Basic Pistol - by Harel Shapira (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From an award-winning scholar of the political right comes an immersive and harrowing journey through the other-world of gun schools and the curriculum of violence they teach.

To understand why so many people die by the gun, we must first understand how people live by it.

This is the realization that led sociologist Harel Shapira to embed himself in Tactical Training, a popular firearms school in rural Texas. Here, students are inducted into an ideology of self-defense, where any grocery store trip could become a shootout, and any passerby could be the home intruder that tears a family apart. To shoot and kill in the name of self-defense is not a matter of "if" but "when."

Forty-two classes, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and one concealed carry license later, Shapira has emerged with Basic Pistol, a dark and richly textured plunge into a uniquely American obsession. Basic Pistol follows Shapira's fraught journey through Tactical Training's extensive curriculum and into a community for whom gun ownership is livelihood, is tradition, is identity. In so doing, he exposes how today's gun culture, and the fears and fantasies it breeds, have eaten away at the very fabric of American society, empowering white men to place Black humanity in the line of fire.

Page-turning and paradigm-shifting, Basic Pistol shows that if there's any hope of reining in gun violence, it must start not with the guns themselves, but with the people who carry them.

About the Author

Harel Shapira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Waiting for José (Princeton University Press), which explores the civilians who patrol the United States / Mexico border. Through fieldwork at gun schools, Shapira considers how people train their minds and bodies to use guns, and what such an education means for the future of American democracy. His previous research has been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.