What Academia Gets Wrong About Guns (Spicier Take)

Part 3 of 3 of series on "What Academia Gets Right and Wrong about Guns"

Continuing my series of posts on the symposium I attended this week called “Shared Targets: Supporting Collaboration across Gun Experts and Firearms Researchers.”

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.”

Two days ago, I posted my thoughts on what academia gets right: It is coalescing into a paradigm that centers and guides research on the topic.

I ended up writing two versions of what academia gets wrong. So, my presentation was like a choose-your-own-adventure story. At the symposium, the audience chose to hear the spicier take that my trusted advisers did not want me to present.

Yesterday, I posted the more mild take I put together on what academia gets wrong: The insights of the paradigm are also blindnesses.

Below you will find what I actually presented at the symposium. I say this is my “spicier” take, but please remember I am the “Bob Ross of Guns,” so the spice level may be more mild than some have a taste for.

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The blind men and the elephant. Source: The Heath readers by grades (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1907), p. 69. Public domain

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The event was co-sponsored by the Bringing Research and Innovation into the Debate on Guns in Society (BRIDGS) Initiative at Arizona State University 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.

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“What Academia Gets Right and Wrong”

David Yamane

18 November 2025

See Part 1: What Academia Gets Right

See Part 2: What Academia Gets Wrong (Conventional Take)

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 remains so at its contemporary core. Because of this, it is aligned with right-wing politics and threatens to undermine civil society and democracy.

The formation of this paradigm represents real progress. But paradigms are double-edged.

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Wrong

This dominant scholarly approach to studying guns, gun owners, and gun culture – and here I would include both the public health paradigm and the gun studies paradigm – reminds me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

In the story, several blind men encounter an elephant and each touches a different part. Because of this, they come away with different understandings of what the animal is like.

Each man is convinced his understanding is correct, and they argue about the true nature of the elephant.

This is akin to how most academics approach gun culture, except that in the case of the gun culture elephant, most agree on its true nature. Unfortunately, they agree because they are all studying the same part: the anus.

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Going forward, I would like to see the field retain the benefits of the dominant paradigm but reduce its liabilities.

On the one hand, paradigms are useful because they help organize an extremely complex world. By focusing relentlessly on inequality and social harm, the gun studies paradigm filters out all kinds of noise.

But paradigms also prevent researchers from recognizing assumptions that differ from their own. My work, for example, is based on a different premise: that guns are normal and normal people use guns.

I know this violates people’s assumptions because I’m frequently met with resistance to my use of this language of normality. Consequently, this aspect of the complex world of guns frequently goes unexamined.

From my perspective, a better, more comprehensive understanding of guns requires us to embrace their paradoxical nature. We need to appreciate both the harms that the dominant paradigm focuses on and the normality I center in my work.

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I propose in the conclusion to my book Gun Curious – I have some copies for sale here if anyone doesn’t have it yet – that we would be better served to understand that guns are not one thing, but many.

We need to recognize more parts of the gun culture elephant.

Guns are good and bad, fun and frightening, dangerous and protective, unifying and divisive.

Leaning into the paradox of guns will not only make for a better scholarship, I think it also provides a better starting point for our fraught public conversations.

Seeing guns as paradoxical may just get us beyond the kinds of dichotomies that have us trapped in the finger lock of the gun debate.

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