Muskets & Masculinity
How Guns, Like Men, Are Subject To Lazy Stereotyping And Why I Have To Apologize For My Lazy Thinking
A funny thing happened on the way to this Substack post. I paused to ask Twitter a question. Two questions, in truth, and they were simple:
I conduct survey research as part of my day job so I’ll quickly throw in the required disclaimers that this poll isn’t reliable—principally because I did not collect a random or representative sample. For example, if you look at these results, adding up the two “Yes, Guns” groups, you’d think that 75% of people support legal gun ownership. Which is not true according to actual survey research—see, for example, Pew Research Center’s summary showing that it’s more like 50/50 depending on what is asked. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use some of these data if we know what we’re looking for.
My whole purpose in doing this was to look for a relationship between masculinity and legal gun ownership. I wanted to know if how people see one shapes how they see the other. My simple Twitter poll suggests they do: If you think masculinity is good, you are very likely to support legal gun ownership (83%). Conversely, if you don’t think masculinity is generally good, you are less likely to approve of legal gun ownership (35%).
I’m not going to dive into the masculinity side of this relationship—I spent much of 2022 doing that and you’re welcome to watch those videos and read those (free) posts here, here, and here on my Substack. Instead, my purpose here is to talk about how people perceive both things and do so badly.
On Muskets And Masculinity
I’m using the word musket here for gun because I like alliteration. And because I own a musket, the first firearm I’ve owned in my entire adult life. I got into muskets because I’m a history fanatic—I live just 20 minutes away from the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts where the “shot heard round the world” was fired, the same shot that formally triggered (pun intended) the American Revolutionary War. After reading book after book about the events of the Revolutionary War and giving visiting friends and relatives many tours of historic battle sites, I realized that I couldn’t quite understand the mechanics of the battle solely by reading text descriptions. I simply couldn’t grasp what it’s like to defend my family or town as a colonial militiaman, or march on an unsuspecting village as a redcoat without personal knowledge of what it’s like to handle and fire a standard-issue Brown Bess musket. That’s why in 2022 I resolved to buy a period replica musket, which I spent time finishing and learning about before I ultimately fired it for the first time in November of last year.
These few months later, I have fired my musket over a hundred times. I’ve learned a lot about musket fire, but I’ve also dived into gun ownership questions generally because to fire my musket in suburban Boston I’ve had to join a gun club, and though the details on whether this is required are still unclear, I also chose to get a License to Carry (LTC) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In under a year I went from someone who doesn’t own or fire guns to someone who could conceal-carry a Glock if I wanted to (note: I don’t own a firearm other than my musket, at present, not that that’s technically anybody’s business).
In the process, I have had to face a lot of difficult questions in my own mind. I’ve also had uncomfortable conversations with my wife who at times probably wondered whether I was still the peaceable man she married. I’ve ultimately learned that I’ve been kind of a jerk when it comes to my beliefs and assumptions about guns and gun owners. This article is me explaining why I was so wrong before and what I’m prepared to do about it.
Masculine Men Don’t Hurt People, Toxic Men Do
The Appeal Of Lazy Stereotyping
In early 2022 I produced a research-based piece and video explaining why the term “toxic masculinity” was not useful along with a piece I wrote for the Institute of Family Studies. Summarizing the results of a 2021 nationwide study of adults, I suggested that people who assume toxic masculinity exists and who believe that we should combat often hold an unspoken assumption: The more masculine a man is (or thinks he is), the more likely he is to engage in harmful behaviors. Those behaviors range from light actions like manspreading or mansplaining to grave things like sexism generally and sexual assault specifically. When I released the video, I found very quickly that debunking this assumption with data was not received well by some. They were not interested in overturning the lazy stereotype that says “men can be bad therefore masculine men must be worst of all.”
I won’t recap the analysis in detail, but the facts are simple: We can measure masculinity along a spectrum. Measuring men and women on that spectrum, masculinity does not form a bell curve where you might find at one extreme end the hyper masculine men who do all the bad things. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is “very masculine,” fully 41% of men agree that they are very masculine (see the figure taken from that report). More to the point, those 41% of men are the best among us on nearly every measure I included in my survey. These men give more to charity, do more community service, are more likely to be faithful to their partners, and find more satisfaction in their children. They are more successful in education attainment and career outcomes, and they are happier and experience more life satisfaction than the other men who rank themselves lower on the scale of masculinity.
