What do you think?
Rate this book
Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
An eye-opening portrait of the gun sellers who navigated the social turmoil leading up to the January 6 Capitol attack
Gun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy.
Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Jennifer Carlson takes readers to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture—armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship—as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process.
Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy to health.
Gun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy.
Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Jennifer Carlson takes readers to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture—armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship—as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process.
Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy to health.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2023
10 people are currently reading
264 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Carlson
11 books10 followersJennifer Dawn Carlson is associate professor of sociology as well as government and public policy at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. Her writing has appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 7, 2024
I have several qualms with this book and because writing reviews provides me with an illusion of my own intellectual and literary importance, I will enumerate my grievances.
1. It was just poorly written. The book as a whole was unorganized and difficult to follow. The author has excessive fondness for compound complex sentences and makes prolific use of em dashes. Syntactically, this book needed much more variation.
2. Actually, it probably shouldn’t have been a book at all. A series of blog posts, think tank commentaries, or even opinion pieces, would have sufficed.
3. The author advocates in the conclusion for a sort of “civic grace” or “political empathy” that allows us to approach persons adhering to different ideologies with compassion and a desire to understand their views without validating them. I wholeheartedly endorse this. But to me, the author did a poor job applying this theme to her treatment of her subjects: gun sellers. It seemed that the main theses of this book were written before data collection, and testimonies of sellers were fitted to preconceived ideas. This feels intellectually dishonest.
4. Ultimately, I didn’t feel that the book said much that was new. I learned that gun sellers are often very conservative, and often take an active role in shaping the conservative ethos. This is thoroughly unsurprising.
1. It was just poorly written. The book as a whole was unorganized and difficult to follow. The author has excessive fondness for compound complex sentences and makes prolific use of em dashes. Syntactically, this book needed much more variation.
2. Actually, it probably shouldn’t have been a book at all. A series of blog posts, think tank commentaries, or even opinion pieces, would have sufficed.
3. The author advocates in the conclusion for a sort of “civic grace” or “political empathy” that allows us to approach persons adhering to different ideologies with compassion and a desire to understand their views without validating them. I wholeheartedly endorse this. But to me, the author did a poor job applying this theme to her treatment of her subjects: gun sellers. It seemed that the main theses of this book were written before data collection, and testimonies of sellers were fitted to preconceived ideas. This feels intellectually dishonest.
4. Ultimately, I didn’t feel that the book said much that was new. I learned that gun sellers are often very conservative, and often take an active role in shaping the conservative ethos. This is thoroughly unsurprising.
April 30, 2023
I had the pleasure of seeing Ms. Carlson on a panel discussion at the LA Times Festival of Books. This prompted me to buy the book and it did not disappoint. It's a frightening look into the minds of gun sellers and it's simply a mentality to which I can't relate. Ms. Carlson keeps a remarkably balanced perspective throughout and she's an exceptional writer as well. The book ends on a poignant note as she returns to the challenging relationship with her now deceased father, a subject with which she opened the book. Highly recommend.
March 20, 2024
Judging from the regular inquiries I receive from international media, a robust civilian gun culture is enigmatic outside the United States. Or at least the particular civilian gun culture of the United States is. As the interdisciplinary study of guns shows, it is enigmatic to many Americans as well.
In the growing field of gun studies, MacArthur Foundation-certified genius Jennifer Carlson holds a singular position at the top. Merchants of the Right follows her pathbreaking studies of (mostly) white men who publicly carry guns in the context of socioeconomic decline in Citizen-Protectors (Oxford, 2015) and the racial politics of gun rights through the prism of law enforcement in Policing the Second Amendment (Princeton, 2020).
This book uses the thoughts of gun retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic gun buying spree in the U.S. as a window onto the politics of guns and understands the politics of guns as a microcosm of right-leaning politics more generally.
The titular “merchants” here are 50 gun sellers in four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Michigan – that Carlson interviewed from April to August 2020. Of these, 84% self-identified as some variety of politically conservative (including Republican, libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Christian conservative) (p. 31). Hence the book’s title: Merchants of the Right. These individuals do not only peddle guns, but a conservative political imagination that has dire consequences for democracy itself (Ch. 4). In a more normative and speculative conclusion, Carlson considers the implications of her study for the future of democracy in America.
