12 Questions for a Writer: David Yamane
David Yamane is a sociology professor, authority on guns in America, and lifelong liberal from San Francisco who bought his first gun at 42. His book, Gun Curious, wrestles with important questions.
Who are you, what have you written, and why?
I am a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University. For the first 20 years of my professional career, I studied religion, especially post-World War II American Catholicism. I authored four books and dozens of other publications in that area, mostly for academics, beginning in 1994 when I was a graduate student. As I was finishing my last book on the topic, Becoming Catholic: Finding Rome in the American Religious Landscape, I realized I wanted to study anything but religion. I was in my forties, tenured, and on the brink of a final promotion to the rank of full professor, so maybe it was a bit of an academic midlife crisis. Around the time I was trying to figure out what to study next, I began to notice guns all around me in North Carolina. Street signs for concealed carry classes, billboards for gun stores and ranges, people I played tennis with who owned firearms, and my future wife who used guns professionally as a member of the US Coast Guard. This was quite new and surprising to me having grown up completely outside of gun culture. I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that gun-less blue bubble only got bluer as I was educated in sociology and worked in academia.
In 2011, my growing personal interest in firearms intersected with my professional need to launch a new project. I spent the next 12 years participating in and observing American gun culture, and my forthcoming book, Gun Curious, reports on that surprising journey.
Tell us about why you wrote “Gun Curious” and the process you undertook to write it.
Once I decided to switch from religion to guns, my initial plan was to study why people get concealed carry permits and write an academic book about that. As I got into my research, I realized that concealed carry was just part of a broader shift in American gun culture toward what I call, borrowing from the gun journalist Michael Bane, Gun Culture 2.0. This is the most recent evolution of America’s historic gun culture, one centered on armed self-defense.
By 2018, I had written a full proposal and three complete chapters for a book called Gun Culture 2.0 that I sent to Oxford University Press. It was a scholarly book that included a strong first-person participant-observer authorial voice. The peer reviews from Oxford came back split. One reviewer wanted more of an objective academic style and the other reviewer appreciated the more personal narrative elements.
Having arrived at an important fork in my professional road, I decided I didn't need or want to write another academic monograph that would be read by a few hundred people. I would lean into the personal narrative, placing my own experience of becoming a gun owner at the center of the story. Gun Curious is the result of this reimagining of my project.
Writing as an academic sociologist for three decades made me very comfortable in that genre, but I needed to learn how to write in a more accessible style. So I took online writing classes through the Creative Nonfiction Foundation and the University of California-Berkeley Extension, read books on the topic, hired a writing coach, and paid much more attention to the craft of writing than ever.
Although I don't think Gun Curious is a fully realized work of creative nonfiction, some elements of that genre appear in this book. I do believe and hope it is much more interesting to many more people than my previous scholarly work.
What did you learn in the process and what surprised you?
The two biggest things I learned in the process of writing this book are that gun owners are people, too, and that there is a lot of diversity among gun owners.
First, because media and scholarly attention to guns so often focus on negative outcomes, it's hard to appreciate the normality of guns and gun ownership. Given the huge number of guns and gun owners in America – perhaps as many as 100 million adults owning at least 300 million guns – it’s actually quite rare for guns or gun owners to harm themselves or others, intentionally or accidentally. This is not to diminish the significance of gun violence, suicide, or accidental death and injury. These negative outcomes are significant and we need to do everything we can to reduce them as much as possible. But there is a big, untold part of the story that falls under my saying: Guns are normal, and normal people use guns.
Second, I realized that gun owners are not all politically conservative white Christian men from the rural South. That is, the characters from Duck Dynasty only represent part of U.S. gun culture. Gun owners are diverse in where we come from and where we live, our political orientations, and our racial, gender, and sexual identities.
Of course, there are also good and bad gun owners; responsible and irresponsible gun owners. Even though I am concerned about racist and Christian nationalist and insurrectionist gun owners, most gun owners don't fit those molds. As Michael Bane once told me, there are assholes even in your grandmother's knitting group.
In an America where people seem to see movement to the poles as the best way to identify themselves, how can we lower the temperature around the Second Amendment?
Like many people, I am worried about political polarization in the United States, both in general and especially around gun issues. The fact that guns have become a political wedge issue impedes progress toward recognizing gun owner rights and simultaneously seeking to reduce negative outcomes with guns. We are too often given a false choice between these two ends.