The conclusion is simple: Masculinity, as it is lived and experienced by men in the US today, directly contributes to good outcomes for individual men, their friends and families, and their communities. The more masculine, the better. Instead of warning about the dangers lurking inside of masculinity we should be actively promoting its increase. (Interestingly, the same is true of femininity as it is experienced by women, see how my data was used to come to this conclusion in this article).
While you as an individual can choose to feel as masculine or feminine as you want, as for what message we want to send men generally, browbeating them into under-developing their masculinity actually harms everybody. But to shift from this to a more positive view of masculinity, we’d have to shed our lazy stereotype about men and masculinity.
How I Lazily Stereotyped Gun Owners
My Twitter poll suggests that people lump masculinity and gun ownership together. If you have lazy stereotypes about one, it’s likely you have lazy stereotypes about the other. Both stereotypes are unsupported by the data about men and about gun owners. Sadly, I have been guilty of lazy stereotyping about both. I grew up in the sparsely populated western US where settlers had lived off the land for a century before I was born, not to mention the indigenous people who did the same there for many centuries more. Schools in my communities took off two days from school each October for the deer hunt. This vacation was a wonderful break from school and we boys would all excitedly look forward to going camping with our fathers and uncles, making it a powerful bonding experience.
When I was nine, we went on the deer hunt with Jim, one of my dad’s employees, a real manly guy with lots of rifles and a nice pickup truck (Ford F-150, naturally). He routinely bagged a deer every year and naïve me thought that maybe he would help my dad who never came home with a deer score a big buck so I could tell the other boys in school that we had landed a four- or five-point buck like in the stories I knew they were also hoping to tell. Jim’s son Brad was a few years older than me and he was super fun to hang out with. A reckless kid who swore a lot, Brad loved to take risks, whittle stuff, and shoot his shotgun at anything that moved and a lot of things that didn’t.
On day one of the actual hunt, after we’d gotten up before dawn and marched out into the woods to track the deer in our chosen mountain range, we were headed back to camp having only sighted a few deer and we were a bit bummed. Brad was the most vocal in expressing his disappointment and he kept shooting things with his small-caliber shotgun to show that he was the equal to any hunter in the mountains. Eventually, we came across a pond and Brad saw a jackrabbit alongside it. Trapped between us and the pond, the jackrabbit was easy prey and Brad took aim and blew it to pieces.
His dad was both proud and a bit dismayed and told Brad he’d have to retrieve the carcass, remove all the buckshot, and prepare the rabbit for dinner that night. A wise lesson to teach a kid. But Brad turned it into a macabre game, taking the rabbit back to camp and pulling it apart in gruesome fashion, trying to gross us younger kids out. It worked. It also made me dislike hunting. I was suddenly less interested in getting a deer if it meant you were supposed to gloat over it and act like Brad was acting. I was later grateful that after three days of hunting my father didn’t bring a deer home that year, as per our custom.
It’s unfair of me to take this single incident and use it to justify what became a lifelong dislike of hunting and guns. But I did. I was all of nine years old. After that incident, I began to hear my friends talk about the rifles they hoped to get when they turned twelve differently than before. And I determined not to get one myself. I went to hunter safety when I turned twelve, true, but other than my childhood BB gun, I never asked for nor received a gun as a teenager. I might have shot a rifle a dozen times in those years, a shotgun probably the same.
It was the 80s by now and it was fashionable to make fun of rednecks. Country music had always been fair game—Garth Brooks hadn’t made country music lucrative yet and country radio stations were few—and hunting was always associated with those people in their pickup trucks with the double gun racks. It sounds crazy today but in the mid-80s, most of my male classmates who drove trucks came to school with a gun hanging in the rear window of their pickups. I was their friend, but if I’m honest I began to look down on them for their guns.
At the same time, in the broader culture, guns were being brandished by gangsta rap artists and being used in actual gang warfare in the distant “big city.” Combined with my own personal experience of guns, I concluded that guns gave off an energy that I didn’t want to associate with. When my wife and I were married, we agreed: Guns were not for us. And gun people or “gun nuts” as some derisively called them, were not our people.
Where I Finally Offer An Overdue Apology
I now apologize for that lazy stereotyping and hasty judgement. I should have realized along the way that not only was I being bigoted, I was also creating a massive headache for myself as a parent.
