Gun Culture in Our Culture Wars
Solomon Pena ran for State Representative of New Mexico’s House District 14 last November, lost by about two thousand votes and claimed on social media that he should have won the election. On Monday, January 16, Albuquerque police arrested Pena with charges of paying four other men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators. Police said Pena was present on at least one of the shootings.
With a socio-political landscape crowded with fascist militias, so-called Constitutional sheriffs, militant Christian nationalists, white supremacists and with one of our two dominant national political parties practically containing an armed wing — like Sinn Fein or Hezbollah — can anyone honestly say anymore that they never saw such a story coming?
“It follows that ‘gun culture’ refers to the social, durable, and layered pattern of cognitive and normative systems embodied in firearms as both artifacts and vehicles of that culture,” wrote academic researchers in Nature magazine. “Gun culture encompasses how both individuals and institutions consciously and unconsciously interact with firearms, through beliefs, thoughts, behaviors, social and legal norms, as well as the social structures they project onto them.”
The researchers in the Nature magazine study noted that an American “gun culture” was first branded in the…