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.
January 28, 2019: “Looking at yet another instance of gun violence, partisans will no doubt be swept up in the kind of either/or thinking that obscures more than it enlightens. Gun control advocates will point to the gun as the key culprit. Gun rights proponents will note the suspect’s prior arrest record and the futility of signs posted at every entrance to campus reading, ‘No concealed or other weapons permitted.’ The event provides an opportunity for more subtle thinking.”
February 19, 2018: “After every high profile mass homicide in America – or at least those perpetrated with guns – people take to social media to express their disdain for “the other side.” As a blue bubble, liberal gun owners who also studies American gun culture, I have many friends on both sides. So I just scroll through my Twitter and Facebook feeds and SMH. It is impossible to address the issue of mass shootings in any critical way without being accused of defending them.”
February 20, 2018: “Why I Don’t Favor an Assault Weapon Ban. About me: 49-year-old, married, Asian-American man with three children. Lived a very happy life for 42 years without ever seeing, touching, or firing a gun. Becoming a gun owner, hanging out in gun culture, and reading a lot of scholarship about guns have led me to this conclusion. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but it seems that we have a Bill of Rights at least in part to protect citizens from the government deciding we don’t need certain things.”
May 30, 2022: “Maybe something will come out of the bipartisan talks happening in the Senate, or maybe it won’t. But while gun rights and gun control activists harden their positions, why not move forward with policies and practices we know can reduce gun death and do not require restricting guns?”
June 6, 2022: “These are the worst of times and the best of times to shed light on American gun culture. There already exists a strong bias in academic studies of guns toward negative outcomes. Mass public shootings like those in Buffalo (racist) and Uvalde (children) only heighten the emotionalism. As the smoke dissipates from yet another mass shooting and another meeting of the National Rifle Association, what do I have to say?”
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