Like many parents raising young children in the 90s, we vowed not to have any toy guns in our home. Watch your kids point wood blocks in the air and say “pew pew” enough times and eventually you give in, indulging them with water guns because it’s just water, then maybe Nerf guns because it’s foam, and eventually laser tag guns because they don’t shoot anything but light. And don’t ask me to recount the many years of battles we had over video game guns. No Call of Duty for my kids, no sir.
We never did come up with a good explanation for why the standards we had at any one time were the right ones. But at least we weren’t exposing our children to the potential harms of having a gun in the home. Every news story about harmful gun use from suicides to school shootings reinforced our belief that we had done something right. To be clear, I don’t believe a child needs to grow up with a gun in the home. But I also no longer believe that “guns are bad and gun people are bad,” is a good reason not to have one.
It was my brother-in-law who got me shooting clay pigeons in my 40s. Not only was it a lot of fun, I had a knack for it. I can typically hit 60-70% of them and can regularly get two in the same pull. All without growing up having developed that skill. Plus, my brother-in-law is someone I admire greatly. Each time I visited and he took me out to shoot—something we only did half a dozen times perhaps—it slowly forced me to deal with the negative stereotypes I had built up about gun ownership.
The Truth About Legal Guns And Their Owners
There are more than 400 million registered firearms in the US. That’s in a country of fewer than 350 million people, where just over 100 million of those individuals have a firearm. Yes, that means the average gun owner owns about 4 guns. I have a friend from high school who owns around four dozen and let me tell you those things are worth a mint (let me also tell you that if you were to attempt a home invasion on this guy, you would not survive five seconds). If you had told me those numbers—400 million guns for 100 million people—10 years ago it would have activated my prejudices and I would have thought something like, “No wonder we have a gun problem in this country.” I understand and accept that the 2nd Amendment encodes a right to own guns in the US. But I did secretly think that the good people usually avoided guns and those who were really into guns were less good. I admit this with respect for my many friends and relatives who were and still are into guns.
I’m a numbers guy, I depend on statistical analysis to make a living, which is why it pains me to admit that I never understood the 400 million guns number for what it is: A ringing endorsement of legal gun owners in this country. I say this as a reformed lazy stereotyper of guns and gun owners. I know that there are people in this country who believe that a gun is automatically harmful to people by its mere existence. They feel “triggered” to see a gun much less be close to one. In fact, it’s gotten so bad that some colleges are discouraging the use of the term “trigger warnings” because it is doubly triggering since the term might make someone think of gun violence.
The facts don’t support this generalized fear of guns per se. In truth, the facts suggest support for the tired, old slogan of the gun rights activists, that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” a slogan which I don’t particularly embrace but which is technically correct. Because with 400 million legal firearms in circulation in the US, only a few tens of thousands of them are used to kill people in any given year. All of those deaths are tragic. Especially so because a majority of them come from suicide, and this has included people close to me who I miss terribly. But none of those deaths were caused by guns. Instead, they were caused by people who used those guns to do awful and regretful things.
If you don’t think that’s a meaningful distinction, let me put it to you this way: If you think guns hurt people, then guns are doing a terrible job of it. Especially legal ones which is what we’re talking about when we talk about gun regulation. Because given the billions of dollars spent on firearms and ammo in this country each year, fewer than 0.025% of those guns successfully harm anyone in any given year. And as gun ownership has climbed to the 400 million number in the past two decades, the harm done by guns did not rise in proportion. Truly, if by their mere existence, guns hurt people, they are terrible at it.
Which is why I’ve had to come to my state of contrition regarding the stereotypes I’ve had about gun owners. The vast majority of them will never do anything with their gun that harms another human being. And to be clear, vast majority means something like 99.975% in any given year. These people possess what some regard as a terrible tool that wreaks havoc on human life. Yet nearly all of them, statistically speaking, do not use that tool to do anything more harmful than to do a bit of hunting or target practice, often as a an excuse for bonding with friends and relatives.
Refusing To Believe Things That Aren’t True
When I find something in my catalog of lazy stereotypes that I should eliminate, I commit to doing so, including identifying changes in behavior that will be consist with my new knowledge. I have identified two types of change I expect from myself. First, I should choose to get to know actual gun owners. Second, I should be more vigilant generally about lazy stereotyping.
