The February issue of Reason magazine arrived today (the new issue is not online, unfortunately).  On the cover was a blurb titled “Humanizing gun nuts.”  It is for a review of the book Shooters (Myths And Realities of America’s Gun Cultures) by Abigail A. Kohn.  Of particular interest were some quotes from the book’s preface.  I’d had this book sitting on my bookshelf for a while, intending to “get around to it” one of these days.  This prompted me to get started.

But for your edification I thought I’d share with you this excerpt from the preface which highlights the extreme anti gun and anti gun owner bias in the academic world. 

When I began my research into gun enthusiasm and gun ownership in the mid-1990s, I learned that a number of my academic colleagues held very similar views.  One colleague said (trying to sound positive) that I was commiting a real social service by researching “such disgusting people.”  Another informed me that because neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan all obviously loved their guns, until I recognized that the phenomenon of gun enthusiasm was intrinsically racist, I was an apologist for racist violence.  A third colleague told me frequently that she found gun owners utterly repellant, and she was surprised (and more than a little suspicious) that I didn’t find them repellant as well.  She insisted that until I recognized and acknowledged the ugliness and inherent pathology of gun enthusiasm, my research was disrepectful to victims of gun violence.

The bigotry of the above statements is breathtaking.  If anyone wonders why gun owners regard academics with barely concealed contempt, perhaps this will help their understanding.  It’s also a good reason not to trust anything they have to say.

I’m trying to withhold judgment on the book, but I’m only a few pages into it and I already find myself yelling at the author.  Despite her attempts to delve into the world of shooters, she doesn’t seem to get very far.  Or perhaps I’m just more sensitive to anti gun bias, since I’m somewhere to the right of the NRA when it comes to gun rights.  I often find it laughable when I see someone decry the “hard line” position of the NRA, since I tend to think of them as wimps most of the time.

And that may be the key to the problem I have with the author.  She speaks of the issues being “complex” and dismisses as “ideologues” those who see them as “black and white.”  From my perspective, there are simply certain areas of life that aren’t up for popular vote or subject to the will of the majority.  The right to keep and bear arms is one of those things.  As long as people talk about a national “dialogue” on guns, then that signals to me that they don’t get it.  I usually regard this as a backdoor path to more gun control, which we’ve had quite enough of in this country, thank you very much.