced that describes all gun culture.
The other thing that saddens me about this conference is that it seems the only way to get the participants to be honest with each other is to do it behind the curtain. I've said before that there are parallels to the bias in gun studies and climate studies, to wit, there is immense academic pressure to stay within the confines of the "dominant paradigm" and not stray too far beyond it for fear of earning academic opprobrium.
Cases in point: Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr. I won't go into Judy right now, although she was a National Academies member for several studies. Roger Pielke Jr., who studies the interplay of science and politics (NCAR, CIRES, U of Colorado, AEI) recently gave a talk at Cornell U. on the problems of using rare, catastrophic events and their social costs to "prove" climate change. A senior professor at Cornell demanded that the professor who invited Roger be censured for inviting a "climate denier". But Roger is not a climate denier. In fact, the first slide said that climate change is real and is a real problem**. But using rare events to "prove" climate catastrophism is problematic due to the statistical nature of these events and that the social costs are inflated because more people live in harm's way and thus the value of development has increased dramatically through time.
** in a Dispatch Energy essay that just landed in my Inbox, Roger states:
"A robust consensus has developed... with most projections of future climate change suggesting that, on current policies, the world is headed in the direction of a 2- to 3-degree Celsius increase over preindustrial values by 2100—a far cry from the 4- to 5-degree or more increase envisioned under extreme scenarios that we now know were wrong...Even though projections of future climate change have moderated considerably in recent years, the human influence on climate remains real and poses risks to our collective future. Accelerating the pace of decarbonization remains important as we also seek to broaden energy access, secure supply, and reduce consumer costs while limiting environmental impacts. "
But apparently, you can't critique the "climate emergency" narrative without being attacked. Is it the same with gun studies?
I'd grant that merely _having_ a paradigm is "progress", in that it at least lays out a series of truth assertions which can then be challenged directly, as opposed to amorphous beliefs that can be more easily motte and bailey'd, "walked back", or otherwise evade challenge?
Once everything is out in the open the intellectually serious can be identified based on how much of the paradigm they are willing to question, regardless of their own initial beliefs.