Where I'm Coming From
The Spirit of Critical Curiosity
Because guns do not have a teleology, people use them for a range of purposes, from good to evil. Gun owners are human, so we see the full range of human triumphs and tragedies among them. Gun culture is part of American culture, so America’s flaws also stain gun culture. This recalls Immanuel Kant’s observation, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” But media and scholarly attention are disproportionately drawn to the evil, tragic, flawed, and crooked.
Reflecting my liberal “tragic optimism,” my approach to guns has a different point of departure.[i] Rather than focusing on crime, injury, and death with firearms, my work is based on the proposition that guns are normal and normal people use guns. This is not an article of faith or belief statement for me; rather, it is based on my empirical observations of guns and gun owners over the past 13 years. When I say guns are normal and normal people use guns, I mean it in two senses. First, guns and gun ownership are common, widespread, and typical. Second, guns and gun ownership are not inherently associated with deviance or abnormalities.
In today’s binary world, this observation codes me as “pro-gun,” and not just in the view of their cultured despisers. One of the students in a pistol course I was observing at Gunsite Academy in Arizona said to me, “It is nice to have someone working on this from the pro-gun side.” I was taken aback by this comment because I have never seen my work as “pro-gun.” What I write about guns is based on my search for truth, not a political position. I am pro-understanding.
Understanding is the heart of my work. It is the foundation of critical thinking, empathy, and learning. It contributes to effective communication, decision-making, innovation, and problem-solving. The human desire to understand is intimately connected with curiosity, defined by the great pragmatist philosopher William James as “the impulse toward better cognition.”[ii]
In fact, my curiosity-driven search for understanding is how my journey into the world of guns began over a decade ago. I was gun curious, both personally and professionally.
Curiosity is the sociological enterprise’s driving force. In his classic 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology, Peter Berger declared, “It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this: things are not what they seem.” Social reality is complex and difficult to apprehend at first glance, and with each new discovery about some aspect of the social world, new complexities are revealed. Consequently, sociologists must constantly question what we see, not accept seemingly obvious answers, and pursue the truth even though it is ultimately elusive. Berger warned those considering his invitation, “People who feel no temptation before closed doors, who have no curiosity about human beings, who are content to admire scenery without wondering about the people who live in those houses on the other side of that river, should probably also stay away from sociology. They will find it unpleasant or, at any rate, unrewarding.”[iii]
I accepted the invitation to sociology long ago. The curiosity in all of my work, especially my book Gun Curious, reflects this.
My understanding of American gun culture now includes 14 years of personal experience as a gun owner and 13 years of sociological research. It incorporates hundreds of hours of fieldwork, innumerable conversations with gun owners, immersion in various old and new gun media, and extensive engagement with scholarly analyses and cultural criticisms of guns.
When I embarked on my personal and professional exploration of guns, I thought back to the great German-American sociologist Reinhard Bendix, whom I had the good fortune to meet at UC-Berkeley not long before he died in 1991. Though I was a mere undergraduate and he a distinguished faculty member, Bendix graciously spoke with me about the sociological enterprise I was just joining. He referred me to a passage from the philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus that I have attempted to embody in my work in the ensuing three decades and that I hope is the animating spirit of “Light Over Heat”:
I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, not to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.
Welcome to Light Over Heat.
[i] Kaufman, Scott Barry. “The Opposite of Toxic Positivity.” The Atlantic (online), August 18, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/08/tragic-optimism-opposite-toxic-positivity/619786/; Yamane 2017, 2022.
[ii] Kidd, Celeste, and Benjamin Y. Hayden. 2015. “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.” Neuron 88 (3): 449–60.
[iii] Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor, pp. 23-24.
You have to understand that neutral looks positive to a lot of us. From people cherry picking data, to including 18 and 19 year olds in "children" when studying gun deaths, despite the fact that they are legal adults, a lot of academics, sadly, don't have your integrity. They have a political ax to grind, and are determined to grind it.
My entry into the gun community began when a student introduced me to the argument from a number of legal scholars that whatever we can do to the Second Amendment can be done to the First, et al., and developed out of a fascination with the history and mechanical inventiveness of firearms--helped along by a fellow member of my faculty writers' group who wrote stories about Reconstruction Era Tennessee. But as you point out, guns have no teleology--other than to propel bullets down range--beyond what we humans give ourselves, and it's my goal to sign up more citizen-gun owners as I advocate for guns and leftist-liberalism.