Classes are hailed as a solution to violence, but the reality is more complicated.
Harel Shapira didn't set out to write about guns, but work he was doing at the U.S.-Mexico border brought him into contact with the right-wing militants known as the Minutemen. "In the process of spending time with them," he told me, "I formed relationships with gun owners for the first time in my life. People who love guns, who enjoy shooting guns, who feel guns give them freedom." |
That experience captured his imagination. "As a sociologist, I am most drawn to moments where I feel my experience of the world is very different from someone else's," Shapira said. When it came to gun ownership, the difference "was emotional, political — it was physical. Where they saw safety, I saw violence. Where they saw freedom, I thought about oppression." |
Over the years, as the tide of gun deaths rose, Shapira thought about how inadequate public discourse is for the project of understanding American gun culture. "We focus a lot on violence and shooting," he said. "We don't focus enough on living. What is the kind of life that guns produce?" |
Shapira spent the next decade taking firearms classes and interviewing instructors in Texas and elsewhere around the country. "I wasn't there to learn how to protect myself or my family," he writes in a powerful new Opinion essay. "I was there to learn what was taught in the classes themselves, which a broad coalition of groups — including many police officers, Republican and Democratic legislators and gun violence prevention organizations — have hailed as a path out of the nation's epidemic of violence. |
"I found something very different. The classes I attended trained students to believe that their lives are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy." |
It's a theme Shapira will expand on in his forthcoming book, "Basic Pistol: How Americans Live and Die by the Gun." "It starts with a very pro-gun premise," he told me. "The N.R.A. says guns don't kill people; people kill people. I totally agree. So who are these people?" |
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