November 6, 2023
This weekend I had assault rifle, a FN-Herstal PS90, pressed against my shoulder. I adjusted for the mechanical offset of the laser scope of the rifle and put a bullet right through the heart of my target. The gun was light and the trigger action was easy. In that moment I had a flash of God-like power in a world were we all feel all too powerless.
I’ve had a long history trying to understand the appeal of guns that began when a deranged fan shot and killed my hero, John Lennon, in 1980. As kid in the South, I was buried in gun culture. From watching The Rifleman after school (“Paw!”), and the toy weaponry of my G.I. Joe, to the gun racks in the back of pickup trucks that drove around Stone Mountain. I even had a plastic Tommy gun that shot out sparks when you squeezed the trigger. But the murder of Lennon turned me into a 16-year-old gun control advocate. Why did we need all these guns?
My work as a criminologist put me back in the middle of gun culture. Whether it’s the law enforcement agents I engage with or the right-wing extremists I study, everybody is packing heat. While I’ve lectured for over 30 years on America’s bizarre obsession with guns, I’ve also worked to respect the gun and the gun owner. I fashioned sticks into pistols as a boy. Could that childhood fascination provide a clue into the fact that 32 percent of Americans own a firearm?
In 1995, when I was a fresh young PhD., I was lecturing my criminology class about the statistics on gun ownership. About how homes that contained guns were more likely to see those guns used in a suicide, a domestic homicide, or in an accidental shooting, or be stolen, then they were to ever use them to defend the home from an intruder. A had an aspiring Oregon militia member in that class who was routinely aggrieved by my anti-gun rantings and invited me to the shooting range to experience the appeal of unloading high caliber rounds into some paper targets.
Needless to say, that day we hit the range was both terrifying and exhilarating (and loud). He brought several weapons for me to try (most of them legal). By the end of the morning, I was going full Clint Eastwood, firing a 45 with my left hand and a 357 Magnum with my right. I remember the guns feeling lighter as each round was launched toward the target. And I hung that target in my university office, as a subtle message to my students, “I am not one to be trifled with.”
After the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, that left 15 students dead, I began to explore the connection between guns and masculinity. School shootings mimicked workplace shootings, where (young) men were somehow emasculated and made the fatal decision to “go out like men.” My experience shooting certainly played into some macho fantasy of myself I’d harbored since I was a skinny boy in suburbia.
In 2005, I participated in the FBI’s Citizen Academy and got more formal weapons training, including with semi-automatic rifles. It was intense, but also gave me a deeper respect of the weapons themselves. I felt like I couldn’t have opinions about guns unless I knew what it was like to fire them. That training played into that macho fantasy of myself 17 years later while I was in Ukraine, when I secretly wished a Ukrainian solder would hand me a rifle and ask me to repel some Russian invaders. Fortunately, for my family (and for Ukraine itself), that never happened.
In 2021, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. and that number only trends upwards. Over the years, I’ve considered owning a gun since my work has generated some seriously scary enemies. But I’ve always thought there were essentially two-parts of gun ownership. The first was acquiring the weapon and the second was looking for an opportunity to use it and I’m not sure that a creak in the house wouldn’t have me reaching for the ammo. And now that there is a kid in that house, guns are off the table. But, according to Pew Research, nearly 4 in 10 American adults live in a household with at least one gun in it and a lot of those homes have kids in them.
My experience at the range Saturday wasn’t just meant as a day to reclaim my inner-Rambo. I was there with members of my anti-violence team, one who is a bonafide gunsmith and brought his 45 handgun and rifle for us to fire. As soon as we entered the firing range, my heart rate shot up. About a half dozen men were firing off countless rounds, as shell casings flew through the air. It was the sound of war and mass shootings and domestic terror. But, with our skilled guide, we took our positions and fired at our targets, like I did at the Lickskillet shooting gallery at Six Flags amusement park, when I was a kid. Guns blazing around me, I focused on BRASS, “breathe, relax, aim, stance, and squeeze,” and tried to cluster my shots at the center of the target.
The term “gun culture” is overly broad. Yeah, it includes extremists on both the right and the left who are waiting for the call to play out their John Wick fantasies on real and imagined enemies. The faith in a soon-to-come civil war is very real to them. But there are also a heck of a lot people that enjoy the sport of shooting that includes the kind of recoil you don’t get in a video game. Going shooting helps me break through the “us vs. them” mentality I tend to have about gun owners, because now I can see the appeal. But I can also walk away from it.
Randy,
A gun battle at a keg party in the woods, where I had to hide behind a log or get shot when I was 16 had me questioning guns. Then witnessing an accidental murder of a innocent bystander in a bar on Piedmont Road same year kind of turned me off to the idea of guns. But an afternoon destroying a pile of terra-cotta tile behind the coach house had a mansion in Buckhead with a 45 caliber handgun that lifted me off the ground. Every time I shot it was enough for me to understand the thrill. But, I think Chris Rock has the solution: bullet should cost $5000 apiece… That would take care of it most gun violence.
DbDean
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Hi Randy, I have been exposed to firearms my entire life, the son of a Marine combat veteran that kept an unloaded Colt .45 auto in his nightstand. We knew it was there and occasionally showed it off to our friends. We went into the woods off of 78 and shot our .22 rifles at beer cans lined up on the rails of an old bridge over a creek. We wandered the woods of Tucker with the same rifles and before that our Crossman BB guns. It was common to see kids with rifles (air or otherwise) on their shoulders, walking through our neighborhood. Now there would be a community- wide lockdown and SWAT teams involved. I still own guns, and enjoy shooting, but the “gun culture” of today makes me embarrassed to admit it. I call it the Fake Tough-Guy Syndrome. The bizarre fantasy world of being the good guy with a gun stopping the bad guy with a gun. A fantasy that is not borne out in statistics that demonstrate that there is almost NO situation that the average person is likely to encounter in which the introduction of a firearm is going to make things better. Jogger that looks out of place in your neighborhood? Argument over parking spot? SO cheating? All a gun does is change the outcome from hurt feelings to grievously injured/ dead bodies. I see the FTG’s with their pistols on their hips at Home Depot, and all I can imagine is how many rounds that they will throw down range into the general vicinity of a bad guy, that will actually end up in some poor bystanders body. And the biggest embarrassment of all is the nonchalance of how they talk about these fantasy acts of “heroism”. Taking a life and feeling excited & proud is a sign of sociopathy, not toughness. For every “man protects family/ others” story, there are ten “forgot it was loaded” or “had a few too many drinks” incidents; shouted down by the NRA and their 2nd zealots. Will I keep my guns? Yes. Will I support laws that enhance easy access to them? No.
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“But I’ve always thought there were essentially two-parts of gun ownership. The first was acquiring the weapon and the second was looking for an opportunity to use it….”
I also carry an epi-pen, and I can assure you I don’t go looking for opportunities to get stun by a wasp.
You seem to be projecting a lot of your own sentiments onto others.
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You might be right.
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