New Friends I Didn’t Know I Could Have
I’m now a member of a gun club so I am already meeting generous and funny people who are part of my club or otherwise associated with my new habit of shooting lead balls into paper targets. I am sad that I have held myself back from getting to know these people and people like them before now. Nothing in my experience along the way to getting my License To Carry has reinforced the lazy stereotypes I had built up over many years. In fact, the 24 people I spent a day with in the firearm safety class mandated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were some of the most diverse people I’ve met in a long time. And not check-the-box kind of diversity, but real diversity—I met a Brazilian small business owner who decided to arm herself to protect her business, I encountered Ukrainian immigrants eager to exercise constitutional rights after having achieved US citizenship. In fact, the people in my class and shopping in the adjoining gun shop were more racially diverse than the typical gathering I encounter in the suburbs of Boston. If anything will challenge your lazy stereotypes, it’s watching a white gun seller respectfully show two black men an array of handguns, dryly discussing various features of them to assist the men in their purchase. (If that image triggers any of your lazy stereotypes, I invite you to challenge yourself.)
And then there’s the primitive weapons and black powder community. This refers to the enthusiasts who study, build, fire, and expound upon historic black powder weapons like my 1761 Pedersoli replica Brown Bess long land pattern smoothbore Musket.
There are Kentucky rifle enthusiasts and flintlock pistol fans and if you ever want to learn anything about how to handle and fire these weapons, just post a video of yourself with your new musket kit and you will get dozens of helpful suggestions offering guidance and correction (I need lots of the latter) on your journey. My experience sharing videos on YouTube of my musket firing tests has deepened my respect for people who responsibly own and use firearms. I can no longer pretend they are less good people.
Ditch Lazy Stereotyping For Good
Along my journey, I’ve interacted with many friends and relatives who are gun enthusiasts and shared with them that I’m rethinking my stereotypes. They have been very generous and I appreciate that. At the same time, a few have replied with lazy stereotypes of their own about “gun control nuts,” mocking them in the same lazy way that gun owners have also been mocked. But not most of them. I appreciate, for example, the deep dialogue I had with a friend who met me on the range with several rifles and handguns so I could shoot them for the first time. He has some beautiful firearms and his generosity in letting me fire them was an example of how this community has treated me generally. But more important to me was his willingness to talk openly about the critiques he has of gun-control activism, not in a lazy way but in a carefully articulated and animus-free way.
All these experiences have prompted me to think about how to stay vigilant against lazy stereotypes. Because avoiding lazy stereotyping doesn’t have to mean coming to admire people you can still strongly disagree with. In my opinion, at a minimum it means two things:
Evaluate the actual harm. We are biologically wired and culturally primed to pay extra attention to things that might harm us. This makes sense on every possible level. Those who didn’t worry about the sound of the tiger treading through the nearby grass didn’t survive to reproduce. Those who did, did and voila, we are here. But that doesn’t mean every sound in the grass is a lurking tiger. Given that we live in the most prosperous time in the history of the world—and in the US, are among the most prosperous people in that world such that even our poor live better than the average person a thousand years ago—we have far fewer lurking tigers to worry about. However, our brains and our cultures don’t know how to turn that alert system off. Thus we overperceive threats in our environment and can even end up inventing things to worry about. Many of our modern “traumas” are just disappointments, but try telling your brain that. Seriously, try telling your brain that using numbers.
In my gun example, I took a number like 400 million guns and translated that into actual harm rather than imagined harm. That’s when the relationship between the number of legal guns owned and the terrible things that happen when people misuse guns evaporated. Because there isn’t one. Not just that the relationship is small, but that it is weak, meaning that when gun ownership rises, the harms guns cause don’t rise accordingly. By reducing our fears to focus on actual harms instead of perceived ones, you can relieve yourself of the burden of believing that every movement in the tall grass is a mortal threat.
Try this on whatever lazy stereotype you hold. Are you afraid of Islam because of terrorism and your mind justifies this stereotype by remembering the senseless loss of thousands of people on 9/11? You shouldn’t. There are about 3.5 million Muslims in the US yet just a few dozen are arrested in a typical year for supporting or participating in extremist plots; and just 141 Americans have been killed by those attacks or plots, or fewer than 10 a year for the two decades since 2001, with terror-related arrests falling since 2015 even as the Muslim population in the US is growing. Every single one of those deaths is a tragedy. Every person who supported or committed those acts is awful and should be held responsible. But if Islam is trying to hurt Americans, it’s very bad at it. Actual harm analysis shows us this clearly.
