Metzl’s “What We’ve Become” Reading Notes, Part 3

This post continues what I started before with my recaps of the first two sessions of our Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club on Jonathan Metzl’s recently published book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms (Amazon affiliate link to help offset my expenses in doing this work).

Here are my reading notes of what I liked and disliked about the first section and the second section of what we read.

For our third and final meeting last night, we had another solid turnout of panelists and other registered participant observers.

For the session, we read pages 213 to 303 of Metzl’s book. Following are the “reading notes” I brought with me to the meeting.

I encourage panelists each session to first read with the text (what did you like or appreciate?) and then to read against the text (what did you dislike?). Here are my likes and dislikes in this section:

LIKE

(1) In the concluding chapter on “Where Do We Go From Here?” toward the end of the book, Metzl appropriately “challenges gun researchers to avoid the trap of framing gun safety interventions in red-state America as ‘common sense,’ as if attitudes about guns and shootings are obvious rather than the result of people’s everyday values, choices, and realities” (p. 284).

Couldn’t agree more. Even though this framing “works” better in “blue-state America,” since 2018 I have urged gun violence prevention advocates to drop the language of “common sense” because it is political, rhetorical, and divisive. In 2022, I included “common sense” or “commonsense” as one of three arguments my fellow liberals should avoid in discussing guns in America. (The other two were “protect children not guns” and “other countries acted immediately”).

(2) Particularly in the concluding chapter and Epilogue, Metzl’s argument closely matches what I call The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. (A) He recognizes (and dislikes) that defensive gun ownership is the core of gun culture today (p. 269). (B) He discounts the need and utility of guns for self-defense, invoking (of course) Hemenway and Solnick’s “Epidemiology of Self-Defense Gun Use” (p. 295). (C) He holds that the opposite is true of guns: “In each case and many others, the gun itself adds risk to the situation” (p. 296). (D) From A, B, and C, he concludes that defensive gun ownership is not rational but irrational, describing guns as “talismans of self-protection” and approvingly citing The Trace’s Mike Spies on “the ‘addictive’ nature of gun ownership.” (E) In terms of the “something else” that is motivating gun ownership, Metzl clearly points a finger a white male privilege and racial resentment (as he did in his earlier book, Dying of Whiteness).

It is reassuring every time I read a study that so clearly maps onto The Standard Model.

(3) I appreciate Metzl mentioning my work under his “Where Do We Go from Here?” point #2: “Expand the Public Health Framework.” I have promoted the study of gun ownership beyond the frameworks of criminology of epidemiology for nearly a decade now (p. 276).

I’m not quite sure what to make of his characterizing my (and others’) work as “largely red-state-based approaches — ones that nod toward validating gun rights” (p. 276). It is true that I discovered guns in North Carolina, though it was among both red and blue people, and my ideas apply to red and blue people alike. This may suggest some limitation in Metzl’s insistence on seeing things largely in terms of red- and blue-state politics.

It’s also the case that, even as Metzl recognizes gun owner diversity, he don’t like it. In the first suggestion in his “Where Do We Go from Here?” conclusion, he suggests we need to “Better Understand What It Means to Own a Gun and What It Means to Carry One.” He acknowledges that “gun ownership is far from monolithic” (p. 273). But when he discusses liberal gun owners, ever so briefly, here are some of his characterizations:

• “Liberal gun owners present a different challenge” (p. 273). Why a challenge and not an opportunity?
• “Growing evidence suggests that simply owning a gun can make liberals more conservative” (pp. 273-74). Checks references: Not a single piece of evidence cited, much less growing evidence.
• Following the above, Metzl claims, “when guns become talismans of self-protection, people become more sensitive to arguments that the government wants to take them away” (p. 274). Calling something a “talisman” is dismissive, and again no research is cited to support either of the two claims in this passage.
• “Investigative journalist Michael Spies exposes the ‘addictive’ nature of gun ownership, whereby people who buy one gun are likely to buy more” (p. 274). Checks references: a link to Spies’ author page on The Trace website, not to any documentation of this particular claim. Calling a behavior “addictive” is gaslighting. I actually address “Becoming a Gun Super-Owner” in Gun Curious which refutes quite a few of Metzl’s claims without even having seen his book when I finished mine. Buy my book!

