Liminal Gun Ownership

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the LGC National Meeting for the first time. The “L” in LGC stands for “Liberal,” but as I argued in my keynote address to the group, it could just as well stand for “Liminal.”

Anthropologist Victor Turner used the term liminality to describe the condition of being “betwixt and between.” Others have described it as being “neither here nor there.”

The concept was originally used to describe the transitional phase of a rite of passage, when a person is moving from one status to another. It could also be used to describe the passage from one place to another, like moving to a new city, or from one situation to another, like beginning a new job.

Turner thought that liminality was so intense that most people moved into and out of it in due time. But the condition of being betwixt and between is something that some people may experience over longer periods of time. Think about people who are social exiles or refugees, those who voluntarily stand outside of “normal” society, those who are androgynous in sex or gender identity.

Or think about someone who is liberal and also a gun owner.

Most liberals are not gun owners and most gun owners are not liberal.

Liberal gun owners, I contend, are special people who occupy a special place in our contemporary socio-political reality. Hence my conclusion that the Liberal Gun Club really is a Liminal Gun Club and liberal gun owners really are liminal gun owners.

I am working with the leadership of the LGC to push out a video recording of my address, “The Agony (and Ecstasy) of Liberal Gun Ownership,” where I elaborate on these ideas and their implications. So watch for that.

But those who have followed me over the years, and those who have read my book Gun Curious, know that this perspective captures the fundamental experience I had journeying out of the blue bubble in which I have spent most of my life and journeying inside America’s gun culture for the next 13 years (and counting).

Being in the liminal position of having one foot inside and one outside of gun culture can be a lonely existence at times. My hybrid identity as a liberal professor/gun owner in theory means having two tribes to call my own. In reality, I often instead feel homeless, floating between two different social worlds, neither here nor there.