My friend and I did an on-line Q&A about his new theory text, Social Theory: Continuity and Confrontation.
The University of Toronto Press put it on their blog last week. Check it out HERE.
I’m looking forward to using the text next spring in my theory classes.
As part of my ongoing effort to understand “Gun Culture 2.0,” I was fortunate recently to host a leading sociologist studying American gun culture, Jennifer Dawn Carlson.
Dr. Carlson is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, but despite working north of the border she is an American and primarily studies American society. She has published a number of newspaper opinion pieces which attempt to speak across the divide between “pro” and “anti” gun camps. Among these are: “The Gun Debate Misses the Mark in Detroit” in the Detroit News and “The NRA’s Hidden Power” in the Los Angeles Times.
Carlson’s presentation last month was based on ideas she is developing in a forthcoming book called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford University Press, 2015). The book draws on research conducted on gun carriers — both open and concealed — in and around Detroit, Michigan, hence the “age of decline.” She argues that within the context of socioeconomic decline in general and personal decline experienced by men in particular, gun carriers reassert their relevance by identifying themselves as “citizen-protectors” (her term, not theirs).
In Carlson’s analysis, the social identity of the citizen-protector: (1) “Redefines lethal shooting, under certain circumstances, as a morally upstanding response to violent threat and an affirmation of one’s love for life,” (2) “Draws on the duty to protect as a historically male-dominated social function,” and (3) “Emphasizes protection as an esteemed form of masculinity.”
Thus, to understand why a growing number of Americans are getting licensed to carry handguns in public (or are exercising their right to open carry without a license where that is allowed) requires getting beyond the gun itself. Carrying a gun is about more than personal self-defense; it is an assertion of “relevance, dominance, and dignity.”
One thing I find particularly valuable about Carlson’s work is her valiant effort both to understand where gun carriers are coming from and to explain this to those who come from outside the gun culture. Her ability to speak across the divide, I hope, is enhanced by the fact that she did all that she could (as a young female from the People’s Republic of Berkeley) to walk-the-walk with gun carriers. She got a Michigan concealed carry license and carried a firearm regularly, she became an NRA Certified Firearms Instructor, and she even open carried a handgun into a Detroit police station as part of a protest by open carriers. Short of actually shooting someone in defense of self or others, she did all she could to establish her bona fides.
Because I read it in draft form, I will not give away one of the punch lines to her book, but Carlson draws some important conclusions based on her time interviewing and hanging out with gun carriers. Conclusions she could only reach by hanging out with gun carriers. I am anxiously awaiting the publication of Citizen-Protectors to see whether those conclusions resonate with a broader audience.
Thumbing through the February 13, 2014 issue of Gun Digest magazine, I was excited to see data on a recent survey of first-time gun buyers, attributed to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for the shooting, hunting and firearms industry.
Two pie charts, shown below, describe (1) the percentage of new shooters who engage in certain activities (target shooting, hunting, plinking, etc.), and (2) how frequently new shooters shoot.
These are both very important pieces of information, but what’s wrong with this picture?
If you answered that the pieces of the pie chart do not add up to a meaningful whole, you are correct. The first pie chart totals 264% and the second totals 80.3%. A meaningful whole in this case would be 100% of new shooters.
Pie charts are appropriate visual displays of information when we want to show the relative sizes or proportions of different phenomena as a part of a fixed whole. If one slice of the pie grows, another slice has to shrink. You can’t just expand the pie (to 264%). If you remove a slice of the pie, the other slices have to grow. You can’t just shrink the pie (to 80.3%).
A pie chart is not appropriate for a situation in which a single respondent can choose more than one category (a new shooter can be a target shooter and a hunter and a plinker, for example). Or when there are categories of responses that are not displayed (19.7% of new shooters shoot less than once a week or did not respond to this particular question, we can infer). In these cases, a bar chart is more appropriate to display the relative sizes of phenomena.
For a really excellent discussion of pie charts and their potential pitfalls, see “Understanding Pie Charts” on the eagereyes blog.
My friend Black Hawk Hancock has written a nice obituary for the “Godfather of Cultural Studies,” Stuart Hall, who died yesterday. It is posted on the University of Toronto Press’s blog.
The post also calls attention to Hancock’s forthcoming classical and contemporary theory reader, which gives Hall a pride of place. A link to the introduction to the Hall section of the textbook is also available on the blog or here.
I spent my winter break this year packing up my office and moving to a new building. The biggest part of moving offices for me is always packing and unpacking my hundreds of books acquired over the past 25 or so years.
