Thoughts on GUNLORE: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities

The Light Over Heat Virtual Book Club, which I started this year, just finished its fourth book of 2024. The experiment was a great success, so look for an announcement early in 2025 about our next read.

The final book we read was Gunlore: Firearms, Folkways, and Communities, an edited collection of essays by folklorists. I chose the book because I was reviewing it for the Association of College and Research Libraries’ CHOICE, which academic librarians use to decide which books to stock.

Here’s my review:

Folklore is the shared everyday expressive cultural practices and forms of ordinary people. Gunlore, then, is “folklore about guns” (p. 220). This is the first book by folklorists to draw a bead on one of the most important and misunderstood parts of our shared informal culture. In their editor’s introduction, Robert Glenn Howard (Comm Arts, U. Wisconsin-Madison) and Eric Eliason (English, BYU) hit the bullseye in highlighting how even non-gun owning Americans “live in a gunlore-saturated society” (p. 3). Gunlore originated in a panel at the American Folklore Society and, as with many edited collections, it takes a scattershot approach to its topic. Some chapters go off half-cocked, like the opening chapter on gun fetishization that is based on secondary analysis of 20+ year old data. Other chapters are more on target, exploring gunlore on Instagram (ch. 2) and 4chan (ch. 3), in “alternative history” cosplay communities (ch. 6), and as vernacular religious experience (ch. 10). Despite some limitations, Gunlore successfully demonstrates the cultural normality of firearms in the U.S. I hope it encourages others to set their sights on further understanding folklore about firearms and does not turn out to be a mere flash in the pan.

I will share some further thoughts on Gunlore in a couple of following posts so stay tuned.