Drawing on Swidler’s “toolkit theory,” Carlson devotes one chapter to each of three primary “civic tools” that constitute gun sellers’ political imaginations: armed individualism (Ch. 1), conspiracism (Ch. 2), and partisanship (Ch. 3).
Safety and security are universal human concerns.Carlson’s interviews with gun sellers show how this concern is interpreted through the lens of conservative politics. Armed individualism turns attention away from collective solutions to the problem of security and toward personal responsibility. Rooted in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, this “gun-centric sensibility” gets updated throughout American history (p. 37). In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson puts the most recent incarnation in the context of the rise of neoliberalism; others have used the term “responsibilization” to characterize this ethos.
As the COVID-19 pandemic amplified concerns for safety and security, many sought to alleviate those concerns by purchasing firearms. In the same way that many became “preppers” during the coronavirus pandemic – hoarding toilet paper, cleaning wipes, and hand sanitizer – gun buyers stocked their arsenals or in many cases began new ones (p. 53). As a result, Carlson’s gun sellers felt vindicated in their view of armed individualism as a mechanism of control in times of profound uncertainty (p. 68).
The self-reliance that firearms achieve through force is complimented by conspiracism as a cultural tool that supports self-reliance through knowledge (p. 73). Conspiracism is part of a broader shift among conservatives toward distrust not just of government but all elites. This was particularly apparent in how Carlson’s interviewees saw science during the coronavirus pandemic. In my own wanderings through American gun culture, I have seen this ethos as well, perhaps best reflected in a gun social media influencer who described the mask he was forced to wear to combat COVID as a “Marxist face diaper.”
The treatment of partisanship was my favorite of the three toolkit chapters because other gun scholars and I have noted the changing face of gun owners evident during the great gun-buying spree of 2020 (Yamane 2023). New gun owners include more racialized minorities, women, LGBTQ people, people living in urban and suburban areas, and political liberals. Carlson’s gun sellers often welcomed some of these new faces, but their extremely partisan conservative politics led them to draw the line at political diversity. Partisanship “provided a tool for gun sellers to police the boundaries of gun culture as conservative terrain” (p. 104). Which would be fine if the implications were limited to gun culture. But Carlson suggests that, at its worst, gun sellers’ partisanship drew a line around citizenship and political community that put their liberal political opponents on the outside.
To be clear: Carlson recognizes that Democrats are even more likely than Republicans to agree that the country would be better off if their political opponents “just died” (p. 127) and that partisanship is non-partisan (p. 129). Her empirical focus here is simply on one side of the two-way street of negative polarization.
Taken together, these three civic tools inform the political imaginations of gun sellers. Carlson identifies three: a libertarian imagination “which centers on a celebration of individual rights as the preferred remedy to social ills”; an illiberal imagination, “which rallies around an exclusionary vision of ‘the people’ to resuscitate a bygone era of American democracy”; and an eclectic imagination, “which brings together elements of conservative and liberal politics by emphasizing induvial rights alongside collective responsibility” (p. 135).
The overwhelming majority of Carlson’s gun sellers reflect one of the two conservative political imaginations (libertarian and illiberal) that are at odds with liberal democracy’s need for balancing the conflicting demands of political equality, social difference, individual liberty, and the common good. Carlson finds some hope, however, in the eclectic imagination shared by the only three gun sellers who self-identified as left-of-center (p. 154). Because these gun sellers “straddled political worlds” – conservative gun culture and liberal political culture – they reflected the imagination that might develop among diverse, non-traditional, first-time gun buyers. And in the end, this suggests a path out of the crisis of democracy weighing on Carlson’s mind.
Carlson begins her concluding chapter on “The Democracy We Deserve” by adapting a line from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “There’s a specter haunting American democracy—the specter of the gun owner.” Her case departs from Marx’s, though, because Marx took the specter of communism to be a force for good, such that “[a]ll the powers . . . have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” In the contemporary United States, gun owners are often seen as a destructive force, and the oppositional holy alliance includes the national Democratic Party, gun violence prevention advocacy groups, public health scholars, and generally those who construct a master narrative of democracy-destroying right-wing gun politics (e.g., Busse 2021, Lacombe 2021).