You can extend this thinking to any topic, large or small, by reminding yourself, “If this thing causes harm, it’s doing a poor job of it.” In the long run, there will be harms, some of them may even be large, but most are not and starting with that assumption will help you stay in control of your lazy stereotyping.
Mistrust the info offered by your tribe. As I write this, there is a social media storm in the wake of the collapse of Buffalo Bills’ player Damar Hamlin during a game last weekend. He is currently in critical condition and I pray for his safe and speedy recovery. But meanwhile, back on social media, people who think they mean well are using this terrible incident to make claims about either the effect of the COVID vaccines, long-COVID, or any other cause beyond simple cardiac arrest brought on by direct impact to the heart. These conversations follow a predictable pattern:
It was the vaccine that did it, young healthy people don’t just up and collapse suddenly!
Actually, yes, they do, very infrequently but with more regularity than you know because you haven’t paid attention to these incidents before now.
Oh yeah? Well, here’s a link to a study where somebody claims that the rate of sudden cardiac arrest experienced by athletes in the past two years is way higher than it was before.
Once someone has dropped the magic link that “proves” that athletes are dying all over the world in greater numbers than ever before, they can no longer be reasoned with. And why should they, didn’t they see a number of actual harm just like James said they should? Except they didn’t. The particular study in this case constructed a list of pre-COVID sudden cardiac arrest deaths among athletes that deliberately omitted key sources that are well documented and would have dramatically altered the pre-COVID body count. Ideally, researchers would not release these so-called studies without soliciting critiques from experts who have been tracking these deaths for longer because, who knew, those people exist (spoiler alert, there is a dedicated field of sports medicine that has been tallying these deaths and explaining them for two decades now; there are at least two specific genetic conditions that explain why otherwise completely fit athletes can die of sudden cardiac arrest—translation: this is not a new phenomenon).
Simply put, if your tribe claims that thousands of people were killed by the new thing they oppose, assume that the number is wrong, exaggerated, or taken out of context, both because good numbers are hard to come by but also because people lie—some doing so with good intentions and others not. Be especially wary of numbers that seem radically simple like “1 in 5 will experience X ” or “every 30 minutes X happens” because these numbers are notoriously bad, in some cases outright lies and in other cases painted this way to make something seem worse than it is (for example, something that happens every 30 minutes only happens 48 times a day or under 14,000 times a year—it can mean a lot to the people directly affected but, like shark attacks, the actual occurrence rate is low).
A key phrase to combat this common weakness is to say, “that number sounds too good to be true,” or more to the point, “that number sounds too much like what I want it to be for my comfort.” Saying it out loud models for your friends and family that you are aware of what you want the numbers to say and that you’re actively challenging yourself to insist on good evidence that develops over time. Maybe the numbers will prove to be right, and you can take a moral victory lap for your side then. But employing this phrase either way marks you out as a thinker who can be trusted.
An Open-ended End
Some might hope that I have now seen the light and will become an ardent supporter of 2nd Amendment rights. I will not be joining the NRA nor putting a gun-rights bumper sticker on my truck, sorry to say. While I am much more supportive of the 2nd Amendment now than I ever have been—I’ve written a lengthy essay about that—I don’t agree with some of the ways people go about it. However, I also don’t agree with many of the lazy arguments made against the constitutional right to bear arms and the more of those I hear, the less likely I am to believe gun control legislation could effectively solve the problem of the few guns that end up being used in terrible ways each year.
I once had a colleague whose mind seemed captured by the idea of campaign finance reform. So much so that he only cared about how to make it happen. There was no discussing with him the facts about campaign finance reform; he couldn’t even hear what you were saying if you asked where the evidence was that his preferred reforms would work. He just kept coming back to the idea that people who were for it were good and people who were against it—or even who were neutral—were bad. End of story. This is a lazy, closed mind. And as much as I liked him on many other levels, the most important thing I took away from my interactions with him was: Don’t be like that.
Long story short (too late, I’m aware), that’s what this whole essay is about: Don’t be like that. Don’t be lazy in how you think about men, about women, about guns, about Muslims, about COVID. Lazy thinking about these things (and the threats they may or may not represent) leads you to lazy stereotypes about the people who disagree with you about those threats. Which can lead you to believe things that aren’t true, ironically leading you to become your own source of harm, at least in your own life. I know this because I have done it. Don’t be like that. It’s lazy; I can be better than that. So can you.