Their Aim Is True

Taking stock of America's real gun culture

Abigail Kohn from the May 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Ms. 45

I met Thea in an introductory handgun class that was taught by two other women. An attorney, she was a vivaciously attractive white woman in her mid-40s. She had grown up under difficult circumstances in the Midwest and had married her childhood sweetheart. Although he had kept a shotgun, Thea had no interest in guns back then. She did, however, have an abiding interest in law enforcement, and in her late 20s she applied to the FBI Academy and was accepted. But before she could join the agency, her husband died, leaving her to raise their two daughters alone. She did not join the FBI, though eventually she went to law school and became an attorney.

Thea became much more interested in guns when she began dating a gun enthusiast, whom she has since married. Thea associates her husband Jonathan’s gun enthusiasm with his willingness to care for and protect her. Initially, I was ambivalent when she told me that because Thea seemed so feminist in both her professional and personal life. But her interview reminded me that people are more complex than labels can render them. Thea made it clear that these issues are complicated for her. She said: "I made a career, personally and professionally, of empowering people. But as good as I’ve always been about standing up for other people, I’m not the least bit good about standing up for myself. And so it’s very important to me to have somebody -- I mean, I didn’t have a clue how important that was until I was with Jonathan -- to have a man protect me. And I feel like he is completely protective of me. I just kind of bask in that."

Shooting makes Thea feel confident and strong -- or, as she puts it, like she has "something else going on besides estrogen depletion." She admires shooters as people who know how to stand up for themselves. "I think of them being kind of in charge of their destinies. And I think maybe that’s another reason why this is something that’s good for me now." She linked her admiration for shooters to her difficult childhood. Shooting has helped her find an inner strength. "I’m a person who loves to stand up to bullies. My old man [her father] was such a bully -- this is a very new skill that I’m learning to cultivate. It’s very hard for me. And this makes me feel strong."

The Rifleman

I met Leonard while I was becoming a cowboy action shooter. A somewhat quiet and reserved man, he was a regular in the group. When I asked if I could interview him, his exact words were, "You don’t work for Sarah Brady, do you?" He agreed to talk with me only after I assured him that I did not work for the gun-control advocate.

Leonard was particularly interesting because he was one of the few African-Americans who competed regularly at local and regional cowboy shoots. Leonard was a middle-class family man, an architect who lived and worked in the city, and he had also been in the military.

He loved Winchester rifles, and apparently had quite a collection. I asked him why he liked cowboy shooting, and why he thought there were so few black men on the modern-day cowboy range. He said that he thought it was because so few African-Americans know about their ethnic heritage on the 19th-century frontier. He thought blacks weren’t likely to learn about their heritage from Hollywood Westerns, the source of so much popular knowledge of the frontier, because Westerns rarely portrayed the African-American contribution to the Old West.

He said: "I think a lot of times -- until just recently, maybe in the ’60s -- when you used to see Western movies, you didn’t see black faces. But I knew ever since I was a kid that there were [black cowboys], because we had pictures of guys from around 1901."

Leonard was quite knowledgeable about the contribution of African-Americans to the historic frontier, and he derived his pleasure in the sport from this actual history, as opposed to the mythologized history that is dramatized by the sport of cowboy shooting. When I asked him what guns meant to him, he said, "I always thought that if you had a good horse, a good Winchester, and a good backpack, you could go into the woods and stay forever. So it’s kind of a romanticized freedom, maybe."

It was easy to see how this image could appeal to a man who lived and worked in a highly urban environment. Leonard had a sophisticated understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality, but that knowledge did not diminish his pleasure in cowboy action shooting.

Paradigm Found

Contrary to my initial expectations of the "gun nuts" who presumably constitute what critics disparagingly refer to as "the cult of the gun in America," most members of "the gun culture" I’ve talked with are typical citizens. They live normal American lives, insofar as any of us is "normal." They have complex and sophisticated ideas about what guns do, what guns are for, and why guns are an important part of American history, society, and culture. A point that is consistently overlooked in the heat and vitriol of the gun debate is that millions of Americans have ostensibly enjoyable, or at the very least ordinary, experiences with guns all the time.

My own professional and personal experiences have also helped me understand why shooters are so resistant to the idea that guns are really only weapons of violence. They can certainly be used that way, and I don’t know a shooter who doesn’t acknowledge that point. But guns are also about sport and recreation. They are about spending time with friends and others who share the pleasure of challenging sporting competition.

For that reason, when critics equate guns only with violence, they miss a large part of the picture, and they misrepresent the complex nature of America’s diverse, multilayered gun culture. If guns were only about tragedy and death, then they would not be so enjoyed and so firmly incorporated into the lives of so many different Americans. The people who actually are part of the gun culture often have rational, thoughtful, or simply mundane reasons to own and use guns. Ridiculing and insulting them to further policy agendas strikes me as both counterproductive and wrong.

I took up shooting and researching guns to confront my ambivalence about guns and their relationship to violence, and to try to understand why they are such powerful symbols in American society. If I learned nothing else during my research, I learned that "the gun culture" is not some concrete, bounded entity that is manifested at gun shows or at shooting ranges, or in NRA magazines.

The gun culture is a fundamental part of American culture as a whole. Members of America’s gun culture don’t live in a vacuum. They serve on school boards; they attend town meetings; they go to neighborhood parties and community picnics; they go to their jobs in large and small places of business. They have incorporated guns into their lives, and many of them really aren’t interested in changing that fact. Until critics of guns and the gun culture recognize that fact, they are only going to alienate gun owners and polemicize the gun debate. Neither result will further a goal sought by both sides: to reduce the amount of violence in American society.