On one reading, Carlson’s book contributes to this master narrative. She argues that the 1970s merger of the National Rifle Association as a political force and the broader conservative political movement in the U.S. created a gun-centric politics that has played an essential role in the crisis of American democracy. This runs from “democratically perverse outcomes,” such as the Congress not passing universal background checks despite popular support (p. 163), to the “illiberal mobilization of democracy” in the assault on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th, in which armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship were on full display (pp. 164-5). Gun sellers’ dominant libertarian and illiberal political imaginations are two particular responses to the challenges of living “at the edge of democracy” (Ch. 4), but ultimately they push us closer to the edge.
A second reading suggests a more nuanced view of American gun owners and gun culture. This returns me to a significant empirical carve-out Carlson notes in her introduction: “I focus on a conservative corner of American gun culture and American gun politics, but the reality is that there is a great deal of diversity among gun owners and gun rights advocates that this book does not engage nor attempt to capture” (p. 32). Adding these diverse voices to the conversation about guns, gun culture, and gun politics in America provides a way forward as Carlson hints at in Chapter 4 and fully recognizes in the book’s concluding paragraph: “those Americans who straddle political worlds may be the best, and last, hope for reinvigorating democratic culture in the United States and forging the democracy we deserve” (p. 181).
Why? Because those who straddle different worlds, like liberal gun owners, may be better able to “embrace rather than eschew” the conflict that is central to democracy (p. 171). They may be more comfortable with the three-part alternative democracy-enhancing civic toolkit that Carlson outlines. First, she endorses political equanimity – “a measured tolerance for uncertainty” inherent in democracy – over armed individualism’s “eager attempt at controlling it” (p. 173). Second, she promotes civic grace – “political compassion toward one’s fellow citizens” and acceptance of their “sincerity of political expression and legitimacy of political standing” (p. 174) – over exclusionary conspiracism’s distrust. Third, she encourages social vulnerability – recognizing the frailty we share in common as humans and the “grievances, losses, traumas, and suffering of fellow citizens” (p. 177) – over partisanship’s limited view of “the people.”
In the end, I agree with Jennifer Carlson that a robust democracy in America depends on the willingness of gun people and non-gun people across the political spectrum to embrace each other “as equal citizens and fellow humans” (p. 181).
In the growing field of gun studies, MacArthur Foundation-certified genius Jennifer Carlson holds a singular position at the top. Merchants of the Right follows her pathbreaking studies of (mostly) white men who publicly carry guns in the context of socioeconomic decline in Citizen-Protectors (Oxford, 2015) and the racial politics of gun rights through the prism of law enforcement in Policing the Second Amendment (Princeton, 2020).
This book uses the thoughts of gun retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic gun buying spree in the U.S. as a window onto the politics of guns and understands the politics of guns as a microcosm of right-leaning politics more generally.
The titular “merchants” here are 50 gun sellers in four states – Arizona, California, Florida, and Michigan – that Carlson interviewed from April to August 2020. Of these, 84% self-identified as some variety of politically conservative (including Republican, libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Christian conservative) (p. 31). Hence the book’s title: Merchants of the Right. These individuals do not only peddle guns, but a conservative political imagination that has dire consequences for democracy itself (Ch. 4). In a more normative and speculative conclusion, Carlson considers the implications of her study for the future of democracy in America.
Drawing on Swidler’s “toolkit theory,” Carlson devotes one chapter to each of three primary “civic tools” that constitute gun sellers’ political imaginations: armed individualism (Ch. 1), conspiracism (Ch. 2), and partisanship (Ch. 3).
Safety and security are universal human concerns.Carlson’s interviews with gun sellers show how this concern is interpreted through the lens of conservative politics. Armed individualism turns attention away from collective solutions to the problem of security and toward personal responsibility. Rooted in settler colonialism and chattel slavery, this “gun-centric sensibility” gets updated throughout American history (p. 37). In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson puts the most recent incarnation in the context of the rise of neoliberalism; others have used the term “responsibilization” to characterize this ethos.