Each time I move offices, I read Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” The essay was first published in 1931 in Literarische Welt. I read it in a collection of Benjamin’s essays and reflections called Illuminations that I purchased primarily to read his more famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
As the subtitle suggests, the essay is not really about his library per se, but about book collecting and, in essence, about a people’s relationships to their books. He insists that it is a “relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness.” Instead, he uses words like “love” and “enchantment” to describe the relationship. When unpacking his library, Benjamin says he is filled with images and memories he associates with the books. Cities he visited, rooms he occupied. In this way, to paraphrase Benjamin, our books do not live in us; we live in our books.
Every book I have, I have for a reason. They embody the places I have been, people I have known, classes I have taken, research projects I have undertaken (or have wanted to undertake or may yet undertake). So unpacking my library allows me – indeed, forces me – to re-live my past, evaluate my present, and consider my future.
Perhaps because I have parted with those books that have negative associations for me – e.g., those on Catholic higher education – I have overwhelmingly positive feelings while unpacking my library. I have a shelf reserved for my teachers over the years: Bellah, Blauner, Bonnell, Burawoy, Camic, Epstein, Gorski, Joas, Kornhauser, Lembo, Lichterman, Voss, and others. I have a shelf reserved for friends and colleagues: Baggett, Bartkowski, Byrne, Flake, Hancock, Marti, Wood, and others. And interspersed throughout the rest of the shelves are the books, too many to name, that made me and sustained me as a scholar. Every book on every shelf is there for a reason.
That said, for the first time ever, packing and unpacking my library has been a bittersweet experience. Each of my previous 4 major moves involved getting a bigger office and more space for my books. So I accumulated and accumulated, easily owning over 3,000 books at one point. In my new office, I was only given 3 bookshelves and so I have had to pare back to just 1,000ish books between work and home.
Donating box after box of books was like tearing out and throwing away pages from a photo album or diary. I only hope that someone will see in these orphaned books what I saw in them when I had world enough and time to collect without limit.
Since November 2012, when I first started working in earnest on a new research project on American gun culture, I have tried to blog regularly at Gun Culture 2.0. I have been averaging about 5 posts a month since then, which is pretty good compared to my previous attempts at blogging (like on this blog).
As I noted in one of my first posts, “Jumping into the gun culture as a complete novice is like jumping into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.” I wrote this after the movie theater attack in Aurora, Colorado that month. Things only got worse later in 2012 when the Sandy Hook massacre took place. What was already a challenge to get up to speed on only became worse.
As a consequence, my posts on Gun Culture 2.0 have ranged widely from my own experiences shooting to reviews of books about guns to my attempts to understand existing research on guns. I am pretty much all over the place.
I began the blog as a way to force myself to reflect in writing on gun culture – a way to force myself to write! – but not many people who take the time to write do it only for themselves. So of course I have been interested to know if anyone out in cyberspace is looking at my posts. Recently I decided to look at my site statistics to see how many people have visited and what they have been most interested in reading about.
Top Blog Posts
The majority of my posts have fewer than 100 views, so the 6,370 total page views since I started Gun Culture 2.0 are dominated by a few entries. The home page not surprisingly leads the way with 1,415 views (though June 14).
1. Massad Ayoob’s MAG-40 Course – A Humanitarian Approach to Armed Citizenship (735 views). This is a long entry, but for anyone interested in a very thoughtful approach to the rights and responsibilities of armed citizenship, Massad Ayoob is the man.
2. Understanding Case-Control Studies of Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor (656 views). I am glad so many people have looked at this, because a lot of the most often cited statistics on the dangers of keeping a gun in one’s home is based on case-control designs. I learned a lot myself about this methodology in writing this entry.
3. Massad Ayoob Checks the Accuracy of My Handgun (612 views). This entry is just funny, because you often hear people who shoot guns say things like, “That gun doesn’t shoot well.” Given my own experience, I wonder what percentage of the time the actual statement should be, “I don’t shoot well.” Guns don’t shoot badly; people shoot badly.
4. Assessing the Great Ammo Shortage of 2013 (592 views). The fact that this entry has gotten as many views as it has suggests how concerned people are about the ammo shortage.
5. Shooting the MAG-40 Qualification Course (545 views). Three of the top 5 most visited pages on my site have to do with Massad Ayoob and his MAG-40 course. Overall this suggests that people are a lot more interested in Massad Ayoob than they are in me!
6. Investigating the New York Times’ Dangerous Gun Myths (173 views). This entry is another long one, and probably too boring for mass consumption, but looking at specific claims made in a NYT editorial claiming to debunk gun myths is important for those who want to look below the surface of those claims.
