I give the author full credit for being honest and at least attempting to be open minded (not easy to do with a volatile subject). Although her anti-gun bias is painfully obvious and permeates the entire book.
The author was educated at Berkeley, and sees everything through that viewpoint. She misses several elephants in the room. For example: Could the fact that LBJ's Great Society programs have largely destroyed the black family have anything to do with the rise in inner-city violence? As a true Feminist, the author doesn't even consider the possibility that having generations of children grow up without fathers in the home might cause problems.
She is much too academic, and tends to jump to a lot of conclusions. Based, I think, on current trends in Political Correctness, rather than objective reality. For example, she talks about growing financial insecurity making people less trustful of government. Really? In 1930's Germany, it seemed like financial insecurity made people far too trustful of their government.
Her writing is filled with high-sounding, theoretical "psycho babble." She writes like a freshman college student, trying to impress her professor by blindly parroting back all the nonsense she learned in class. The author insists on trying to define reality based on academic theories. I suspect that a month of living on the street in a bad neighborhood would teach her a lot more than every Sociology class she ever took.
She attributes a crime victims split second decision to fight for their lives to a vast, sociological reform movement. While people that carry firearms usually put a lot of serious thought into the possible consequences, sometimes it's just about trying to stay alive in an increasingly dangerous world. She has some notion in her head that self-defense isn't a good enough reason to have a gun. Therefore, everyone that carries a gun must have some other, more complicated, reason for doing so.
According to the author, simple self-defense just isn't a good enough explanation. People who choose to carry guns must also be "making a statement" to society. While this might be true of the small minority of people who practice "Open Carry", she lumps that group in with the far larger number of people who carry concealed. I expect that most people who carry concealed can probably count on one hand the number of other people who even know they carry a gun. How are you supposed to be "making a social statement" if you go to great lengths to make sure no one knows what you're doing?
She insists on injecting a racial bias into her findings. If a white crime victim defends himself against a black criminal, then he's (guilty of) making a racial judgement? Why isn't the black guy guilty of racism for trying to rob someone who's white? Is the black victim who defends himself against a white attacker also racist?
She makes gender observations on the basis that women are somehow being marginalized because a higher percentage of men carry guns. And men, of course, only carry guns because of some need to preserve their dignity, or to see themselves as still useful as protectors. The possibility that a man might carry a gun for some reason other than propping up the male ego never even seems to occur to her.
She somehow manages to find either a gender or racial bias in almost every single statement that anybody makes, as well as every statistic she researches. There is a whole chapter on racial profiling in the middle of the book, which appears to contain a number of legitimate concerns that should be addressed. To me, she undermines those valid points by having "cried wolf" so often before that I couldn't take her seriously. The overwhelming majority of blacks killed by guns are shot by other blacks committing crimes. Since she doesn't mention that, she comes off as pushing an agenda rather than seeking a real solution to the problem.
She will give quotes from people as proof of societal racism/sexism, but does not offer any numbers to show how widespread that illustrated attitude is. For example, she quotes several men who made sexist remarks when they saw her carrying a pistol. But was that attitude evident in 75% of the men who saw her carrying a gun? Was it only 5%, and the other 95% treated her respectfully? She doesn't say. Does she offer any evidence of how prevalent this attitude is outside of the two economically devastated cities of Detroit and Flint where she did her research? Well, no. Any data showing whether this has gotten better or worse in the last 20 years? Not a word. But she uses these isolated examples to make blanket statements about sexism in American society. Using her own methodology, maybe what she really discovered is that Sexism is caused by Poverty?
Her overall thesis is that the increase in gun ownership and carrying is tied to the (largely financial) decline of American society. Personally, I don't buy the whole Poverty causes Crime theory. Lack of Morality causes criminal behavior. The whole history of this country is filled with immigrants who arrived with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, and they didn't resort to selling drugs or armed robbery. There was a lot more financial decline in 1930's America, and there wasn't the same increase in violent crime (and most of it then was fueled by Prohibition, not widespread poverty). Having said that, if we were still living in the 1950's, or Mayberry as she calls it, fewer honest citizens would feel the need to protect themselves.
The author is not emotionally driven or hostile to gun owners. She is simply starting from a different set of assumptions. If you accept, for example, that Poverty causes Crime, then certain conclusions naturally follow from that. And all discussions of, or solutions to, criminal behavior are filtered through that assumption. Even if she has to ignore some inconvenient facts, and come up with convoluted theories, in order to make everything fit into her assumptions (Berkeley doesn't seem to be a big fan of teaching the Scientific Method).
I obviously disagree with much of what the author says. But the book offers a fascinating look into a World View. Since this world view is predominant among both the old mainstream media and in academic circles, it is worth taking the time to understand it.
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