David Yamane

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Blogoversaries

May 23, 2023 by 2 Comments

First, I want to wish a happy 11th blogoversary to Prof. David Yamane who started his great Gun Culture 2.0 blog 11 years ago today. It is one of those must read blogs in the gun culture.

The second blogoversary I wish to acknowledge is my own. I had forgotten about it until I saw David’s post. I started this blog on Blogger on May 20, 2010 making this blog 13 years old. I have since moved to WordPress thanks to a scare I got in 2019 when I suddenly got canceled by Google for a supposed violation of their terms of service. Fortunately, that was resolved in my favor, I was able to rescue my old posts, and I moved on.

Looking back at that first post, I can now say things that I couldn’t at the time. I spent a bit over 25 years working as a financial advisor for a firm that specialized in group retirement for the non-profit and governmental sectors. I did hold the Certified Financial Planner™ designation for 20 years until I voluntarily relinquished it at the end of April given I had retired. When I was told that I had to declare the blog as an “outside business activity” after many years of just muddling along, I had to go back and change some earlier posts due to demands from our compliance department. Go figure.

I sadly recognize that the golden age of blogging is probably over. Many of the great gun bloggers of that era such as Sebastian and Say Uncle have moved on with their lives. I owe a great debt to both of them as their links to me drove a ton of traffic my way. Others such as Weerd, Alan, Breda, and JayG have moved on to podcasting. JayG, like Tom McHale at American Handgunner, moved on to be an editor of an actual magazine. In Jay’s case, it was as Executive Editor of Shooting Illustrated. Fortunately, some of the great bloggers of the era such as Tam, Miggy, Old NFO, David Codrea, and Kevin Baker are still at it. Indeed, Kevin hit his 20th blogoversary less than 10 days ago!

While Instagram and YouTube “influencers” get the traffic now, I plan to stick with blogging as my primary activity with co-hosting on the Polite Society Podcast as the side gig. I don’t see any reason to change as I am still enjoying this. Besides, we need citizen journalists as it is called by David Codrea.

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Prof. Yamane Reviews Books On The NRA

August 12, 2022 by 4 Comments

Professor David Yamane just reviewed four books about the NRA. This was on his YouTube channel entitled “Light Over Heat with Professor David Yamane.”

Of the four books that he reviewed, I was only familiar with and have read Tim Mak’s Misfire. I personally found it a good book pointing out the controversies surrounding Wayne LaPierre.

David’s reviews takes on two persistent myths about the NRA. First that they only became political after the Cincinnati Revolt of 1977. Second that they are the most powerful lobby in Washington.

The other three books are Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force by political scientist Matthew J. Lacombe; Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War by sociologist Scott Melzer; and The NRA: The Unauthorized History by journalist Frank Smyth.

(You can also find links to each of the books on David’s blog page here.)

After listening to his review of all four books, I think Lacombe’s Firepower will be my next book to read on the NRA. He also has a number of academic articles out on the gun culture and the NRA according to Google Scholar. As a one-time grad student in political science, this has peaked piqued my interest.

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Happy Blogiversary To Gun Culture 2.0

May 22, 2022 by

David Yamane is celebrating his 10th anniversary of starting the Gun Culture 2.0 Blog. He notes that since that start in 2012, he has had over 500,000 visitors and a million pageviews. In my humble opinion, the reason he has had that success is because he puts out good stuff.

He notes in his first post that until he was 42 years old he had neither handled nor shot a firearm. Since then:

When I began this blog, I was quite new to guns and gun culture. In fact, part of the reason I started this blog was that I was so new to the study of guns that I had no scholarly standing to speak on the issue.

Since then, I have logged 799.5 hours of field observation of organized gun events (especially gun training), not including hundreds of hours of television programs, DVDs, and streaming videos I have watched, podcasts I have listened to or participated in, mundane visits to gun ranges and stores, class field trips to the gun store/range, and so on.

We need people like David. First because he is a respected academic at a major university doing serious research on the gun culture and doing it without looking at us like we are some strange species. Second because his innate curiosity has led him to investigate and experience the gun culture in all its various permutations. Finally because he is an all-around nice guy who appreciates fine whiskey, good food, interesting books, and good guns.

Somewhere along the way, despite a late start, he has become one of us and we are better for it.

Writing this reminded me that I had my own blogiversary on Friday and I had totally forgotten about it. It was my 12th. Regardless, 10th or 12th, that is a long time in blog years. I look at my blogroll and see how many of the blogs that I used to read regularly are no more. That does sadden me as I love blogs and blogging. Podcasts, YouTube videos, and other social media formats are fine but nothing for me beats researching a topic and then writing about it.

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“Concealed Carry Revolution”

May 15, 2021 by

I just brought in our mail and this arrived.

This is Prof. David Yamane’s newest work on the gun culture. In this case, specifically the growth of ordinary citizens exercising their right to bear arms.

I am looking forward to reading this as soon as possible.

