Review From America's 1st Freedom (January 2010 Issue)

Professorial Repose

 

 Book looks at how citizen-to-citizen communication changed gun policy
By Jon Strunk : December 4th, 2009 UTNEWS

Patrick

If you read the newspapers and watched network news during the last few decades, you would have anticipated a growing chorus for tighter and stricter U.S. gun control. But the opposite has happened. Dozens of states have approved the right for licensed persons to carry concealed weapons.

Dr. Brian Anse Patrick, associate professor of communication, investigates this social paradox in his new book, Rise of the Anti-Media: In-Forming America’s Concealed Weapon Carry Movement.

According to Patrick, instead of the traditional, vertical model of the media informing the masses, the concealed-carry movement relied on horizontal communication between groups of citizens who banded together to lobby politicians from the grassroots, while informing their movement via their own “anti-media” systems, as Patrick terms them.

“These were the very first people to go online. They were the first to effectively take advantage of desktop publishing and e-mailed newsletters. These people informed themselves of what was happening in local and state politics and lobbied for change,” Patrick said. “Once you were reading about these gun-rights efforts in the mass media newspapers, it was too late to counter the changes.”

Patrick’s book emphasizes the impotency of large media organizations — even at a time before their demise was predicted nightly on blogs — as the reporting on gun issues and culture of the time had little relation to the changes in law and the shift of society’s mood.

“There was a decision among many of these local and regional citizen groups to move incrementally as they lobbied for concealed carry,” Patrick said. “They would target local politicians they saw as obstacles and vote them out of office. And in local and state elections, a few hundred or a few thousand votes can be determinative.”

Further, Patrick said, while the national lobbying group the National Rifle Association certainly played a role, many of the advocates for concealed-carry laws were not raised with a tradition of gun ownership or hunting in their home.

“You have business women, minority and immigrant populations — not necessarily the types of people you think of when you think ‘gun culture’ — all joining together to push elected officials to either join the effort to establish concealed-carry law or at least get out of the way.

“Look around. Advocating gun control is a losing political issue right now,” Patrick said, “and if you’ve only been reading national mass media for the last few decades, you’d have no idea how that could have happened.”

Rise of the Anti-Media is published by Lexington Books and is Patrick’s second book; he is working on his third.

Cover Image

Here is the photo that appears on the cover of Rise of the Anti-media.   The model is Brooke Wagner.  Photo by Tom Osswald.  45 acp Pistol by Colt Firearms Manufacturers.  Scene, a warehouse in north Toledo, Ohio.  

Reviews of: RISE OF THE ANTI-MEDIA: IN-FORMING AMERICA'S CONCEALED WEAPON CARRY MOVEMENT 

By Brian Anse Patrick 

"Brian Anse Patrick's new book deftly explores the emerging cadre of ‘concealed carry license’gunowners, an active, non-traditional group including women and minorities, who are shaping politics, often through alternative media."            

—Peggy Tartaro, Executive Editor, Women & Guns 

"Gun control can be analyzed from many perspectives: law; criminology; politics; philosophy. Brian Anse Patrick's splendid new book on the movement to allow concealed carry covers all these perspectives, plus one more: he documents how 40 states adopted right to carry laws over the fervent opposition of the news media and political elites. This occurred through a brand new phenomenon—millions of people communicating and organizing over the Internet. This book is a magnificent achievement."—Don B. Kates, author of Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control 

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New Book!  Soon to be Released . . . 

Rise of the Anti-Media

In-Forming the American Concealed Weapon Carry Movement 

by

Brian Anse Patrick

       TABLE OF CONTENTS     

List of Figures

Acknowledgments           

 

            Introduction: The Impossible Takes Twenty Years                                                                                                

 

1    The Era of Restricted Carry            

Restricted Carry as Status Quo            1-2

Discretionary Systems            1-4

Mail Order Pistols, the Sullivan Law and the Uniform Firearms Act            1-7

Caveats and Clarifications on the Regulation of Guns             1-12

Traditional Gun Culture and Restricted Carry            1-16           

Devaluation of Concealed Weapons by Traditional Gun Culture            1-22

Race and the Revolver Habit            1-25

Concealed Carry In Progressive Detroit             1-36

An Aristotelian Political Solution            1-43

 

2  Energizing the New American Gun Culture 

            Magnitude of the Effect            2-1

            Local Tactics            2-4

            Gossamer Public Opinion v. Concrete Social Movement             2-11

            The Gun Control Paradox Untied            2-16

            Social Movements and Culture            2-24

            Traditional Gun Culture Before New Gun Culture            2-27

            Adversity and New Gun Culture             2-31

            Horizontal Interpretive Community v. Vertical Communication System              2-34

            Anti-Media             2-37           

 

3   Diffusion of Concealed Carry           

            Florida’s Discontents             3-1

            Marion Hammer and the Unified Sportsmen of Florida             3-13

            Communicating Social Action             3-21

           

 

4  Horizontal Interpretive Communities in   Action            

            Toward Apogee            4-4

            Horizontal Communications            4-10

            Horizontal v. Vertical Informational Systems in Ohio            4-18

 

5      Mass News Media and Concealed Carry           

            Primacy of Expert Anti-gun Sources in News            5-2

            The Meta-Story of News            5-7

            Themes of Support for Concealed Carry            5-16

            Additional Observations on News Coverage            5-18

            Anti-Media Alternatives            5-28

                       

6   Women, Students and Other Gun Culture Converts            

            Converts             6-3

            The Known, the Unknown and the Imagined            6-7

            Reality of the Imagined            6-14

            Market or Movement?            6-18

            Guns and Salvavirgo            6-26

            Women and Concealed Carry Mobilization            6-29           

            Students for Concealed Carry            6-31

            Some Other Groups            6-52

 

7   Under Social Construction: The Right to Bear Arms

            Shall Issue as a De Facto Individual Right            7-3

            Exegesis of Sacred Texts            7-6

            The Mutual Exclusivity Logical Fallacy             7-10

            Creating and Marshalling Knowledge              7-15

            The Pragmatics of Social Movement             7-30

            Parallels with Civil Rights Movement             7-32

 

8    Anti-Media, the Concealed Carry Movement and the Original Meaning of the First Amendment 

            Interpretive Autonomy            8-3

            Overcoming Distance, Scale, Time and Economics            8-11

            Anti-Media             8-24           

 

9    Informational Politics 

            The Right to Interpret Meaning            9-2

            Mass Democracy’s Interpretive Priesthood             9-7

            Informational Change            9-15

                    

        References           

        Index 

Sign of Progress

The above photo was recently shot in Detroit on 8 Mile Rd near the corner of Gratiot Avenue by me.

The success of the Concealed Carry Movement is something that no one would would have predicted 20 years ago, and yet it is here, it works, and the movement is growing.  

New American Gun Culture ranks among  the most successful social movements of the past half century. 

Brian Anse Patrick