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Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy
A stunning exposô of the roots of American gun culture.
On progressive websites and in newspaper columns Gun Show Nation has become part of a lively debate on guns and democracy in America. "Burbick gets it," Buzzflash says, "she cuts through to the heart of the psychology of guns." Cultural historian, critic, and gun owner Joan Burbick examines the lethal politics of gun ownership, answering that perennial question about America Why are Americans so obsessed with guns? Looking at the nation from the floor of a gun show, Burbick uncovers a powerful conservative ideology that attempts to place gun ownership at the center of our democracy. "Careful in her conclusions, lively in her writing" ( Booklist ), her analysis takes us from the history of the NRA, through the gun lobby's engagement with domestic politics that reached its high-water mark during the Reagan era, to the movement's contemporary hostility to the United Nations.
The most thorough account yet of the beliefs that millions of ordinary Americans hold about guns, Gun Show Nation delves into the political machinations that have shaped the gun debate in America and draws fascinating conclusions about gun culture and national identity.
On progressive websites and in newspaper columns Gun Show Nation has become part of a lively debate on guns and democracy in America. "Burbick gets it," Buzzflash says, "she cuts through to the heart of the psychology of guns." Cultural historian, critic, and gun owner Joan Burbick examines the lethal politics of gun ownership, answering that perennial question about America Why are Americans so obsessed with guns? Looking at the nation from the floor of a gun show, Burbick uncovers a powerful conservative ideology that attempts to place gun ownership at the center of our democracy. "Careful in her conclusions, lively in her writing" ( Booklist ), her analysis takes us from the history of the NRA, through the gun lobby's engagement with domestic politics that reached its high-water mark during the Reagan era, to the movement's contemporary hostility to the United Nations.
The most thorough account yet of the beliefs that millions of ordinary Americans hold about guns, Gun Show Nation delves into the political machinations that have shaped the gun debate in America and draws fascinating conclusions about gun culture and national identity.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 3, 2017
As a work of journalism informed by academic expertise, this is a good and informative book. It offers some compelling arguments about the gun as a political fetish and the role of gun shows themselves in building the current right. It also is especially useful in identifying key texts and major figures involved in the gun-rights movement. In 2016, it feels prescient. From an academic perspective, I found it lacking. It is described as an ethnography but the author's encounters with people in the field come off as somewhat random and lacking in specificity. Instead of getting thick descriptions of people in context, we get somewhat cursory descriptions of gun shows and generalizations about what "people say " there. There are some interviews that are discussed at greater length, but these are few and far between by the standards of ethnographic research.
August 22, 2016
Good book, even great in some parts. I'm a little confused by the negative reviews, to be honest. There are 27 pages worth of references and notes at the end of the book. I see no need for them to be physically located at the bottom of each page. And if you're a gun advocate, then you won't agree much at all with the author's opinions and (heavily referenced) conclusions. So if you're checking out some of the other reviews, please note that some readers seem to be rating the author's political views rather than her book. She's on the left and I don't think she tries to hide it. So yeah, you're more apt to like it if you too lean toward the left side of the aisle. If you're a bit more on the right, conservative side, then you might want to read something by Glen Beck instead. What can I say?
December 26, 2007
I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness.
for the rest, go here:
http://satanscientist.livejournal.com...
for the rest, go here:
http://satanscientist.livejournal.com...
December 15, 2017
Gun Show Nation is provocative. It highlights several disturbing connections between guns, racism, and the erosion of American democracy. At times it seems to skate over the surface with strings of generalizations needing support (the endnotes do offer some support). Other times, it offers fresh insights that stem from innovative research. The blending of reading old magazines, interviewing gun advocates, and surveying broad historical trends makes this book stand out.
Burbick writes well, which makes this book a quick read. But, the content penetrates. Her writing exhibits a rare depth and breadth of knowledge of American history and culture. The book will linger beyond the hours spent turning its pages. I anticipate returning to it for rerereading.
Burbick writes well, which makes this book a quick read. But, the content penetrates. Her writing exhibits a rare depth and breadth of knowledge of American history and culture. The book will linger beyond the hours spent turning its pages. I anticipate returning to it for rerereading.