At the same time, I am hopeful that we can lower the heat around guns, gun rights, and gun violence prevention. This hope is based on a number of experiences I have had with politically diverse groups of people talking civilly about guns. Some keys to having better conversations are:
One, seek commonality. Often when I'm speaking to groups about guns, I begin by asking people to raise their hands if they are in favor of gun violence or if they are against gun safety. No one raises their hands. We can build upon this vast common ground if we want to. Beginning with our commonalities before moving on to our differences sets a different tone for conversations about guns.
Two, related to this is to have empathy for those with whom we disagree. I always like to think of myself as being in a conversation with others not a debate. You can't win or lose a conversation. Conversations are geared toward mutual understanding and that is what I always seek to do. It definitely lowers the heat when someone feels that you care about why they believe what they believe and don't simply want to prove them wrong.
3. The third important way to lower the heat is to see people with whom we disagree as fellow citizens and not enemies. I was at an event on gun violence a couple of summers ago with the public historian Clay Jenkinson. Clay is perhaps best known as a first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. When people at the event would come up to say hello, Clay would say, “Hello, Citizen.” Now, I don't think I have the gravitas to pull that off myself, but it was a good reminder that when I do speak to others with whom I disagree about some aspect of guns, they are fellow citizens.
In the end, we will never and do not all have to agree on every issue. We do need to disagree respectfully. That's one of the beauties and challenges of living in a pluralistic democracy of 300 million-plus diverse citizens.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
Most of all, I want people to see what an even-handed, non-inflammatory discussion of American gun culture can look like. We do not have many models of this, unfortunately.
Central to this is simply telling my truth and not seeking to convince people of some ideological, political, or policy position on firearms.
I also sincerely hope that everyone who reads the book learns something new about some aspects of guns, gun ownership, or gun culture. This includes even people who have been gun owners their entire lives and feel like they know everything there is to know about the topic. I think we've all met that guy before.
Last, I hope people take some pleasure in reading the book. I tell the story of American gun culture from my own perspective as someone who became a new gun owner later in life. Maybe there are some stories in Gun Curious that will move readers, make them think, and maybe even make them smile.
What is it that draws you to writing?
It's funny, publication has been a job requirement for me since I was in graduate school back in the 1990s. My first major article in sociology was published in 1994, 30 years ago now. But until recently, I never thought of myself as a writer. Scholarship was just one part of my job requirement as a sociologist and professor. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy writing. I always prided myself on being able to write well “for a professor.”
When I began to reconceptualize this project as something that could become a trade book, I had to force myself to think of myself as a writer. For the first time in my decades-long career, I studied the craft of writing, learned about creative nonfiction as a genre, and paid attention to how the non-academic publishing industry works. Even though I had already published seven academic books, I still had to learn how to craft a query letter to find an agent, write a proposal that could be sold to trade publishers, and think about my platform as an author.
The commonality between my older academic work and what is represented in Gun Curious is that I try to understand the world and express that understanding in words. This is ultimately what draws me to writing.
What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
This is a hard question for me to answer because I don't easily think of myself as a writer who has advice to give. But I have authored quite a few articles, book chapters, books, and other publications. So here are two pieces of advice for what they’re worth.
First, I don't remember where I first heard this phrase, but it is my best advice: ass in chair.
My most productive writing happens when I commit to sitting at my desk and doing the work. For me this doesn't have to be a long slog. If I can get to my desk at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning – before I check my email, the news, or social media – and work for two hours without my phone anywhere near me, I can get the equivalent of a full day's worth of time-interrupted writing done in those two hours.
Second, I always remind myself that you don't write a book or an essay. You write words, and those words become sentences, and those sentences become paragraphs, and those paragraphs become chapters of a book or a finished piece of writing.
This occurred to me shortly after my first book came out in 2001. I was having lunch with an undergraduate student who asked me, how do you write a book? My immediate, gut response was, “One word at a time.”
What is your favorite book and why?
I have many favorite books across different genres of writing, but in the context of this Q&A, I would say my favorite is John Steinbeck's 1962 book Travels with Charley in Search of America. I frequently return to this book while I'm doing my research and writing on different topics because it beautifully combines keen sociological observation with a fiction writer's talent for storytelling and description. It's a model of writing that I definitely fall short of, but aspire to nonetheless.
Beyond the form and style, Steinbeck substantively captures something really important about America. He recognizes that a land peopled by nomadic native tribes, global explorers, pilgrims, and refugees is restless in its very spirit. But this restlessness is counterbalanced by a desire for some grounding, continuity, stability, home. These two forces exist in a dynamic tension that animates much of the social world I observe.
How much do I like Travels with Charley? When my wife Sandy and I took a 6,000-mile road trip from North Carolina to Yellowstone and back last summer, I wrote a series of blog posts called Travels with Sandy in Search of America’s Gun Cultures.