7. The Culture of Fear and the Mass Murders of 2012 (114 views). Here is another entry I wish more people would read. Recently, a big to do was made about the near-simultaneous release of a government study that showed violent crimes committed with guns is way down over the past 20 years, and a Pew Research Center poll that shows that people perceive gun crime to be going up. But this is an old story — crime down, fear up – as I note in this entry from January 2013.
8. Thoughts on Banning Certain Types of Rifles and Magazines (107 views). Banning so-called “assault rifles” and so-called “high capacity” magazines is a panacea designed to make us feel better without making us significantly safer. Enough said, but I wish more people had looked at this page, too.
Visitors
From its inception, Gun Culture 2.0 has had 6,370 page views. I don’t have any basis for comparison in terms of blog readership, but I know this is more people than bought my first three books combined!
The best ever single day was 142 views. On that day I posted an entry on “Looking Forward to History’s Top Shot Season 5 All-Stars.” I like this because as I noted in my first ever entry, Top Shot had a major role in my interest in guns and gun culture.
My best month ever was May 2012 with 1,687 views. That was up from just over 1,000 in each of March and April. If I can get 1,000 page views a month, I am happy with that.
Although the vast majority (5,352 of 6,370) visits have been from the United States, I have also had 548 visitors from Australia, and the other 400+ visitors have come from 60 other countries including Vietnam, Slovenia, Kuwait, Nepal, South Africa, and Malta.
We’re number 1, we’re number 1!!!!! I got an email to this effect from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s sociology department upon the release of the latest ranking of graduate programs by US News.
Of course I checked it out right away and was interested to see my undergraduate alma mater — UC-Berkeley — was also ranked #1. We’re #1 too, we’re #1 too. Actually, there was a 3 way tie with Princeton joining the two “Public Ivys” at the top with equal ratings of 4.7 out of 5.
I also can’t help but note that, despite the excessive emphasis on “high status” publications (American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and if you must go to the second tier then perhaps Social Forces) that forced me to leave back in 2004, the University of Notre Dame sociology department continues to languish in the 40s. I wonder if someone there is preparing an alternative ranking based on faculty publication rates as I type, as they have done in the past.
Although the pleading did make me uncomfortable while I was at Notre Dame, I can feel their pain since they are working so hard to be accepted in the upper echelons of the status hierarchy of the profession. (My intro soc students coincidentally read just this week an excerpt from Murray Milner’s Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids about status hiearchies among teenagers.)
To be sure, the methodology of the US News rankings is problematic. Key informants rating graduate programs on a scale of 1 to 5. I distinctly recall sitting in the office of one of the UW-Madison faculty who was sent the US News ranking form to complete. He was filling the form out as I sat there and kept saying, “I don’t know anyone there. I don’t know anyone there.” What place that is any good would not have people he knows!?
I guess in the end, even though it’s flawed, as long as it keeps UW-Madison on top, I’m good with it.
In my introduction to sociology class this week, I am discussing sociologist James D. Wright’s classic essay, “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America” (from Society March/April 1995, reprinted in Guns in America: A Reader).
Among his points: “There are 200 million guns already in circulation in the United States. . . . firearms are the most commonly owned piece of sporting equipment in the United States.” [Note: 270-300M today]
“Most of those 200 million guns are owned for socially innocuous sport and recreation purposes. . . . Gun ownership is … more appropriate to the sociology of leisure than to the criminology or epidemiology of violence.”
“Many guns are also owned for self-defense against crime, and some are indeed used for that purpose; whether they are actually any safer or not, many people certainly seem to feel safer when they have a gun.”
“Most of the gun violence problem results from the wrong kinds of people carrying guns at the wrong time and place.” Or as Canadian journalist Daniel Gardner says in The Science of Fear, “if you are not a drug dealer or the friend of a drug dealer, and you don’t hang out in places patronized by drug dealers and their friends, your chance of being murdered with a handgun shrinks almost to invisibility.” Or as Gun trainer John Farnham says: “Don’t go stupid places or do stupid things with stupid people.” This lowers your risk of homicide substantially, whether you have a gun or not.
“Everything the bad guys do with their guns is already against the law.” To wit: Sandy Hook shooter shot his mother (murder), illegally transported firearms into a gun free zone, etc. (some say he violated as many as 40 laws).
The first law of economics: “Demand creates its own supply.” Outlawing alcohol didn’t work, making certain drugs illegal hasn’t kept them out of the United States. If cocaine can make it from Colombia to Chicago, who thinks guns won’t make it from Brazil to Chicago?
“Guns are neither inherently good nor inherently evil; guns, that is, to not possess teleology.”
“Guns are important elements of our history and culture. . . .restrictions on the right to ‘keep and bear arms’ amount to the systematic destruction of a valued way of life and are thus a form of cultural genocide.”
