This may be the first retro academic book on American gun culture. Containing variants of virtually every 1970s cliché about guns, gun owners and gun rights organizations, it sets the study of America's thriving gun culture back forty years to when national antigun groups dominated America's informational sociology.
Scott Melzer's thesis is that the National Rifle Association promotes a “frontier masculinity,” a “mythologized dominant version of manhood from America's frontier past” (16), that privileges a group of conservative, old, antifeminist, paranoid, politically extreme white men who advance a reactionary conservative agenda of individual rights instead of the good collective rights of oppressed peoples.
Melzer, assistant professor of sociology at Albion College in Michigan, is by no means the first person to investigate the NRA while carrying a hypothesis on his shoulder, or to interpret sundry bits of evidence to support preconceptions. He armors these findings with a “grounded-theory” methodology that connects dots of data obtained in interviews of small nonrepresentative samples of NRA members, apparent naïfs, and textual analyses of select publications and fundraising media. Overall the approach is a fairly standard graduate school production, brand X critical theory loosely applied, and rehearses the postmodern catechism: hegemonic masculinity, identity, gendering, queer theory, privileging and thought crimes such as “essentialism.” Moral indictment overburdens analysis: the NRA has not gotten aboard the progressive train of dialectical history.
Retro clichés include: (1) the NRA as a controlling, “top-down” (261) cultural monolith, oblivious to the reality of American gun culture as large, diffuse and horizontally organized into numerous autonomous local interpretive communities; (2) gun owners as the embodiment of a paranoid defective masculinity that compensates, à la Freud, via the gun; (3) the intrinsic male chauvinism of gun culture despite two recent women NRA presidents, numerous women elected board members, and increases in the numbers of women gun owners and holders of permits to carry concealed weapons; (4) dismissal of genuine threats to American gun rights – thereby reducing NRA “gun crusaders” to Chicken Little status; (5) a concurrent acceptance of the public-relations tactic of “reasonable common-sense” gun controls used by antigun organizations to mask an incrementalist policy designed to hinder gun ownership in any way possible; and (6) the alleged extremism of the NRA's leaders for not reflecting more moderate views of the membership, despite the obvious facts of democratic election and overwhelming financial support by members.
Melzer pummels a straw man to set the mood, a popular technique in antigun books and news, where despite the availability of articulate spokespersons, reporters somehow manage to interview the kook in the coonskin cap in the back parking lot. At the Reno 2002 NRA annual meeting, Melzer finds “Floyd” (25), a gauche man clumsily patronizing women at a seminar. Melzer also notices people at the Reno meeting wearing western-style garb, affirming frontier masculinity. But many Nevadans wear cowboy hats and boots every day. Similar lack of sensible comparison haunts the book; properties attributed to NRA members are well distributed across the general population, too. One expects qualitative method to yield thick description, but said description need not be thickheaded.