The book is $11.95 on Amazon. Alternatively, if you would like a signed copy, you can sign up as an annual member to help support David’s research. Having roomed with David at the 2019 SHOT Show, I can attest he takes in-person research seriously as he was out the door to early morning meetings while I was still half asleep.

One way or another, buy the book and support his research!

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Tweet Of The Day

March 25, 2020 by 1 Comment

The tweet of the day comes from my good friend Prof. David Yamane who writes the excellent Gun Culture 2.0 blog.

As the late Dr. Martin Luther King wrote, “A right delayed is a right denied.”

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In His Cold Dead Hands

June 21, 2019 by 1 Comment

It is Friday afternoon and it is time for a laugh after the NRA news of the week. My friend and fellow blogger David Yamane posted the picture below on Facebook. It had the following caption:

Photo from 2040 of Wayne LaPierre holding onto the Executive Vice Preisdency of the NRA in his cold, dead hands.


#guns #gunculture #gunculture2point0 #nra #2a

Great satire always contains an element of truth.

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Gun Culture 2.0 Or How A Liberal Professor Became An Armed American

May 27, 2019 by 2 Comments

My friend David Yamane, Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University, delivered the lunchtime address at the NRA Foundation’s National Firearms Law Seminar in Indianapolis last month. It detailed his journey from a non-gun owning, non-shooting college professor raised in the shadow of San Francisco to becoming an armed American. It was very well received and thanks to John Correia of Armed Self Protection and associates it is now available on YouTube.

In the video he credits his wife Sandy with helping him make the journey. She, like my in-laws, is a native of Mocksville, North Carolina. According to some tongue-in-cheek sources, it is the most redneck town in the state. I’d say it really is like many small towns across the state with farmland surrounding it, a small downtown area with various small shops and offices, and a Walmart out by the highway.

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A Blog For The Gun Curious

February 7, 2019 by 1 Comment

My friend David Yamane has started a new blog called Gun Curious. It is aimed at those who don’t yet have a firearm but are curious about it.

He says:

As someone who had little exposure to and no interest in guns for most of my life, I know what it is like not to understand guns and gun culture. For nearly a decade now, I have burrowed deeper and deeper into American gun culture. I hope to translate what I have learned to the gun curious – those interested in but unsure about guns.


This uncertainty about guns can be coupled with attraction, repulsion, or neutrality. Whatever your orientation, if you are open-minded and hope to learn more about guns and gun culture, you should find something of interest here.

 If you have a friend or colleague that is curious about guns and would like to read more from a non-judgemental perspective, I would highly recommend sending them to David’s new blog.

He explains more about why he decided to start a second blog at his GunCulture 2.0 blog. 

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National Negroni Week

June 8, 2018 by

As Professor David Yamane reminded me in a text a few days ago, this is National Negroni Week. For those that wonder just what the heck is a “negroni”, it is a simple cocktail made with three ingredients: Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin. There are variations and my favorite is the Boulvardier which substitutes bourbon for the gin.

So in honor of National Negroni Week and in memory of the late Anthony Bourdain, here is how he makes the Negroni.

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Interesting Conference At Amherst College

March 2, 2017 by 1 Comment

Amherst College in Massachusetts holds their annual Copeland Colloquium this Friday and Saturday. The colloquium brings in a number of scholars from around the country to discuss a theme or topic. Past topics have included the place of art, the future of the humanities, international development, and “castrophe and the catastropic”.

This year’s theme will be The Symbolic and Material Construction of Guns.

Sponsored by the 2016-17 Copeland Colloquium, this
conference will explore the symbolic and culture
construction of guns (and other weapons), the way in
which the material culture of the weapon shapes quotidian
forms of violent interaction, and the narratives in which
we embed the “weapon as actor.” We want to ask new
questions about the symbolic value of guns and the
meanings the weapons used in the making of day-to-day
violence convey. How do those meanings take on a life of
their own in the minds of participants in violent encounters?
What kinds of symbols are guns, after all? Do they
condense multiple other meanings into a token to be
exchanged in civic life or do they operate as metaphors,
suggesting larger complexes of meaning?

Normally such a conference would be a bit esoteric even for me. However, among the presenters is my friend Prof. David Yamane of Wake Forest University who runs the Gun Culture 2.0 blog. David’s topic will be “The First Rule of Gun-Fighting is ‘Have a Gun’: Technologies of Concealed Carry in Gun Culture 2.0”. Now that doesn’t so esoteric to me.

The conference program and schedule is here along with a list of the other presentations. I have checked and the conference is open to the public. If you are in the western New England area this weekend, it might be worth a trip to Amherst for this conference.

I guess it should not be too surprising that such a conference would be held at Amherst College for a couple of reasons. First, the location is just at the north end of “gun valley” which is that swath of firearms companies (Colt, S&W, etc.) running from Hartford to Springfield. Second, fans of John Ross’ Unintended Consequences know that the protagonist Henry Bowman was an Amherst grad as is Ross himself.