The politics of guns in the United States may never have been so tense as today. The litany of mass shootings that pervade the news leads to calls for gun access reforms, the vast majority of which never occur. Arguably, the most active area of gun politics is in the expansion of gun rights, which has been most recently punctuated by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which enshrines the right to carry a pistol in public under the Second Amendment. Just as important, however, is the work that the NRA and other gun groups do to activate gun owners and others sympathetic to gun rights to engage in the political process.
The study of gun politics within the social sciences has, to date, offered several important perspectives on the roles of gun policy in campaigns and elections, vote choice, and interest group behavior, as well as the psychological and sociological effects of gun ownership. Noah Schwartz’s effort in this book supplements and expands on previous work by providing an ethnographic perspective of the NRA’s efforts to create and maintain a politicized understanding of gun ownership in the United States. Schwartz employs three major theoretical framings in this study. The first, the narrative policy framework (NPF), argues that narratives employing heroes, villains, and morals undergird the NRA’s communications both to the public and to its members, such as through its trade magazine The American Rifleman, its shooting classes, and its public communications at the NRA annual meeting. The second theoretical perspective, memory studies, concerns how culture is understood through the construction of historical narratives. Schwartz leverages archival research on The American Rifleman and the now-defunct NRA TV series to document how positive associations between guns and American individualism reify the core meta-narratives that Schwartz argues shape the NRA’s political efficacy. Finally, he extends his analysis of gun history and memory through the lens of museum studies, examining how the NRA memorializes and thereby institutionalizes its own narratives through the NRA National Firearms Museum.
Schwartz centers three primary NRA meta-narratives in his analysis. The first, “a good guy with a gun,” refers to the idea that gun ownership is a means to ensuring individual and collective safety: in a world where criminals have guns, we are all made safer by trained gun carriers. The second meta-narrative connects gun ownership and gun carrying to freedom and the exercise of these rights as a demonstration of the benefits of US citizenship. Finally, the third meta-narrative describes how the NRA argues that guns are an essential piece of American culture, such as through the image of a Winchester rifle in pacifying the West or of an M1 Garand in the hands of a US soldier. Each narrative is referenced and analyzed in Schwartz’s activities, such as his experiences at the NRA annual meeting, in NRA shooting classes, and a visit to the NRA museum.
Schwartz embraces the challenge of extending the narrative policy framework’s coverage to macro-level analysis, the grand narratives that shape discourse around politically contested ideas. The NPF argues that narratives, which involve a specific setting, defined characters, a plot, and a moral, can be characterized at the micro (individual), meso (policy subsystem), and macro (cultures and institutions) levels. To date, an emerging body of research has provided good evidence for both the micro and meso levels, with less work on the macro level. Schwartz’s work fills this gap quite well. He skillfully structures his literature review to lead into a well-defined conception of narrative and then demonstrates how those meta-narratives (institutional-level narratives) shape the behavior of institutional actors and individual gun owners. The argument is well developed and convincing, thanks to the rich qualitative data Schwartz gathers from various sources. However, these qualitative evaluations may have been strengthened by the use of some descriptive statistics, such as the number of narrative instances in The American Rifleman sample or trends over time.
Schwartz’s methodological choice of participant ethnography lends significant credibility to his arguments. By placing himself into the story, Schwartz is simultaneously able to explain the experience of having the NRA’s narrative taught through its various activities and to humanize his participants’ involvement in gun culture in a manner that defuses the loaded politics surrounding gun owners. The author’s personal experiences and those of his interviewees leave little doubt that the three meta-narratives reach the gun-owning public, shaping how their views of guns and gun politics operate in a politically contested landscape. These findings are not, unto themselves, surprising, and Schwartz’s use of participant ethnography is not novel in gun politics. However, this should not deter the prospective reader: instead, readers interested in gun politics and the politics of narrative should be eager to read this title. The writing is clear and accessible, and the structure of the arguments through the book is easy to follow.
Moreover, Schwartz’s focus on gun culture differentiates his work from other ethnographic works. Whereas other scholars, such as Jennifer Carlson, used ethnography to describe the experience of gun owners in relation to specific elements of gun culture, Schwartz situates this study as an effort to understand how the NRA uses meta-narratives to shape how gun owners (NRA members or not) are inculcated into a mindset simultaneously focused on freedom and safety. The use of freedom as a call to community, culture, and action within the NRA is not new; as well documented by Matthew Lacombe in Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (2021), a rights-based conception of gun politics advocacy has been used extensively in The American Rifleman and other NRA publications for a century. Historically, the NRA has also emphasized safety, but primarily in the sense of the safe usage of firearms. Schwartz traces the historical development from what David Yamane calls “Gun Culture 1.0” (“The Sociology of U.S. Gun Culture,” Sociology Compass 11 [7], 2017) where gun ownership politics is focused on guns for hunting and sport, to the more modern “Gun Culture 2.0,” which emphasizes threats to physical safety, and how gun ownership and the right to self-defense imply a need for permissive gun laws so citizens can be able to defend themselves.
Where Schwartz’s contribution shines is in its ability to tie this evolution in narrative to the current lived experiences of gun owners, both new and old. His chapter on his experiences at gun classes and at the gun range is rich with detail. The most interesting aspect, beyond the author’s need to resolve his own discomfort in an unfamiliar space, is his participants’ willingness to both embrace his project and share their perspectives, which Schwartz shows are linked to those three prominent meta-narratives. Beyond this, Schwartz highlights the complexity of racial and gender identity in participating in gun culture, noting the experience of a Black woman instructor in particular.
One of Schwartz’s most important claims is that the study of the “Great Gun Debate” requires moving beyond “the usual scathing critique of the gun culture, gun-owning community, [and] NRA” (p. 175) to a more focused understanding of how gun owners’ political views are shaped by the stories that the NRA and other gun rights groups tell. Indeed, this perspective shapes the entire book, and Schwartz offers an even-handed account that eschews critical perspectives. Although he does not dismiss the role of an author’s personal preferences in ethnography, the work succeeds because it does what it set out to do—to tell the story of narrative in gun culture—and does not attempt more. Schwartz’s honesty about his discomfort in entering gun-related spaces, combined with his commitment to sharing his participants’ perspectives without critique, adds to the strength of the analysis because it highlights the complexity of gun issues in US politics. For as much as society recoils from the violence that mass shootings inflict on communities, the resolution of gun policy in the United States will not be straightforward so long as gun culture itself guides gun owners’ politics.
Schwartz’s work here makes an important contribution to several fields. Scholars of gun politics and policy will appreciate its accessible writing and nuanced perspective on the role of the NRA. The book builds on and nicely complements previous work by Matthew Lacombe and Jennifer Carlson, among others. Public-policy process scholars will appreciate the work’s detailed effort to extend the narrative policy framework by focusing on the macro level of analysis through the NRA’s meta-narratives. Finally, this work may prove useful to scholars of political communication and memory, because Schwartz’s narrative arc is convincing, rich, and easy to comprehend.
