BASIC PISTOL

A journey into the world of the heavily armed.

A few years ago, in Texas, a young Black man with mental illness banged agitatedly on a door and entered a house. He was shot repeatedly and killed by the homeowner. Shapira, a sociologist with expertise in militia and armed citizen groups, decided to study tactical shooting—and just happened to have this Texas shooter as an assistant instructor at the gun school. In this non-academic ethnography, “an exercise in understanding a uniquely American way of living,” he makes a number of close observations about the culture of firearms and firearms enthusiasts. One disturbing conclusion is that armed civilians are responsible for far more “legally sanctioned shootings” than are the police. A less surprising one is that the students Shapira encountered were almost all white men—though, against expectations, he adds that most have college degrees—who vote Republican. Against the commonly advanced canard that the government is coming to take gun rights away, the author charts a trajectory of continuous expansion, especially in his home state: “In fact, each subsequent legislative session seems to grant Texans the right to be armed somewhere new,” including churches and schoolrooms. The language of gun rights is all too often none too subtly racist, with “bad guys” typically pictured as wearing hoodies and baggy pants and haunting inner cities, and it is also built on a broadly shared sexist assumption that rape awaits the wives and girlfriends of the “good guys”: “To hunt a woman’s attacker down and kill him is the stuff of daydreams, if not legends.” All of this information is learned and not inborn, which leads Shapira to offer a chilling denouement about that shooter and his victim: “Michael had shot and killed Isaac not despite his years of training but because of them.”

An eye-opening study that makes its own case for stricter gun control.