I guess I have inadvertently turned to my dislikes already. So, read on for more.

DISLIKE

(1) The book continues to have an odd texture that weaves together meticulous detail on every aspect of the shooting (before, during, and after) and ideas that seem to be purely speculative or hypothetical. For example, the chapter on “Race” pairs some of the transcript of Jeffrey Reinking’s deposition (p. 258) with an “interpretation” of Reinking’s conspiracist worldview. What connects these two for Metzl is Reinking’s deflection of responsibility in the deposition. I have never been deposed before, but I don’t suppose I would (or my attorney would allow me to) directly implicate myself in potentially criminal behavior in a deposition. And Metzl acknowledges this as an interpretation of Reinking’s behavior, before posing “another interpretation” (p. 259). From there he proceeds to invoke Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon, Josh Hawley, and Tucker Carlson, which left me straining to connect the dots.

(2) Metzl says the loonies “framing the events” at the Waffle House “as fake news represented the ultimate act of structural racism” because they “reinforced the notion that whiteness itself was under attack” (p. 260). Again, I strain to connect the dots as Metzl again seems to overreach by defining “framing” as “structural racism.” (To be clear, I am not opposed to the concept of structural or systemic racism or institutional racism as explaining racial inequality in the United States.)

(3) Some small annoyances continue to pop up in the heated rhetoric Metzl is bringing here. Not only does he continue to refer to magazines as “clips” (see my original set of comments), but he also writes things like, “It was red hot from shooting and killing” (p. 222) in reference to James Shaw grabbing the “barrel” of the killer’s rifle. I don’t care that he said barrel instead of handguard, but the barrel/handguard was not red hot from killing. When I take my Sociology of Guns students to the range, the handguard of the AR-style rifle we shoot also gets hot and we are not killing anything.

To my mind, the events being described are horrific enough that the author need not take additional liberties to amp them up even more.

(4) This is not an academic book but it does base many of its claims on academic work. I didn’t catalog every example, but I was disappointed to see frequent references to news stories about research rather than citations to the research itself. Not to mention instances (some of which noted above) in which no research was cited to support Metzl’s empirical claims.

In addition to what I noted above, here’s another example: “DEFENSIVE-USE DATA instead REPEATEDLY SHOWED that by the time someone yanked a gun out, it was too late–the other guy already had the upper hand” (pp. 295-96, emphasis added). Checks references: No documentation to support this claim. I think for a reason: those data don’t exist. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, it’s not surprising that Metzl invoked Hemenway and Solnick in the course of discounting the significance of defensive gun use as this is central to The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership (see above). But Metzl’s description of Hemenway and Solnick’s study is wrong, which is surprising given his embeddedness in that field of scholarship (p. 295).

(5) Metzl follows the recent convention coming from the medical lane of the gun violence prevention movement of speaking in catastrophic terms about the .223/5.56 round fired by most AR-style rifles. To be clear, I believe the .223 bullet is devastating enough — especially when fired at close range and in high volume — that it need not be exaggerated. Following many others, I discuss in the chapter of Gun Curious on “Living with AR-15s” the fact that Eugene Stoner, Jim Sullivan, and Bob Fremont of ArmaLite were trying to update the U.S. Army’s primary service rifle to shoot a smaller, faster bullet.

But I do find myself annoyed when Metzl describes someone being shot “not with a regular bullet, if such a thing exists, but with a bullet from an AR-15” (p. 229). This is incredibly misleading to someone who doesn’t know much about guns, which I take to be Metzl’s primary audience. Here’s the reality: Every bullet is regular insofar as it is designed to do what it does. The .223 Remington cartridge commonly associated with the AR-15 — a military-grade or military-style assault weapon, a “weapon of war that has no business on our streets” — is regular insofar as it was derived from “a standard hunting round called the .222 Remington.” That is a quote from Gun Curious, but I am actually quoting Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson’s recent book on the AR-15.

(6) I guess in the end there is just too much heated rhetoric in this book for my taste. But I’m a light over heat guy, not really the audience for this book. With all of the success Metzl’s book is having among cultured despisers of guns, however, I am rethinking my approach. Stay tuned for my follow-up to Gun Curious.