Tony Grist
NOTE: I recently unpacked my hodgepodge of notebooks about gun culture to begin thinking about writing another book in 2025. Seeing John McPhee’s Tabula Rasa in a local bookstore inspired me to empty those notebooks here. Be advised: These are truly notes and not composed ideas.
Guns have been so politicized in the United States that even unobjectionable ideas can become divisive.
Take the term “gun safety,” for example. Everyone favors it, but “gun safety” has been co-opted rhetorically by the gun control movement as part of its 21st-century rebrand.
Same for “law-abiding gun owners,” but in the opposite direction. It is something unobjectionable that people resist because it has been deployed rhetorically by the gun rights movement. So, you can read phrases like “so-called law-abiding gun owners” in the academic literature on guns.
Some people have tried to shift rhetorically away from “law-abiding gun owners” to “responsible gun owners” to emphasize particular behaviors rather than standing relative to laws that are always subject to change. (E.g., Today, I am the legal owner of an AR-15; tomorrow, I could own an illegal gun. Either way, I am the same responsible gun owner, unless you want to define responsibility relative to legal standing, in which case this is a distinction without a difference.)
I uncovered this four-fold table in my notebooks recently. It is undated and has no explanatory text, but I think it may have emerged from a conversation with Rob Pincus, who often helps me see gun things in new ways.
The idea here is that we shouldn’t just think about whether someone is a “legal” gun owner or not, or a “responsible” gun owner or not, but to think about the different ways these two statuses can relate to each other.
We find some interesting statuses to consider when we read across the “diagonals” in the NO-YES and YES-NO boxes (as opposed to with the diagonals in the NO-NO and YES-YES boxes).
What do we make of someone who does not legally own firearms, but who behaves responsibly with those firearms. Someone, for example, who was convicted of a non-violent felony when they were young and have lived good, upstanding lives ever since? Are they “criminals” in a meaningful sense? Or are they more like the felons who have served their time and would like to exercise other rights of citizenship like voting?
In the opposite box, what do we make of someone who legally owns firearms, but behaves irresponsibly with them? As I wrote in that box on the table, “BAD.” And when I say bad, I don’t mean Michael Jackson bad.
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