As the COVID-19 pandemic amplified concerns for safety and security, many sought to alleviate those concerns by purchasing firearms. In the same way that many became “preppers” during the coronavirus pandemic – hoarding toilet paper, cleaning wipes, and hand sanitizer – gun buyers stocked their arsenals or in many cases began new ones (p. 53). As a result, Carlson’s gun sellers felt vindicated in their view of armed individualism as a mechanism of control in times of profound uncertainty (p. 68).
The self-reliance that firearms achieve through force is complimented by conspiracism as a cultural tool that supports self-reliance through knowledge (p. 73). Conspiracism is part of a broader shift among conservatives toward distrust not just of government but all elites. This was particularly apparent in how Carlson’s interviewees saw science during the coronavirus pandemic. In my own wanderings through American gun culture, I have seen this ethos as well, perhaps best reflected in a gun social media influencer who described the mask he was forced to wear to combat COVID as a “Marxist face diaper.”
The treatment of partisanship was my favorite of the three toolkit chapters because other gun scholars and I have noted the changing face of gun owners evident during the great gun-buying spree of 2020 (Yamane 2023). New gun owners include more racialized minorities, women, LGBTQ people, people living in urban and suburban areas, and political liberals. Carlson’s gun sellers often welcomed some of these new faces, but their extremely partisan conservative politics led them to draw the line at political diversity. Partisanship “provided a tool for gun sellers to police the boundaries of gun culture as conservative terrain” (p. 104). Which would be fine if the implications were limited to gun culture. But Carlson suggests that, at its worst, gun sellers’ partisanship drew a line around citizenship and political community that put their liberal political opponents on the outside.
To be clear: Carlson recognizes that Democrats are even more likely than Republicans to agree that the country would be better off if their political opponents “just died” (p. 127) and that partisanship is non-partisan (p. 129). Her empirical focus here is simply on one side of the two-way street of negative polarization.
Taken together, these three civic tools inform the political imaginations of gun sellers. Carlson identifies three: a libertarian imagination “which centers on a celebration of individual rights as the preferred remedy to social ills”; an illiberal imagination, “which rallies around an exclusionary vision of ‘the people’ to resuscitate a bygone era of American democracy”; and an eclectic imagination, “which brings together elements of conservative and liberal politics by emphasizing induvial rights alongside collective responsibility” (p. 135).
The overwhelming majority of Carlson’s gun sellers reflect one of the two conservative political imaginations (libertarian and illiberal) that are at odds with liberal democracy’s need for balancing the conflicting demands of political equality, social difference, individual liberty, and the common good. Carlson finds some hope, however, in the eclectic imagination shared by the only three gun sellers who self-identified as left-of-center (p. 154). Because these gun sellers “straddled political worlds” – conservative gun culture and liberal political culture – they reflected the imagination that might develop among diverse, non-traditional, first-time gun buyers. And in the end, this suggests a path out of the crisis of democracy weighing on Carlson’s mind.
Carlson begins her concluding chapter on “The Democracy We Deserve” by adapting a line from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “There’s a specter haunting American democracy—the specter of the gun owner.” Her case departs from Marx’s, though, because Marx took the specter of communism to be a force for good, such that “[a]ll the powers . . . have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” In the contemporary United States, gun owners are often seen as a destructive force, and the oppositional holy alliance includes the national Democratic Party, gun violence prevention advocacy groups, public health scholars, and generally those who construct a master narrative of democracy-destroying right-wing gun politics (e.g., Busse 2021, Lacombe 2021).
On one reading, Carlson’s book contributes to this master narrative. She argues that the 1970s merger of the National Rifle Association as a political force and the broader conservative political movement in the U.S. created a gun-centric politics that has played an essential role in the crisis of American democracy. This runs from “democratically perverse outcomes,” such as the Congress not passing universal background checks despite popular support (p. 163), to the “illiberal mobilization of democracy” in the assault on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6th, in which armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship were on full display (pp. 164-5). Gun sellers’ dominant libertarian and illiberal political imaginations are two particular responses to the challenges of living “at the edge of democracy” (Ch. 4), but ultimately they push us closer to the edge.
