Modern Gun Ownership is Just Another Consumer Fantasy About Empowerment

One of the first things we knew about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin of Donald Trump, was that he was killed wearing a “Demolition Ranch” t-shirt. Demolition Ranch is a YouTube channel (and associated merchandise brand) owned and operated by Texas veterinarian Mathew Carriker. In its 13 years of existence, Demolition Ranch has produced thousands of hours of content, some instructional but most gleefully adolescent, featuring Carriker and his friends using often outlandish firearms to destroy everything from ballistic dummies to derelict cars. It has over eleven million followers.

Two days after the assassination attempt, Carriker posted an emotional video offering condolences to the victims and distancing himself from the shooter. “Across all of my videos, we don’t talk about politics at all,” Carrick assures those tuning in for the first time. “This channel is not about violence, this channel never will be.”

Your reading of the significance of Crooks’ identification with the “Demolitia,” as Carriker’s followers are known, probably tracks to your feelings about gun culture more broadly. Many Americans will find Carriker’s disavowal of politics and violence absurd, given the nature of the content that he produces. (Only months ago, he appeared in a video produced by fellow gun influencer and Republican congressional candidate Brandon Herrera, attempting a ballistic recreation of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.) Others will find any attempt to implicate “Demolition Ranch” in Crooks’ violence an affront to the millions of law-abiding citizens who, like Carriker, own guns for self-defense and enjoy shooting as recreation.

These divergent understandings of the relationship between gun violence and gun culture are representative of our country’s inability to reconcile the antinomies of the “gun debate.”  As soon as it was clear that the investigation of Crooks would yield no unambiguous partisan motive, questions about his t-shirt and what it means largely faded from the media conversation.

If our national debate about guns has ossified to the point that such questions can be so quickly memory holed, our gun culture—bolstered by an unprecedented spike in gun purchases, millions of them made by new gun owners, during the early days of the pandemic—continues to flourish, or metastasize, depending on your perspective. Our increasingly armed society has also become one increasingly willing to entertain the potential necessity of political violence.

Two new books—historian Andrew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, and sociologist David Yamane’s Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture—attempt to explain what brought us to this point, and to break the stalemate of the gun debate, by transforming our understanding of the relationship between gun violence and gun culture. The comparison of these explanations reveals much about the limits of US liberalism’s ability to contend with our increasingly armed society.

Rejecting familiar accounts of the 18th-century origins of contemporary gun culture, McKevitt’s history attends to the transformations of “gun capitalism” since the early days of the Cold War, providing an economically grounded account of recent transformations in US gun culture and the attendant emergence of our hyper-partisan 21st-century debate over gun regulation.

In Yamane’s sociologically inflected memoir, he tells the story of his own journey, as a Japanese American liberal academic, toward becoming a gun owner and what he calls an “armed citizen.” In so doing, he seeks to challenge many of the truisms that shape liberal critiques of gun culture. In Yamane’s liberal progress narrative, gun culture may have had its origins in the racial and colonial violence of the United States’ past, but, like other American institutions, has the potential to be transformed: “I believe the arc of gun culture history is long, but it bends toward inclusion,” he writes. “And if it doesn’t, we need to bend it.” Yamane illustrates this point with a picture of MLK Jr. he drew in second grade, presumably to reinforce his commitment to this path.

Despite such unusual gestures toward inclusiveness, many readers will be tempted to understand Yamane as standing on the opposite “side” of McKevitt in the gun debate. Yamane is well-known among gun scholars for his sympathetic reading of US gun culture and has spoken at the National Rifle Association’s annual firearms law seminar. McKevitt, on the other hand, has been targeted by the far right for his leftist takes on social media.

But these authors are hardly representative of the gun debate as it has come to be defined in the national media. Both are broadly skeptical of the efficacy of the reforms proposed by the contemporary gun control movement; both identify as politically left of center. Their books, however, present readers with radically divergent approaches to navigating our contemporary impasse.

The overarching aim of Gun Curious, as Yamane states in its preface, is to prove that “guns are normal and normal people use guns.” Toward this end, it ranges over a number of statistics that will be familiar to gun rights advocates but are often overlooked by those who favor more gun regulation. Many of these arguments present genuinely inconvenient facts for many arguments for gun control. For instance, the AR-15, despite its central place in current policy debates, is employed in only a tiny fraction of gun homicides, the overwhelming majority of which are perpetrated with handguns. Similarly, despite the media focus on gun homicides and especially on mass shootings, the majority of intentional gun deaths in the United States are suicides.

Even in its more sociological register, Gun Curious does not attempt to construct a bulletproof case for the notion that gun ownership makes one safer. Instead, Yamane argues that, like more familiar risk calculations involving alcohol consumption or backyard swimming pools, decisions surrounding gun risk are personal ones about which reasonable people can differ.

Yamane explains his own decision to keep guns through an adaptation of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager regarding the existence of god: “it is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” This analogy to the personal nature of religious faith—and the comparison between First and Second Amendments rights that it implies—is of central importance in Yamane’s defense of self-defensive gun ownership.

In this vein, Gun Curious tells a deeply personal story about gun culture, but one that nonetheless brackets crucial aspects of its author’s decisions as a gun owner from its consideration. The primal scene of Yamane’s memoir is an encounter with domestic abuse. Walking his children in from the car in the parking lot of an apartment complex he has moved into following a divorce, Yamane encounters a man he doesn’t recognize threatening his female neighbor. He is afraid for her safety and that of his children.

It is hard not to describe the scene as emasculating, though Yamane (who, like many gun writers, is dismissive of attempts to psychologize men’s desire for guns) does not. However one theorizes this moment, in its wake, “the feeling of insecurity and desire to protect my family” played a major role in putting Yamane on the path from “orthodox liberal who knew nothing about firearms into an average American gun owner.”

