The war against gun owners.

Since the 1970s, the American print media has pursued an all-out war against gun owners. Mainline media often present "gun nuts" as either sick or laughable. A columnist for a major West Coast newspaper recently described a women's organization formed to support gun-ownership rights as peopled by "bored, undereducated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin' suburban white women from lost Midwestern towns."

Yet most of the conventional wisdom regarding guns and gun owners, I have learned, is either overly simplified or wrong. Criminologists have been pointing out for years that citizens regularly use guns effectively to thwart crime. And gun control, where implemented, has hardly turned out to be the panacea that liberals insist it is.

But guns obviously have tremendous meaning in American society, quite apart from their practical role in debates about crime. Why are many Americans so attached to their guns? Alas, this is almost completely unexplored territory.

In the fall of 1997, as a graduate student at the University of California, I set out to conduct an anthropological study of gun enthusiasm. To collect data, I used the traditional anthropological method of participant observation--basically, joining the group in question, making friends with its members, observing and participating in its events, and engaging in group activities with the community. For 14 months, I spent time at shooting ranges, gun shops, and shooting competitions. I conducted in-depth interviews with male and female gun owners. I asked what guns symbolized for them.

These "shooters" told me that guns symbolize core American values: freedom, independence, individualism, and equality. They believe these values embodied in gun ownership are vibrantly alive, yet deeply threatened, in the contemporary United States. Shooters view competence with firearms as a central aspect of both individual responsibility and national identity, and they see attacks on gun ownership as attacks not only on themselves, but on their way of life.

Individual gun ownership as a root of political freedom

Freedom is the most frequently discussed and strongly held value of shooters. They view the American Creed as built on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire capitalism. Freedom, both political and social, is generally thought of as freedom from the demands of others, the ability of responsible persons to be whatever they want and act as they choose.