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.

I hate to move on from the Cody Firearms Museum, but this is my third and final post about my visit there with Sandy on the 16th day of our Western travels.

In my first post, I highlighted how the museum seeks to appeal to those who are not already into guns. In my second post, I highlighted some of what the museum has that will appeal to those who are into guns.

In this post, I discuss some of the social and cultural education about firearms the museum attempts to provide.

Although many museums do valorize their subjects, in my view the best museums seek to educate visitors. So, a firearms museum isn’t a celebration of guns or a defense of the Second Amendment. It highlights the social and cultural realities (plural) of guns.

The Cody Firearms Museum begins to do this in a few ways.

First, as noted in my first post, it helps those who are gun ignorant, gun curious, or gun skeptics to see the manifold purposes to which guns are put. In my language, it shows how guns are normal and normal people use gun. But it doesn’t stop there.

Second, around the corner from the opening exhibit and the firearms timeline is large reproduction of a Time Magazine cover photo collage showing 245 Americans with differing views of guns. You see Gabby Giffords and Kevin Dixie, people wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts with and without guns, and so on. The collage captures the incredible diversity of views about guns (pro/con), of uses of guns (good/bad), and of gun owners. The magazine’s interactive website is still available online and you should check it out if you haven’t already.

Third, a wall highlights the relationship between firearms and culture — the roles and uses of guns — throughout history. There are a lot of different ways you could slice that huge pie, but the museum includes panels on law, sport, legislation, misuse, and defense. Misuse is a panel that could easily have been left off, but it is an important aspect of the reality of guns even if it is not the primary reality it is often made out to be.

Fourth, of course, being at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West means having a section on “The Wild West” is essential. But so too is the recognition of the gap between the myth of the Wild West and its reality. The museum does a great job of including artifacts that will be of interest to people raised on TV shows like Bonanza, but it also captures some of the complexity of guns in the real history of the West.

Last, on a very personal level, I was impressed that a wall in the military section covering “The Cost of War” included a large image from the World War II Japanese-American Internment Camp at Heart Mountain, a short drive north of Cody.

After our tour of the Cody Firearms Museum, Sandy and I visited the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. It, too, is worth a visit, even if you have visited other internment camps sites like Manzanar in California.

A woman working at the Buffalo Bill Center “complained” to me that Heart Mountain had hired away two of their great young employees and there is a lot of growth and energy there.

There is so much more in the Cody Firearms Museum that I haven’t had a chance to cover in these three brief blog posts, nor in my three planned “Light Over Heat” videos. Not to mention the other four museum at the Buffalo Bill Center.

Even if you’re not planning to visit Yellowstone, a few days in Cody is time well spent.

Thanks for reading beyond the headline. If you appreciate this or some of the other 1000+ posts on this blog, please consider supporting my research and writing on American gun culture by liking and sharing my work.