Although part of me thinks it is hopeless to think that either side in the debate over whether more guns leads to more crime or less crime will yield any ground to the other, as an outsider I see some possible common ground in the scholarship. If I had to come to a conclusion based on my initial foray into this scholarship it would be this:
(1) In general, more guns do not lead to more crime. Both Duggan’s and Lott’s scholarship (discussed in my previous post) shows this for such crimes as rape, assault, and robbery (as does the work of Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig, for example: “The Social Costs of Gun Ownership,” Journal of Public Economics, 2006). These scholars are on opposite sides of the debate, but seem not to recognize this commonality.
(2) At least as concerns more populous areas, more guns lead to more homicides. Both Duggan’s and Lott’s work show this (as does the work of Cook and Ludwig noted above). Again, this seems like an area of agreement that is not often recognized.
To me, this suggests two implications:
(a) Guns as Force Intensifiers. As Cook and Ludwig suggest, “guns don’t kill people, but they make it real easy” (Gun Violence: The Real Cost, 2000). This is sometimes called the “instrumentality effect,” associated especially with Franklin Zimring’s work — that guns introduce lethality into situations in a way that no other weapon does.
It makes me wonder how many of the 33 percent of homicides annually that result from ARGUMENTS would not have ended in fatality were a gun not present — or, too frequently, a gun and alcohol present. Gun people experienced this closely last year when the former editor of Guns & Ammo magazine Richard Venola was arrested and charged with second degree murder for killing his friend James O’Neill with a rifle. It is reported that Venola appeared to be drunk and was arguing with O’Neill before the shooting. Amazingly, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (full citation below), “the number of homicides resulting from ARGUMENTS declined by nearly half from 10,300 homicides in 1980 to 4,696 homicides in 2008, but as of 2008 remained the most frequently cited circumstance of the known circumstances” (emphasis added).
Gun people know that firearms are force intensifiers. When I took one of the best courses in handgun self-defense in the United States, Massad Ayoob’s “Armed Citizens’ Rules of Engagement,” the gun was seen to represent LETHAL FORCE. The course description was “an intensive 40-hour program encompassing the legal and ethical parameters of the use of lethal force and deadly weapons in defense of themselves and others within the mantle of their protection, including the use of the defensive handgun under stress with an overall emphasis on safety and fast, accurate shot placement.” (In fact, as many know, Ayoob used to train under the auspices of the “Lethal Force Institute.”) We learned that one of the conditions for the legal use of deadly force is when a person is encountering a DISPARITY OF FORCE against them (e.g., force of numbers, positional advantage). In this situation, the gun equalizes the situation because it is in fact a force intensifer for the armed citizen.
(b) The Unequal Distribution of Homicide. The connection between guns and homicide is not evenly distributed through the American population. Focusing attention on the specific issue of handgun homicides by and against certain people yields the greatest payoff. For example, the homicide rate for the United States as a whole was 4.8 per 100,000 in 2010, while the rate in 2008 for Blacks was 27.8 per 100,000, and for Black males age 18 to 24 was 91.1 per 100,000 – almost 20 times the national average. Amazingly, this rate of 91.1 is actually a decline from its peak in 1993 of 195.9 homicides per 100,000. Young Black men 14 to 24 years old are 1% of the US population, but 16% of homicide victims and 27% of homicide offenders. According to the NPR Fresh Air interview with David Kennedy that I am fond of citing, the homicide rate for members of gangs and “neighborhood turf groups” can be as high as 3,000 per 100,000. (And according to Kennedy, gun control is no solution to that problem.)
I don’t find the rate in the report on homicide I am looking at, but 7.5% of all homicides took place in rural areas, which seems to me a higher percentage than the proportion of the American population that lives in rural areas. But I am not certain. (See “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 236018, November 2011).
In response to my post on Michael Glassner’s anti-gun sentiments in his “Culture of Fear” book, my fellow sociologist Matt Loveland pointed me to an article by economist Mark Duggan called “More Guns, More Crime,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in October 2001 (volume 109, number 5, pages 1086-1114).
Duggan’s abstract reads:
This paper examines the relationship between gun ownership and crime. Previous research has suffered from a lack of reliable data on gun ownership. I exploit a unique data set to reliably estimate annual rates of gun ownership at both the state and the county levels during the past two decades. My findings demonstrate that changes in gun ownership are significantly positively related to changes in the homicide rate, with this relationship driven almost entirely by an impact of gun ownership on murders in which a gun is used. The effect of gun ownership on all other crime categories is much less marked. Recent reductions in the fraction of households owning a gun can explain one‐third of the differential decline in gun homicides relative to nongun homicides since 1993.
Having now looked into the Duggan paper, I have two responses:
(1) GUNS AND “CRIME” OR GUNS AND HOMICIDE? The title is “More Guns, More Crime” but Duggan’s strongest findings concern homicide. In fact, at both the state and county level, Duggan finds no relationship between changes in gun ownership and rates of robbery, assault, or rape. At the state level, he finds a small relationship to burglary and larceny (Tables 7), and at the county level to auto theft (Table 9).
So, to the extent that there are concerns, they should have to do with homicide. Not that this is a minor concern, but the fact that more guns do not necessarily lead to more robberies, assaults, or rapes seems an equally significant finding from this study, to me at least.
(2) CHANGES IN MAGAZINE SALES AS PROXIES FOR MORE/LESS GUNS? IF the findings of this study are valid, the more limited claim that more guns = more homicide is still dependent on the quality of Guns & Ammo circulation as a proxy for guns.
Because there are not national gun registries and surveys like the Gallup Poll and the General Social Survey do not have enough cases to do analyses at the state level (much less the county level), scholars have needed to use various proxies to estimate the number of guns in these localities. Duggan writes, “The main impediment to applied work in this area was the absence of a reliable measure of gun ownership that could be measured across geographic areas over time. . . . I argue that state- and county-level sales data for one of the nation’s largest gun magazines, Guns & Ammo, provide a much more accurate way to measure both the level and the change in gun ownership within an area” (p. 1087).
Duggan supports his use of Guns & Ammo as a proxy by including in his article an entire section showing that sales of Guns & Ammo are higher in areas that demographically resemble areas in which there is likely to be more gun ownership (areas that are more rural, less educated, more southern, etc.). He also shows a strong correlation between sales of Guns & Ammo and the number of gun shows in a state.
So, he makes a convincing argument about gun magazine sales as a proxy for gun ownership. But his argument about more guns = more crime is based not on a simple cross-sectional correlation, but on an analysis of CHANGE in gun ownership and CHANGE in crime rates.
So, the change in the circulation of Guns & Ammo in relation to changes in crime rates is what is at issue here. If Guns & Ammo circulation goes up, then homicide rates should go up, if G&A is a good proxy for guns and if more guns = more homicide. Duggan finds this to be the case.
Of course, in gun research nothing is quite as simple as it seems. According to John R. Lott, Jr., there are some peculiarities about Guns & Ammo that reduce its value as a proxy for guns, and especially for changes in gun ownership rates. In the 3rd edition of his book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Lott makes two points: (a) other magazines – specially, Handguns Magazine and American Handgunner – have more of a focus on handguns than Guns & Ammo, which makes them better proxies for the types of guns which are involved in most crime, and (b) Guns & Ammo “was the only one of the top seven largest gun magazines that experienced a drop in sales during the 1990s” (p. 297). Lott also says that a vice president at Primedia told him that during the 1990s, from 5 to 20 percent of national sales of Guns & Ammo were purchased by the company and then given away free to dentists’ and doctors’ offices. AND that these free copies were not distributed randomly throughout the country, but were targeted to locations where Primedia thought gun purchases would be increasing, including “areas where they thought that crime rates were going up” (p. 298).
Lott provides a table in More Guns, Less Crime that shows that of 7 gun magazines (G&A, American Handgunner, Handguns, American Hunter, American Rifleman, and North American Hunter), only sales of Guns & Ammo shows a statistically significant positive relationship to homicide (using two-tailed t-tests, Table A7.1, p. 366).
But, wait, there is still more. In an unpublished paper with Florenz Plassman, Lott conducts his own analyses using Handguns Magazine as a proxy and making some statistical adjustments for the fact that in most counties there are very small number of homicides in any given year. The results of these analyses find – congruent with Duggan – no evidence for a correlation between guns and rapes or robberies. They DO find, however, that “counties with population of more than 100,000 persons provides some evidence that increases in the number of magazine sales [i.e., in guns] cause the number of murder to increase,” but that this relationship does not hold true for all counties (p. 22).
They speculate that the effect of guns on murders may differ for urban and rural areas, which seems to make sense on its face considering that in some rural counties as many as 90 percent of households own guns (according to James D. Wright’s essay, “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America”).
INITIAL CONCLUSION: There are no simple answers when it comes to assessing the relationship between guns and crime. Anyone who says there is probably has a dog in the fight or horse in the race or a certain fish to fry. This blog entry considers just two of many, many very, very statistically complex scholarly publications that speak to the question of whether more guns equal more crime or less. In my next entry I will consider some of the lessons I take from my initial foray into this research.
