In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

Independence Day Greetings from Wyoming! On this day 247 years ago, the Second Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence and separated the United States from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

After two nights in Laramie, the 7th day of our trip took us to Jackson via Rock Springs where we met up with my sister and brother-in-law from California. The drive reminded me of the shocking vastness of Wyoming I first experienced when I worked here for a few weeks with my father decades ago.

He installed telecommunications equipment (microwave radio) which meant we would often work on remote mountaintops where it was impractical to run physical lines. In this case, we were working outside Basin, Worland, and Thermopolis in the center of the state, so far from anything that we flew into Billings, Montana.

One day I was opening a wooden crate with a piece of waveguide in it and found a rat in it. Not knowing what to do, I went inside the small one-room building housing the radios to ask my dad. He had his hands full, so one of the local tower guys working with us indicated he would handle it. Before I could get back outside I heard a “pop” and by the time I got back to the crate, all I saw was some blood splatter on the wood and the tower guy putting a revolver back in the glove box of his truck.

Welcome to Wyoming.

It’s not surprising that the first time I had heard actual gunfire was in Wyoming, nor that a Firearms Research Center was recently established at the University of Wyoming.

After visiting the Wyoming Territorial Prison and the Matthew Shepard Memorial, we finally got to the whole reason we wanted to stop in Laramie in the first place. We had lunch and dinner with George Mocsary, Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming and Founding Director of the Firearms Research Center (FRC) housed at the College of Law.

The College of Law is under construction, so I wasn’t able to “tour” the FRC, but as Sandy and I were walking the University of Wyoming’s beautiful campus I did see the building that should really house a firearms center, Merica Hall.

I first met George in 2022 at the Duke Center for Firearms Law works-in-progress workshop in Durham. Our mutual friend — and Senior Fellow of the FRC — Ashley Hlebinsky provided an introduction and we discussed his efforts to establish a center to complement the work being done at Duke. Just a few weeks ago, I presented some of my work on concealed carry laws at this annual workshop, this time hosted by the Wyoming FRC in Fort Worth.

Over lunch, we talked about the stresses of founding an academic research unit at a public university. Among them is the need to raise money. It raises the question, who will donate money to fund a research center designed to train practitioners to “serve the legal needs of all those who produce, employ, own, and regulate firearms”?

Probably those who have an interest in such things, like individuals and companies working in the firearms space. When the FRC officially launched in January 2023, the Wall Street Journal‘s headline read, “New Gun Research Center Funded by Firearms Executives Aims to Diversify Debate.” The implication being that the FRC would simply do the bidding of the gun industry.

When the Wall Street Journal asked me to comment, I said my hope was that a new center that approached firearms from a more sympathetic perspective would enrich our understanding. But I worried that there wouldn’t be true dialogue across differences. As I was quoted as saying, “I do feel like it’s going to be a he said-he said or they said-they said situation.”

Having just recently attended a joint workshop sponsored by the Wyoming Firearms Research Center and Duke Center for Firearms Law, I am slightly more optimistic than I was back in January, as I discuss in my Light Over Heat YouTube video #54.

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