Further Thoughts on GUNLORE: Guns are Normal

As noted in my previous post, my Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club just finished reading Gunlore: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities. The book is a collection of essays first presented at the meeting of the American Folklore Society and edited by Robert Glenn Howard (Communication professor at my alma mater UW-Madison) and Eric Eliason (English professor at BYU).

I am not a folklorist so a couple of words about the discipline. Folklore studies is interdisciplinary, combining anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, communication, and others, using ethnographic methods to understand cultural expressions (including stories, practices and techniques, music and dance, creative works like crafts and other material culture, proverbs and linguistic expressions) as they are generated and passed down in communities.

Historically, folklore as a discipline focused on traditional forms of cultural expression and, therefore, had a “preferential option for the rural” (p. 17). Today it highlights all “vernacular culture” — everyday cultural practices of ordinary people — and so retains an emphasis on grassroots or non-elite culture even when exploring contemporary urban, suburban, or even virtual contexts.

In brief, folklore is “shared informal culture” (p. 5). Gunlore is folklore about firearms.

Early in their introduction, the editors of Gunlore observe: “Considered as a single group, gun owners would be one of the largest lifestyle/hobby-based subcultures in America” (p. 5). This perspective is reminiscent of James Wright’s “Ten Essential Observations” from 1995 and Abigail Kohn’s Shooters in 2004. But, as I first argued in 2017, it has largely been forgotten by social scientists studying guns since, in favor of approaching guns from the perspective of deviance and pathology.

I appreciated that the editors said they seek to “expand our understanding of the various roles firearms play, have played, and can play in our shared cultural understandings” (p. 7). They further recognize that ”American gun culture is an array of complex, diverse, overlapping, and contradicting groups” (p. 21).

I especially appreciated their recognition that gun owners in America are multicultural. My use of the concept of “Gun Culture 2.0” to characterize the self-defense core of American gun culture today can sometimes be understood as homogenizing the phenomenon. But not all gun owners are defensive gun owners and not all defensive gun owners are alike. Queer gun owners arm themselves again hetero-cis male gun owners, liberals arm themselves again conservatives, white against black, and so on.

The most crucial observation in the editors’ introduction, however, is the idea that, at root, “firearms are tools (objects designed to complete a specific task),” so “most firearms communities center around different purposes and specific kinds of activities” (p. 21).

This passage is key because it focuses attention on the practical, utilitarian nature of guns and how people organize themselves around those practical purposes.

To repeat: “firearms are tools (objects designed to complete a specific task),” so “most firearms communities center around different purposes and specific kinds of activities” (p. 21).

As many different purposes and activities as there are with guns, there are that many gun cultures, according to this volume. As Tok Thompson observes in the book’s conclusion: “The various case studies contained in this book illustrate the diverse gun cultures in the United States, and in doing so complexify the oft herd singular appellation of American gun culture” (p. 262). This is a point that Abigail Kohn made in her book Shooters, subtitled: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures (sadly not cited in the introduction or conclusion to Gunlore).

We could argue about what those cultures — or, I suggest, SUBcultures of American gun culture — are specifically. But the general point of plurality stands.

As does the idea that those (sub)cultures are primarily organized around the practical, utilitarian nature of guns.

Unfortunately, as I will discuss in a following post, the practical, utilitarian nature of guns actually takes a back seat to the symbolic dimensions of guns throughout Gunlore.