Yamane realizes this narrative will disturb most liberals. “Many will see it as allowing me ‘to identify with hegemonic masculinity through fantasies of violence and self-defense,’” he admits, quoting fellow sociologist Angela Stroud. After this momentary consideration of his potentially gendered relationship with guns, he deflects, suggesting that liberals’ discomfort with his defensive gun ownership is indicative of a “fundamental reservation about the capacity for violence guns represent, and, indeed, about violence itself,” a reservation that is fundamentally contradictory, because “in truth, most liberals are not really opposed to guns or violence altogether. We simply prefer to outsource them to police.”

This last point may be true, as far as it goes, but admitting as much does not resolve the questions Yamane repeatedly raises, but does not attempt to answer, about the fundamental forces driving his attraction to guns.  This lack of introspection becomes most acute in Yamane’s chapter about his AR-15.

Over the course of Gun Curious, Yamane explains how he came to own his thirteen guns, providing detailed rationalizations for why “accumulating a super-owner level arsenal is actually quite easy, and sensible” for a gun hobbyist. But his explanations flounder in discussing his purchase of his Bushmaster XM15, the AR-15-style rifle used by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook that was advertised with the slogan “consider your man card reissued.” “If I had seen the ‘man card’ advertising campaign, it didn’t register with me,” Yamane demurs. “I was not a vigilante, insurrectionist, or insecure in my masculinity…I bought [the Bushmaster XM15] because I could.”

For all the novel aspects of Yamane’s narrative, this near-tautology is the heart of this fundamentally normal story. A middle-aged man’s quest to reclaim his sense of security through gun ownership is justified by an affirmation of his abstract right to own them.

Questions about gun consumerism are also central to McKevitt’s story of contemporary gun culture’s roots in global capitalism in Gun Country. In a remarkably researched and entertainingly delivered account of the mid-20th-century arms trade, McKevitt details how a shady group of gun entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War, flooded the US gun market with millions of cheap handguns and rifles, the deadly detritus of World War II.

McKevitt makes a bluntly materialist argument as he explores the ramifications of this transformation of the US gun market: “The sociological question of how societies can prevent gun violence is not any great mystery…Societies prevent gun violence by restricting the population’s access to guns. Mountains of data demonstrate that fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths.”

Even many gun regulation advocates will balk at the lack of nuance here, but by refusing to miss the forest for the sociological trees, McKevitt is able to provide a compelling explanation for the explosive growth of the self-defensive gun culture that Yamane celebrates, and the persistence of the US’s exceptionally high rates of gun violence.

Most liberals, McKevitt argues, make the mistake of accepting historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous diagnosis of US gun culture as an “vestige of a violent past.”  By attending to the modern story of how a massive influx of surplus firearms laid the groundwork for radical transformations in US gun culture, politics, and law, Gun Country refuses the cultural determinism that has led so many to either celebrate or lament contemporary gun culture as an inevitable consequence of our national origins.

This is not to say that McKevitt is peddling easy fixes. He finds in the gun control movement a politics shaped by the broader gender politics of the Cold War. While highlighting the origins of the gun control movement in little-known women-led organizations with transformative goals, he argues that, by the 1970s, masculinity had become “the currency of gun politics,” creating a political arena defined by a pragmatism that pitted “manly men who wielded guns against manly men who controlled them.” What resulted was a political movement that attempted “to distinguish between the virtuous ‘law-abiding citizen’ and the unvirtuous criminal,” incapable of the ambitious reforms necessary to face down the “juggernaut of gun capitalism.”

In considering his preferred path forward in his conclusion, McKevitt makes a brief and somewhat unsatisfying call to pursue an “abolition of state violence,” arguing that “the disarmament of police forces” is necessary to justify disarming private citizens.  While on the one hand a radical or even anarchist position, McKevitt’s invocation of “abolition” also functions as an olive branch to gun owners who share his distrust of state power. He goes on to sketch out a more pragmatic approach to building bridges with gun rights advocates, invoking an historical understanding of the Second Amendment as a “compact between citizen-soldiers not citizen consumers,” a collective right that protects a tradition of participation in the common defense rather than an individual right to own.

In a certain sense, McKevitt’s reading of the Second Amendment, like Yamane’s, is an attempt to “bend the arc” of gun culture. The armed citizen soldiers of the young Republic were “defending” a country that was in the process of being violently wrested from Indigenous peoples, to say nothing of its economic dependence on the violent control of a restive population of enslaved people. But both McKevitt and Yamane reject any originalism that would imagine the United States’ relationship to guns to be wholly determined by the conditions of its founding.

McKevitt, however, refuses the liberal affirmation of gun owners’ right to privately enjoy their own consumer desires, a right that Yamane holds sacrosanct. Gun Country is the origin story of a violent and very modern consumer fantasy, a fantasy that has come to shape Americans’ fundamental relationships with guns and with each other.

We may never learn the details of what broke inside of Thomas Matthew Crooks’ mind in the days leading up to the moment he killed and died on a Pennsylvania rooftop. But his T-shirt tells us that, in the depths of his private despair, he embraced a mass-produced belief shared by millions of Americans, a faith that his manhood and agency could be reclaimed behind the stock of a gun.

This conception of individual empowerment, so central to our contemporary gun culture, is neither an anachronistic remnant of a violent past nor an immutable foundation of American democracy. Those that refuse to accept the normality of US gun violence must join McKevitt in the difficult work of reckoning with how this fantasy has been constructed, and how it might be undone.