A second reading suggests a more nuanced view of American gun owners and gun culture. This returns me to a significant empirical carve-out Carlson notes in her introduction: “I focus on a conservative corner of American gun culture and American gun politics, but the reality is that there is a great deal of diversity among gun owners and gun rights advocates that this book does not engage nor attempt to capture” (p. 32). Adding these diverse voices to the conversation about guns, gun culture, and gun politics in America provides a way forward as Carlson hints at in Chapter 4 and fully recognizes in the book’s concluding paragraph: “those Americans who straddle political worlds may be the best, and last, hope for reinvigorating democratic culture in the United States and forging the democracy we deserve” (p. 181).
Why? Because those who straddle different worlds, like liberal gun owners, may be better able to “embrace rather than eschew” the conflict that is central to democracy (p. 171). They may be more comfortable with the three-part alternative democracy-enhancing civic toolkit that Carlson outlines. First, she endorses political equanimity – “a measured tolerance for uncertainty” inherent in democracy – over armed individualism’s “eager attempt at controlling it” (p. 173). Second, she promotes civic grace – “political compassion toward one’s fellow citizens” and acceptance of their “sincerity of political expression and legitimacy of political standing” (p. 174) – over exclusionary conspiracism’s distrust. Third, she encourages social vulnerability – recognizing the frailty we share in common as humans and the “grievances, losses, traumas, and suffering of fellow citizens” (p. 177) – over partisanship’s limited view of “the people.”
In the end, I agree with Jennifer Carlson that a robust democracy in America depends on the willingness of gun people and non-gun people across the political spectrum to embrace each other “as equal citizens and fellow humans” (p. 181).
May 21, 2023
If you've got gun loving friends in America this book probably rings true with types of conversations you might have. Given this is mostly based off of 50 interviews which leads to a large swarth of anecdotal takes, all of which aren't always challenged by the author. What this book does well is give a good level of understanding of how to listen to people with different view points without turning it into partisan warfare which can lead to openings in changing someones views.
Overall is worth a read if you're wanting to get a basic understanding of where most 2nd amendment absolutists sit with their views whilst exposing some interesting logical fallacies in their arguments.
Overall is worth a read if you're wanting to get a basic understanding of where most 2nd amendment absolutists sit with their views whilst exposing some interesting logical fallacies in their arguments.
May 11, 2023
DNF @ 37%
Thank you to LibroFM and Princeton University Press for this ALC in exchange for an honest review.
In complete honesty, this made me want to throw my phone in the lake or into a path of a speeding car.
What in the repetitive spew was this? I guess if there's one thing gun shop owners have going for them is that they all have the same exact talking points, which the author used repeatedly. This needed some major editing. If each person you interview says the same thing, you don't need to give basically the same quote from them all on the subject.
We get it: people on both sides of the aisle sought out guns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (not a justified reason to buy a gun if i'm being honest). That minorities felt that people on the right were going to hurt them due to racism and bigotry (a justified reason for them to want to protect themselves).
There were zero crucial lessons given in this.
What this author did instead of showing both sides of the aisle in the first 37% of this, is let right wing, gun shop owners spew racist words and Fox News talking points. She let them have a voice on why gun control laws need to be more lax. In a world where we've had 210 mass shootings in the United States in 2023 so far at the time of this review (May 11, 2023)?
Thank you to LibroFM and Princeton University Press for this ALC in exchange for an honest review.
In complete honesty, this made me want to throw my phone in the lake or into a path of a speeding car.
What in the repetitive spew was this? I guess if there's one thing gun shop owners have going for them is that they all have the same exact talking points, which the author used repeatedly. This needed some major editing. If each person you interview says the same thing, you don't need to give basically the same quote from them all on the subject.
We get it: people on both sides of the aisle sought out guns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (not a justified reason to buy a gun if i'm being honest). That minorities felt that people on the right were going to hurt them due to racism and bigotry (a justified reason for them to want to protect themselves).
There were zero crucial lessons given in this.
What this author did instead of showing both sides of the aisle in the first 37% of this, is let right wing, gun shop owners spew racist words and Fox News talking points. She let them have a voice on why gun control laws need to be more lax. In a world where we've had 210 mass shootings in the United States in 2023 so far at the time of this review (May 11, 2023)?