July 29, 2009
There has to be something wrong with a book that fails in its arguments to convince me of something I already strongly believe-- that the US's gun-culture is poisonous and grounded in racism, misogyny, and colonialism. Weirdly non-footnoted, unsupported points, straw-man arguments, and conclusions drawn from logic the book doesn't prove, this book was startlingly bad.
April 23, 2008
I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness.
All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction.
Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color.
In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.)
One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.
All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction.
Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color.
In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.)
One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.
April 22, 2019
This book deals with gun culture, looking at the identities around guns from early America to today. The author focuses on white men because that is what they find to be the largest demographic. Well researched and easy to follow. I want to find a similar book that goes into the double standards for people of color.
October 30, 2018
There are many other narratives that can serve the reader enlightened with the gun theme better than this. Should not be the primary source.
Read
February 9, 2024Core class book
April 30, 2007
Nearly everyone trying to understand the surge of right wing political strength over the last twenty five years seems to be fixated on the role of religion; Burbick, for a change, focuses on that other social issue, gun control and second amendment rights. She gives a sweeping history of the last hundred years, and the tradition of white males in the US proudly arming themselves while African Americans are disarmed. She also shows the way right wing advocates appropriated and revised the discourse of civil rights to claim to be oppressed by the threat of gun control laws. Expanding on the theme, she shows the way the gun rights discourse intersects with anger at ex-wives (laws against those under restraining orders possessing firearms are opposed because of the many police officers they effect(!)), the religious right, and fear of a UN-controlled America (i.e. restraints on US foreign policy). I wish she'd looked a little more into the intersections of veterans, law enforcement, militias, etc, but overall, quite good.
January 23, 2013
I found this book in a used bookstore. I thought it could give me a better idea about the debates the nation is facing on gun control versus gun rights. Instead, the author gives convoluted bromides on white males who somehow use guns to prevent economic and social justice.
Now, I believe that we should have a fair society, but how does one define economic and social justice? There is no attempt at defintion, just statements like, "How much easier it is to believe in the politics of the gun, and to fight for the right to be armed, than to step in front of the gun and build social and civil institutions that sustain our society and promote economic and political justice."
What are these "social and civil institutions," who defines economic and political justice, how do we know when we get there? These and more questions are not answered, it is just feel good aspirations that sound noble, but are ultimately hollow without definitions.
Now, I believe that we should have a fair society, but how does one define economic and social justice? There is no attempt at defintion, just statements like, "How much easier it is to believe in the politics of the gun, and to fight for the right to be armed, than to step in front of the gun and build social and civil institutions that sustain our society and promote economic and political justice."
What are these "social and civil institutions," who defines economic and political justice, how do we know when we get there? These and more questions are not answered, it is just feel good aspirations that sound noble, but are ultimately hollow without definitions.
March 7, 2009
The author presents some interesting research, but it's hard to spot a coherent thesis among it all. I did enjoy the book because I learned a lot about the history of guns and "gun rights" in America; it helped me make connections I hadn't before and better understand the mindset behind the gun rights movement and my own discomfort with gun culture. But I think it could have been written in a much more compelling way.
March 2, 2013
Well-researched but kind of unfocused. Burbick doesn't provide much of a central argument. I'm surprised tragedies like Charles Whitman's killing of 17 people from the University of Texas in 1966, The Branch Dividians in Waco, or even Columbine were not mentioned. It would have offered some great insight if she had talked to a psychologist or sociologist, too. Glad I read it, but I was expecting a little more.
August 24, 2012
Interesting analysis and a few good points, but parts of it seemed very repetitive and irrelevant. Glad I read it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. I think it all could have been said more concisely, and there were issues I thought would be addressed that weren't.
January 15, 2014
Yes it's a book about guns. I think you can't get that much Information out of it. Some parts are interesting and helpful but some...aren't that great. You could read this book but you don't have to. It's an okay book
May 19, 2012
Uneven and sometimes repetitive, but a few individual chapters (8, for example) are clear and thought-provoking.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews