David Yamane

Liminal Gun Ownership

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the LGC National Meeting for the first time. The “L” in LGC stands for “Liberal,” but as I argued in my keynote address to the group, it could just as well stand for “Liminal.”

Anthropologist Victor Turner used the term liminality to describe the condition of being “betwixt and between.” Others have described it as being “neither here nor there.”

The concept was originally used to describe the transitional phase of a rite of passage, when a person is moving from one status to another. It could also be used to describe the passage from one place to another, like moving to a new city, or from one situation to another, like beginning a new job.

Turner thought that liminality was so intense that most people moved into and out of it in due time. But the condition of being betwixt and between is something that some people may experience over longer periods of time. Think about people who are social exiles or refugees, those who voluntarily stand outside of “normal” society, those who are androgynous in sex or gender identity.

Or think about someone who is liberal and also a gun owner.

Most liberals are not gun owners and most gun owners are not liberal.

Liberal gun owners, I contend, are special people who occupy a special place in our contemporary socio-political reality. Hence my conclusion that the Liberal Gun Club really is a Liminal Gun Club and liberal gun owners really are liminal gun owners.

I am working with the leadership of the LGC to push out a video recording of my address, “The Agony (and Ecstasy) of Liberal Gun Ownership,” where I elaborate on these ideas and their implications. So watch for that.

But those who have followed me over the years, and those who have read my book Gun Curious, know that this perspective captures the fundamental experience I had journeying out of the blue bubble in which I have spent most of my life and journeying inside America’s gun culture for the next 13 years (and counting).

Being in the liminal position of having one foot inside and one outside of gun culture can be a lonely existence at times. My hybrid identity as a liberal professor/gun owner in theory means having two tribes to call my own. In reality, I often instead feel homeless, floating between two different social worlds, neither here nor there.

12 comments

  1. I love everything that you’re saying, David, but I find myself bristling a bit at the binaries.

    I’ve long thought that most Americans are much more middle ground than most. If we think of politics not as opposing binaries but rather as a spectrum, I think that guns have occupied spaces in the middle and to the left of that spectrum for much longer (and with much more pervasiveness) than we suspect. In short: I don’t think it’s that gun-owning liberals are some liminal group. Rather, I think that people with the courage to identify thus are the liminal ones.

    Having said that, I think that the identity politics lens that the media force-feeds us distorts everything like one of those wavy funhouse mirrors. I think that one or two banner issues are generally what tip a person to identify as “left” or “right” (in this election, I suspect that abortion will be one of those issues). But that if we dig in with most people, we’ll find that their belief system (the one that actually propels their actions) is more nuanced and—according to identity politics du jour—inherently contradictory.

    And let’s be honest here: a long term goal of the hard leftists has been to paint gun ownership as some sort of extremist right wing behavior. The last thing they want is for gun ownership to be seen as mainstream and acceptable (and, perish the thought, even healthy!). Given that, it’s especially in their interests that liberal gun owners self-identify as some sort of fringe oddity.

    That’s why I don’t like talking about liberal gun ownership as some sort of esoteric oddity. If it could be looked at through an objective lens (and if such a thing could indeed exist), then I think we’d be surprised to find gun ownership to be much more mainstream that we had ever imagined.

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  2. At Gunsite, we have experienced increasing numbers of liberals choosing to purchase pistols and carbines and seek training. Many have never handled firearms. We have so many that we started a new class “Day Zero” the precedes our 250 Pistol and 223 Carbine (Sunday class) and is a slow-paced introduction, including shooting on a firing line. It has been very popular.

    Many of these new attendants also wish anonymity either through private classes (so their friends and neighbors do not know they are gun owners) and/or not being on the class roster.

    We consider this grand opportunity to let these folks learn we are not the “red-necks” that much of the mainstream media portray us to be.

    Ken

    Sheriff Ken Campbell (Ret.)
    Chief Executive Officer
    Gunsite Academy, Inc.
    2900 West Gunsite Road
    Paulden, AZ 86334
    (928)-636-4565
    http://www.gunsite.comhttp://www.gunsite.com/

    “Work hard, do your best, and keep your word. Never get too big for your
    britches. Trust in God, have no fear, and never forget a friend.” Harry Truman

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    • It’s great to hear that some new gun owners are seeking and getting high-quality instruction on how to use their firearms.

      It’s sad that many do not want to be “outed” as gun owners due to the fear of being stigmatized. Sad, but not at all surprising to me, as someone who spends most of my time in liberal spaces. It was only after becoming a gun owner that I realized how real liberal intolerance can be.

      Cheers, Sheriff Ken.

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      • As someone who lives in a very liberal part of the country, I tend to not talk about gun stuff when not in the company of other gun people. Ironically, despite being quite averse to them, my wife has outed me to her coworkers and a few of our neighbors and it has been fine.

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      • I totally get the need for this approach, but I also appreciate when (normal) people out themselves as it reinforces the diversity (and normality) of gun ownership.

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  3. Insofar as my motto is that guns are normal and normal people use guns, I cannot argue with you that gun ownership is mainstream, that the average, everyday gun owner is somewhere in the middle, and that much of the divide in America is waged by cultural elites on both sides. (This is a longstanding analysis of “culture wars” going back to the 1980s.)

    Unfortunately, guns have become a wedge issue in US politics and elites views both represent and influence the thinking of everyday folks.

    I can say from my own experience that I am partially alienated from both liberal culture and gun culture.

    Tomorrow I will be addressing an email from a gun culture friend who said, “I just do not understand that if Liberal Gun Owners believe in the right to own, how in the world can they vote for people that are 100% committed to strip you of that right? Seems insane to me.”

    These views are not unique.

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  4. “…In reality, I often instead feel homeless, floating between two different social worlds, neither here nor there.”

    David, I feel your pain. Whether gun ownership or politics, I joke that the advantage of being in no-man’s land is that you can get shot at from both sides.

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