February 6, 2024
“Not every gun owner is a militia activist—very far from it—but every gun carries symbolic, material, and political potential embedded not only in its owner’s intentions but in the broader social constellation that makes guns appealing, even urgent, to their owners.”
Merchants of the Right is written with the premise that gun sellers are one of the main actors in everyday popular politics, drawing from many interviews with gun sellers across the country, and demonstrating the impact that not only the guns have on the political direction of our country, but also the political education and discourse that comes with the experience of buying a gun. This highly detailed, well-written and thoroughly-backed piece of work comments on the 2020 gun surge that prompted thousands of new gun owners, African-Americans, women and, in some cases, liberals, to buy guns, largely out of fear and mistrust in the institutions. Carlson makes the case that what drives the gun community and their involvement in the political process most often necessitates of armed individualism (through which individuals are prompted to take safety matters into their own hands—or holsters), conspiracism (extreme misinformation and unfounded theories surrounding Covid-19, immigration and science) and extreme forms of unhealthy partisanship.
Oh boy what a country.
Read
July 2, 2023This was not exactly what I was expecting, and that is a testament to my tendency to run across random references to books, immediately request the e-book from the library, and then forget whatever I had known about the book by the time it becomes available to borrow.
Merchants of the Right is not about the general phenomena of gun selling or gun ownership in America. Rather, it is based on a series of interviews with gun dealers during the pandemic, from which the author seeks to draw general conclusions about gun ownership, and gun dealers, in America. Based less on data, more on anecdote than I was expecting, in short. For some reason I also kept hoping, illogically, the author would also talk to some of the gun buyers, but this never happened.
This book is interesting, but it is repetitive in spots, and depressing in others. The conclusion, in which the author offers some ideas to address the deep divides now polarizing red and blue America, felt a little tacked on, though I agreed with the general points.
Merchants of the Right is not about the general phenomena of gun selling or gun ownership in America. Rather, it is based on a series of interviews with gun dealers during the pandemic, from which the author seeks to draw general conclusions about gun ownership, and gun dealers, in America. Based less on data, more on anecdote than I was expecting, in short. For some reason I also kept hoping, illogically, the author would also talk to some of the gun buyers, but this never happened.
This book is interesting, but it is repetitive in spots, and depressing in others. The conclusion, in which the author offers some ideas to address the deep divides now polarizing red and blue America, felt a little tacked on, though I agreed with the general points.
September 3, 2023
There were interesting parts and ideas in this, but overall it needed severe editing. It was much longer than necessary, and read like an academic paper that was trying to hit a word count minimum. The vocabulary often sounded unnatural and as if written from a thesaurus. It reminded me of a poster in one of my high school classes that simply read “Eschew obfuscation”. She did not.
The way she conducted her research (contemporaneously) was useful and interesting, but I disliked how often specific quotes were repeated in various chapters. It was as if 10 of the 50 interviewees said something, and then were the only ones quoted. Or perhaps there actually were only 10 interviewees? It’s unclear.
I’m sure someone has written more succinctly and helpfully on this topic.
The way she conducted her research (contemporaneously) was useful and interesting, but I disliked how often specific quotes were repeated in various chapters. It was as if 10 of the 50 interviewees said something, and then were the only ones quoted. Or perhaps there actually were only 10 interviewees? It’s unclear.
I’m sure someone has written more succinctly and helpfully on this topic.
March 6, 2024
This book was very meh. First of all, it was a little all over the place. Just a lot of random interviews, which I do think the author sets us up to understand but I think I didn't realize it would be 8 hours of this. The author's premise and thesis was also something I feel most Americans who are even remotely political would know - most gun sellers are very conservative, support Trump/MAGA, etc. This is not surprising, or astounding? I would also assume this before I ever even read the book. So it was duplicative of things I already understood and reading it did not really add anything to me.
July 4, 2023
A bit repetitive (for example, the same quotes from interviewees recycled in different sections of the book, and the same points being made to illustrate ostensibly different concepts) but very informative, for all that it's based on first-hand interviews. Would love to have seen more stats to balance the interviews, and each quote needed TONS of interpretation from the researcher rather than standing on its own. Still, the points are valid and the overall takeaway, though not surprising, is scary.
