American Gun Culture is Changing
Glenn Harland Reynolds
Guns are more plentiful in America than ever; to say lots of people own them would be an understatement. Handgun sales are and have been booming, and gun sales in general have been going up for decades. People who, in my grandfather’s time, would have had a shotgun, a deer rifle and maybe the odd Police Positive or Chief’s Special revolver are now buying bigger gun safes for all the firearms they own for sport and self-defense purposes. According to some estimates, America has somewhere around half the world’s total number of citizen-owned firearms. (As Rosie the Riveter said, “We can do it!”)
As readers of this magazine know, carry permits are common and, as this was going to print, 29 states had constitutional carry, which requires no permit at all for those who can legally possess a firearm. Indeed, open carry itself isn’t something only for Western films. It’s not unusual for me to see someone with a handgun on their hip walking around downtown Knoxville—a few even have a Bowie knife on their other hip. (In Tennessee, since the passage of knife-rights legislation a few years back, automatic knives—the polite term for what used to be called “switchblades”—and fixed blades of any length are legal to carry, which makes me feel vaguely tempted to wear a rapier just to class things up.) People who might have unnecessarily panicked at such a sight a couple of decades ago barely notice now.
So, guns are common. But are they really normal—by this, I mean are they normal in the way they were in my grandfather’s day? Well, I’d say we’re now seeing the beginning of a new normal.
When I was a kid, you could walk into the Sears at the mall and they’d have a gun department, with both long guns and handguns. Catalogs listed them, and Christmas ads in magazines—including kids’ magazines—extolled .22 rifles or .410 shotguns as suitable gifts for boys and girls. Sometimes the ads pictured entire families proudly displaying new guns around the Christmas tree.
High schools had rifle teams, even in New York City. A New York Post retrospective remembers: “Many of the city’s public high schools had shooting clubs and a few even had gun ranges on their premises, according to accounts from the Department of Education and others.” (You can find photos online of teams carrying their rifles to a match as they ride the subway or posing on the school steps with their guns.) Elsewhere, high schoolers would hunt on the way to school or on the way home, leaving their guns in their lockers. Pickup trucks in high school parking lots had gun racks, sometimes with rifles or shotguns visible.
Summer camps and Boy Scout troops inevitably taught riflery, and even my junior high school had an after-school shooting program staffed by NRA volunteers. And none of it was controversial. The “gun culture” was just part of the general culture, as it had been for over two centuries.
Nowadays, after decades of political and cultural attacks from the far Left, guns are common, and there’s a booming gun culture, but it’s different. Interestingly, an increasing number of schools do have shooting teams again. The Scouts still teach riflery, as does 4H, the NRA Youth Hunter Education Challenge (yhec.nra.org) and others. And today, an increasing number of folks, even on the Left, are buying guns for self-defense. But also today, guns are treated as a political statement by some, or they are kept in secret by others who are perhaps afraid of what their friends or neighbors might say.
Sometimes hiding guns from the general public is taken to the point of absurdity, as when, years ago, the filmmaker Steven Spielberg used CGI to turn the federal agents’ guns into walkie talkies in the reissue of the movie E.T.
Actually, these days, Hollywood is a diverse and complicated thing. There are plenty of anti-gun politics to talk about, but then we get a popular character like John Wick. He has plenty of guns, and he’s good with them, but still the things he does are obviously not how guns are actually used in America. Even in movies where guns do play a major role, they’re often not shown realistically. But then, a few popular films and TV dramas have gotten them right, such as much of what Taylor Sheridan has brought us with Yellowstone, 1883 and his other productions.
Of course, most guns in America aren’t carried by individuals like those portrayed in films and TV dramas. They’re carried by ordinary people, or they sit in gun safes waiting for a trip to the range or the hunting grounds. A realistic portrayal might show a gun carried by an ordinary person stopping a crime, as opposed to an arsenal of guns carried by a distinctly unordinary person. (No disrespect to you, Keanu; I’m just saying.)
Yes, movies aren’t realistic. Most people don’t drive like people do in the Fast and Furious movies, either. But you see more automobiles portrayed normally in most movies than you do guns.
All of this has a lot to do with politics, myths about guns and even misunderstandings by producers who clearly don’t understand this culture. Gun controllers started a campaign to “denormalize” gun ownership in the 1970s. They did this through media, with increasingly restrictive rules on the sale, carry and shooting of guns and through across-the-board efforts to eliminate this very mainstream American gun culture.
Even now, the Ad Council—once known for its work targeting forest fires and crime prevention with characters like Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog—produces fearmongering anti-gun propaganda exaggerating the supposed dangers of firearm ownership.
These efforts to denormalize guns have worked in certain strains of popular culture and in far-Left enclaves. I remember when I was in law school and I mentioned that I like to go shooting. A classmate asked incredulously, “You’ve shot a gun?” That question was said with a tone of shock—this would not have happened a couple of decades prior.
Fortunately, this cultural divide has changed somewhat since the turn of the millennium and especially since the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision of 2008. But we have further to go.
So, that said, how do we continue to renormalize guns in the various slices of the American culture where they have been marginalized? The answer is actually not that complicated. We basically have to do in reverse what was done in the attempt to denormalize them.
As the NRA has long done and is now putting a lot of resources behind, we need to encourage shooting clubs and shooting teams for high school and college students and to support public ranges. We need to continue to defend the citizens’ right to legally purchase guns—again, as this association does so well.
When people walked into a Sears or a Walmart and saw a gun department back in the era of black-and-white TV, even those who never wanted to buy or own guns were exposed to them in a very normal context, and thus to the idea that their fellow citizens owned and bought guns. This still happens today in a lot of stores, but nowadays, you aren’t likely to walk into a general retailer and see guns a few aisles away from refrigerators and washing machines.
On the other hand, you can go on various websites, which did not exist back then, and order an enormous variety of firearms and ammunition (some of my recent law students even launched a successful ammo shop called LuckyGunner.com and this is now where I buy most of mine). Firearms ordered on the internet must—notwithstanding the claims of anti-gunners—be delivered through a licensed gun dealer who will make sure of the paperwork and thus the background check today, whereas, back in my youth, they could be mailed to your front door. But still, the wide array of choices available today trumps anything you could have gotten at Sears or anywhere else back then.
Hunting isn’t as common as it was a half century ago, but it has hardly faded away—and indeed is increasingly popular among nontraditional participants who want organic meat untainted by antibiotics or hormones.
Without getting into all the statistics, it is clearly true that the shooting sports have become much more common than they had been in a long time. (I saw a woman at my gym hoisting a 15 pound barbell up to her shoulder over and over again. “Practicing for 3-gun?” I asked. “How did you know?” she responded. It was pretty obvious, really.) I also now run into shooting clubs at my range all the time, made up of people of all ages and demographics.
Making it easier to carry a gun has gone a long way already to reinforcing how normal this right is. Further progress toward constitutional carry will help. For a long time, I tended to look askance at open carry as tactically unsound (the bad guys know you have a gun) and unnecessarily provocative to those with an acquired dislike of firearms. But Leftists have normalized a lot of things and behavior by simply exposing people to what they hoped would become normal. Why shouldn’t we? It works.
One of my philosophy professors used to talk about the “normative power of the actual,” which is just a fancy way of saying that people tend to think that the things they’re used to are right. We need to get even more people accustomed to guns, at all levels of society. The more this happens, the more it just factors into people’s sense of what is, yes, normal.
And we should openly promote the gun culture, not only through the media, but simply by talking about it in mixed social settings. That’s not a problem for most of us. And everyone here would agree America needs a strong NRA.
Despite the best efforts of the other side, in America, gun ownership has always been normal. Let’s keep it that way, by treating it that way.
