The marketing of safes and other products like this is also reminiscent of Michael Glassner’s culture of fear (about which I have written a couple of times), where businesses construct fear and then sell the fearful various commodities-qua-solutions. Generally, with gun safes and every other aspect of gun culture technology, I find it interesting to see how these products not only respond to demands but also create and shape them. I am thinking about this myself in terms of guns themselves, holsters, clothing, and legal advice/insurance. All the stuff you can get at Cabela’s (or, in North Carolina, at Bass Pro Shops), as Jennifer Dawn Carlson smartly observes here.
This weekend, I found myself at a Michigan Cabela’s store: for those of you who haven’t entered a Cabela’s, this is America’s megachain for anything gun-related (they call themselves the “World’s Foremost Outfitter”). Cabela’s stores feature “Second Amendment Weekends” (I met Wayne LaPierre at one of them in 2010); offer guns ranging from pocket guns to hunting rifles to antique collectible revolvers; and have more gun accessories than you can probably wrap your mind around – specialty ammo, reloading equipment, targets, gun safes. This is the ‘gun industry’ on the ground – and it’s much more than just guns. This vast collection of goods represents a past-time, a hobby, and, especially for people who buy guns primarily for protection purposes, an entire orientation to safety and security.
Of course, guns, gun safes, ammunition, and so forth – these aren’t the only examples, or even the most ubiquitous examples, of security…
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Gun Culture 2.0 
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