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.
Even as I have been finishing, publishing, and promoting Gun Curious these past 5 years, I have often thought about the book I set aside to pursue a trade book written from a first-person perspective. Gun Culture 2.0 the book is my more academic treatment of American gun culture. It engages more directly with the dominant scholarly perspective on guns, what I call “The Master Narrative of Democracy Destroying Right-Wing Gun Culture.”
In unearthing my notebooks recently, I found some genuine thought fragments that point to the perspective I want to use to animate Gun Culture 2.0.
The Master Narrative (essentially – this is a dramatic abbreviation) holds that the United States was founded as a racist, settler colonialist cisheteropatriarchy; that this influenced the development of gun culture in the country; and that it continues to shape gun culture today.
Like “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership,” The Master Narrative emphasizes the symbolic nature of guns, a nature driven by political and economic concerns. As Jennifer Carlson writes in her foundational book, Citizen-Protectors, “For the most part, gun carry is symbolic” (p. 112). Why? Because most people will not have to shoot someone in self-defense.
So, what motivates defensive gun ownership today? The fatal intersection of downward economic mobility of white men, toxic masculinity, racial resentment, and right-wing political ideology.
The Master Narrative tells a story of guns in America that holds some truth, like all stories do. Just as telling the story of America from the perspective of dominant groups does. The story of immigration to America told from the perspective of those who came through Jamestown and Ellis Island is a true American story.
But as Ron Takaki — the legendary UC-Berkeley historian and my fellow Japanese-American with Hawaiian roots — highlighted when I was in school, we can also look at American history in “a different mirror.”
What if we looked at guns, gun owners, and gun culture in a different mirror? What if we focused not exclusively on the symbolic dimension of guns but took seriously their practical dimension? Would this move us away from the homogenized view that animates The Master Narrative? Would this help us to see the diversity of gun culture and diversity in gun culture?
I think so. This is the working thesis of Gun Culture 2.0.
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