You are a self-described “lifelong liberal from the San Francisco Bay area” and a Professor of Sociology who purchased his first firearm at 42. What was that like? What surprises came with the experience?
I grew up completely outside of gun culture, but when I realized how common guns and gun ownership were in North Carolina and beyond, I felt I had to learn more about how they worked. This wasn't so much out of an interest in getting into guns but more of a fear of guns and a desire to know how to be safe around them. I wanted to be able to determine if a gun was loaded, know how to unload it, and so on.
So my wife arranged for me to shoot a gun under the direction of her high school classmate, Jimmy Staley, who is a gun trainer for the North Carolina Highway Patrol. I was extremely nervous. In fact, I have very little memory of the first shot I took because it is shocking to have an explosion taking place just a couple of feet from your face. But after the initial shock of the first shot, a desire to make a hole in the target where I was aiming welled up in me. I kept shooting, and Jimmy kept giving me advice, and I walked each shot closer to the center of the target.
I was surprised at how much fun it was to try to hit the bullseye. I did not expect that. But shortly after that first experience, Sandy and I decided to borrow her father's shotgun and go clay target shooting. Anybody who’s done that knows it’s incredibly fun.
Although today I think of myself as a defensive gun owner and my research focuses on defensive gun culture (Gun Culture 2.0), I am constantly reminded that shooting is fun. I'm not sure who said it first, but as my friend Jon Hauptman of PHLster Holsters says, “There's no such thing as an anti-gun gun range.”
Gun Curious is about your “surprising journey inside America’s gun culture”. What is gun culture? I feel like that definition is dramatically different with the guys I hunt with as compared to a militia group practicing room entry on some farm somewhere.
There is no single agreed-upon definition of gun culture among scholars, but most definitions emphasize the “symbolic” nature of guns and the emotions they inspire. What does the gun stand for and how does it make people feel?
When most scholars think about defensive gun culture, they see White cis-male gun owners as feeling empowered because the gun stands for settler colonialist White supremacy and hegemonic masculinity.
My approach differs by focusing instead on culture as shaping and directing the practical things that people do with guns. As I wrote in a book chapter called, “The First Rule of Gunfighting Is Have a Gun: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0,” the strength of looking at gun culture as practices is that it recalls the origins of the term culture, from the Medieval Latin cultivare – to tend or to cultivate. Gun culture helps people to “take care of things” with guns.
This makes it easier to understand the motivations of LGBTQ people, racial minorities, women, and other new and non-traditional gun owners.
I also have to say that one of the downsides of using my concept of Gun Culture 2.0 is that it can be read as homogenizing gun culture. My actual argument is that self-defense is the core of contemporary gun culture, not that it is all of gun culture. Even within defensive gun culture, you have a range of orientations including people who are really into tactical gear and LARPing and those who just want a firearm to keep themselves or their family safe in a modest and low-key way.
Also, the activities that fall under what I call Gun Culture 1.0 – hunting, recreational target shooting, and collecting – all continue to exist as vibrant subcultures within American Gun culture. So, I do have a little bit of regret in using that concept because it's so easily misunderstood.
You can wave a wand and control the US Constitution and the three branches of government. What place should firearms have in the main of America?
If they read Gun Curious cover-to-cover, many people will be surprised at how infrequently legal discussions of the Second Amendment and political polarization around guns appear. Those have to be part of the story, of course, but my focus on the place of firearms in America is much more cultural than governmental. The reality is that guns are a part of American culture for a significant number of people, they always have been, and they most likely will continue to be. In terms of lowering the heat on the inflamed debates about the place of guns in American society, the key is actually to focus more on culture than government. I would use my magic wand to help people understand the cultural normality of guns and gun owners, something I try to do in Gun Curious and my other work on American gun culture.
What have I not asked that I should have?
First of all, thank you for the opportunity to discuss my work. Your thoughtful questions make it difficult to imagine others. But I might ask, How does this work stand out from other books about guns? What's different about this project?
I think the biggest difference is that this work does not view guns as either the savior or destroyer of American democracy. Partisans on both sides want to put guns in the center of a debate over the future of democracy. Although I do think guns are central to many people's lives and they do have a spectacular presence in our society, I don't think that guns do what polarizing elites on either side of the issue think they do, good or evil. So, paradoxically, in my view guns are both more important and less important than many people say. I hope that comes through very clearly in Gun Curious.
Gun Curious is available from your favorite independent bookstore or your go to online source.
I appreciate this opportunity to answer some great questions.