July 6, 2023
I concur with the other reviews that this book didn't quite deliver somehow, but I think it's important to read widely about guns and gun control to try and understand the issues. The book does help in that respect--telling what a small sample of gun sellers think and do. Having just had two more mass shootings over the 4th of July, we can't escape the trauma and tragedy of gun possession gone wrong. The book is well documented, and I found myself flipping back to the footnotes often. The bibliography is extensive.
May 20, 2023
I was hoping for more from this one. While I appreciated the insight into gun sellers' perspectives, I wanted more statistics and historical data for how the gun crisis came to be rather than a lot of people's opinions about the politics of guns. I think this would have been a better article or set of articles than a book. It was repetitive and seemed stretched out by the end.
Thanks to Librofm and Princeton University Press for this complimentary audiobook. My thoughts are my own.
Thanks to Librofm and Princeton University Press for this complimentary audiobook. My thoughts are my own.
July 30, 2023
I wanted to like this book, but I couldn’t. It would have been a good [long] magazine article, but it wasn’t substantial enough to justify a book — much of the content seemed repetitive. Worse still, it was probably the most verbose piece of literature I have ever read. I found myself rereading passages frequently because the verbiage made me lose my concentration. There were many times that I wanted to put it down but I finally slogged through it; I wish I hadn’t.
August 17, 2023
Carlson interviews a series of gun sellers who thrived during the pandemic.
This account covers both left and right gun sellers and buyers although the vast majority are of the right.
She draws very few conclusions, but they include: Both the left and right bought guns during the pandemic; first-time gun buyers were surprised by gun law like waiting periods; liberals buy guns too.
Not a very interesting or informative read.
This account covers both left and right gun sellers and buyers although the vast majority are of the right.
She draws very few conclusions, but they include: Both the left and right bought guns during the pandemic; first-time gun buyers were surprised by gun law like waiting periods; liberals buy guns too.
Not a very interesting or informative read.
October 5, 2024
was hoping to get some sort of new insight into right wing gun culture, 2020, etc from this, but was basically left disappointed. the narrative was disjointed and all over the place, way too repetitive, and (and this is mostly a personal gripe) not nearly as well grounded in american history as it thinks it is by constantly invoking inequalities. huge disappointment if not a waste of time completely.
August 8, 2023
I really enjoyed this book, it is very well written and researched. Dealing in current situations and topics is provides insite to the happenings in today's times. I have a better insite on what's going on and am happy for the updates. I suggest this book to all who are interested in our country today.
October 28, 2025
I DNFd this book at 60% mind you well over 1/3 of this is the most long winded introduction I’ve ever read. By the time you get to the meat of the facts/nonfiction flow the author reiterated the purpose of the book needing to be written so many times that it was fairly insufferable. I think there’s a really solid long form magazine/newspaper article here but a full book…. Absolutely not.
November 21, 2023
I struggled with this one for the same reason many others did. Repetitive, shallow, and missed an opportunity to go far deeper into the issues here. Thank you to libro.fm and the publisher for the ALC!
March 4, 2024
This had interesting interviews but was pretty unsurprising in the analysis. It reads like a master's thesis in that the sample size and diversity of subjects felt limited, especially given the ease of virtual interviews.
March 7, 2024
Interesting look at divisive politics as it pertains to guns. The contradictions are many. I thought it interesting that gun violence was hardly mentioned or even made a discussion point. But all in all an interesting read. Cheers!
August 29, 2023
A very interesting anthropological analysis of gun culture through the lens of gun sellers. Carlson provides a portrayal that is sympathetic and terrifying at the same time.
February 8, 2024
Provides a good perspective of the other half of America
February 15, 2024
Nothing new, nothing original. Tired of the rationalization of continued relationships with trump supporting relatives. That just makes you a white ethno-nationalist sympathizer. DNF @ 10%
August 24, 2024
2.5 stars
October 19, 2025
soft 3
January 12, 2024
Did this really need to be a book? It could have been a blog post.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews