SHOOTERS

Here's a review of SHOOTERS: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures, Abigail Kohn's study of, duh, shooters in the San Fran area, in Reason Online:

If there’s a gun in a scene, an old writer’s adage says, it had better go off. As that bit of advice suggests, there are few symbols more powerful than guns. They can represent liberation from oppression or serve as a weighty physical reminder of a lurking existential threat. No matter the association, the powerful emotional responses that guns elicit are largely responsible for the stagnant and vitriolic nature of the current gun control debate.

In Shooters, anthropologist Abigail Kohn argues that both sides of the debate have become so alienated from one another that they effectively form subcultures, and she studies them accordingly. Kohn calls Shooters an ethnography, an anthropological study conducted from within a culture to gain the “natives’ point of view.” Rather than studying gun enthusiasts though literature and statistics, or from behind a duck blind to ensure “objectivity,” Kohn spent time with enthusiasts, interviewing them, taking classes with them, and shooting with them.

A sort of Margaret Mead among heavily armed Samoans, if you will, with better restaurants. I liked the book, if for no other reason that Ms. Kohn took the absolutely radical crazy step of asking shooters what they called themselves! Turns out we never call ourselves "gun enthusiasts," "gun fanciers" or "gun nuts." We call ourselves "shooters." That bought her points right off the bat.

Like the writer from Reason, I think her conclusions on gun control are shaky, sort of like they were an afterthough insisted upon by some nitwit New York editor. The book is definitely worth reading, if for no other reason than Ms. Kohn's finely tuned introduction. Still,. as long as she was in San Fran, I was a little disappointed that she didn't delve into the mating habits of the indigenous cultures...