Some useful information in this piece from Politico
Politico Magazine said:What Both Sides Don't Get About American Gun Culture
Amid the horrors of a mass shooting, it's easy to forget that guns are social glue—and gun control efforts that don't account for that will fail.
By AUSTIN SARAT and JONATHAN OBERT
August 04, 2019
Austin Sarat is Associate Provost and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science. He is an editor (with Andrew Poe) of The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press).
Jonathan Obert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. He is an editor (with Andrew Poe) of The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press).
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
The two mass shootings this weekend have inflamed a gun-control debate that never seems to go away and never seems to get resolved.
In the span of less than 24 hours, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, joined a morbid parade of American cities and towns—places such as Littleton, Colorado; Virginia Beach, Virginia; San Bernardino, California; Las Vegas; and Pittsburgh—as sites of tragic, mass shootings. In the not quite eight months of 2019, there have been seven such attacks. After each one, political leaders of all stripes send their thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims, and Democrats and Republicans offer radically different responses.
Democrats decry inaction on gun regulation. They blame the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby and claim, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it Sunday morning, “The Republican Senate’s continued inaction dishonors our solemn duty to protect innocent men, women and children and end this epidemic once and for all.”
Republicans counter that gun laws aren't the problem and that mental illnesses lead to gun violence. In the immediate aftermath of mass killings, shooters frequently are branded social misfits. Thus people who know Patrick Crusius, the alleged perpetrator of the carnage in El Paso, described him as “quiet, antisocial and a bit ‘strange.’”
“Guns,” we are told, “don’t kill people. ... People kill people.”
High-mindedly, Americans see themselves as locked into a perpetual stalemate over the meaning and limits of the Constitution’s guarantee of a right to bear arms. Somewhat less high-mindedly, liberals see gun owners as captured by the NRA, and pro-gun conservatives feel anxious about the possibility of Washington bureaucrats stripping them of their capacity for self-defense.
But America's stalemate on guns runs deeper than that. It's also based on an important mistake that both sides make about guns themselves and their role in society.
The view of guns as neutral tools, a view shared by conservative defenders of gun rights as well as liberal advocates of gun regulation, misses a crucial fact about guns and gun ownership. It wrongly assumes that the distribution of guns and their presence in their owners' lives are a totally independent facts that don't shape the opportunities and choices of the people who use them.
But increasingly, research into the culture and political views of gun owners is painting a very different portrait. Gun owners' politics don't generally fall into lockstep with the NRA—but guns themselves are woven into people's lives in ways that go far beyond a tool. This suggests that the path to gun law reform won’t be as simple as liberals might hope or conservatives might fear.
One of the most authoritative and interesting surveys of the attitudes of gun owners was conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017. That survey shows the vast majority of Americans who own guns are not members of the NRA and that most favor some form of gun control. However, most refrain from pushing for greater regulation of guns because they neither trust the government nor believe that it will protect them. They often resent the disdain for their way of life of the kind expressed by President Barack Obama when he suggested they “cling to guns or religion” as a way of expressing “antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations." They see themselves as on their own in a dangerous world.
The sale, manufacture, distribution, purchase and production of guns, as well as the views of their owners, are, in part, responses to the perceived weakness of the government and the perceived need for constant vigilance and a concomitant interpersonal fear. As dangerous weapons, guns offer a form of direct power in a world where trust and civic belonging are in short supply. The Pew poll reported that 67 percent of gun owners said protection is a major reason they own a gun; 38 percent cited hunting, 30 percent listed sport shooting, and 13 percent listed gun collecting as major reasons.
But culturally, guns aren't just a reaction to anxieties. In a way gun control advocates rarely consider, but gun owners may find obvious, they're a meaningful social asset for their owners. In a fragmented society, guns connect people at a time when making connections is ever more difficult.
In part because of their danger and allure and in part because they're the center of a sporting culture with deep American roots, guns draw adherents together in contexts like expos, gun ranges, and online chatrooms. At the recreational level, participants can indulge in hobbyist debate and discussion; on a political and cultural level, they can also forge a shared commitment to armed citizenship.