This eclectic collection of essays devoted to “gunlore” and gun-focused vernacular communities illustrates nicely the abiding blessing and curse of folklore/folklife studies, the simultaneous abundance of possible topics and the eternal problem of defining the boundary of that abundance. The array of possible gunlore topics is immense and rich, ranging, in this collection alone, from online “gun-geek” communities to a multi-generational family’s crafting tradition, and from the minute connoisseurship of artifact modification to the ludic aesthetics of cosplay fantasy. The very promiscuity of possible topics we might gather under the umbrella of gunlore makes for an occasion to consider not only the focused research of the individual contributions, but also some important meta-questions relevant to folklore studies in general.
For example, at the outset I need to say that I find it problematic to view gunlore (and “gun folks”) as a definable “old and powerful genre,” as suggested in the subtitle of the editors’ introduction. The overwhelming pervasiveness of firearms in American life, both as objects and as discourse, beggars any attempt to throw the fence of “folklore genre” around the immense reach of the gun universe. It is comparable to positing some definable coherence to, say, “carlore” as a meaningful rubric for guiding a collective scholarly project. It is just too large and nebulous a domain to capture in a single basket. A set of essays with guns as the only clear point of connection seems like putting together apples, oranges, bowling balls, soap bubbles, and planets, based solely on the property of sphericality. The framing of this collection as heralding the identification of a pre-existing genre of folklore is both unsustainable and, perhaps more to the point, unnecessary.
In their introduction, Robert Glenn Howard and Eric A. Eliason propose “some major themes,” familiar folklore categories (e.g., jokes and parodies, folk art), and various broad identities (hunter, prepper, “gun girl”) as legitimizing sub-headings that allow for some degree of scholarly “reproducibility” across the huge American landscape, both literal and metaphorical, of guns. Their introduction underscores, rather, what an uncontainably loose and baggy monster is the study of guns and our relationships to them. Can we, for example, make any meaningful connection between, on one hand, the supposedly “major theme” of the online, performative, sometimes trolling bluster underlying the “gun-geek” debates over AK vs. AR or .38 vs. .45, and, on the other, the signifying “silence” of ubiquitous firearms in a context of subsistence protein gathering that Tok Thompson describes in his thoughtful concluding essay, “Symbols and Things”?
If I take exception to the premise of gunlore as a coherent folklore genre, I very much applaud this volume’s identification of the gun as a heretofore neglected topic for folklorists’ consideration. It goes without saying that as a field, folklore’s primary impulse is toward affirmation and celebration. Cultural domains that might be politically fraught or that include “shadowy” moral dimensions are, if not fully proscribed, at least tacitly marginalized. Given the political cacophony of the gun rights vs. gun control debate that dominates the public square, it is admirably bold to shine the light of folkloric inquiry on the topic of guns. These essays demonstrate folklore study’s capacity to illuminate the nuanced complexity of subcultures and vernacular practices generally overwhelmed by the binary simplicities of the dominant discourse. The individual contributions, though varied in substance and quality, are all thought-provoking takes on their niche topics.
Because of their great variety, both of content and scholarly approach, I will highlight some of the essays over others, based on my own professional inclinations. This does not mean I don’t find value in the chapters I discuss less, as there is something of interest in all these essays. I confess that my bias is in the direction of work located in “real life,” tangible, face-to-face contexts, fully recognizing that a tidy distinction between this realm and the digitally mediated, online, meme-generating world explored in a number of these studies is not particularly helpful or even sustainable.
But with my flag planted, I find Sandra Bartlett Atwood’s “A Knack for Precision: The Art and Science of a Gun-Making Dynasty” to be the most substantial and satisfying offering in the collection. Very much in the vein of classic folklore research, Atwood unpacks the material practices and artisanal ethos of gunsmithing in her extended family. Distilling the value system of the Bartlett family’s production of custom firearms as a “quest for precision” (187), she goes on to elaborate the inherently folkloric play between tradition and innovation across generations. Drawing on skillful, extended interviews with family members, she reveals how the key concept of passion to achieve ultimate precision in their gunsmithing undergirds a whole world of values, personal relationships, and collective practices.
One important aspect of this family’s rich folklife is a belief system that foregrounds the idea of the “knack.” This is the deeply embedded belief that there is some innate, heritable predilection toward precision gunsmithing that passes unevenly across generations. Some family members, exclusively male it seems, manifest it; others do not. Although it is acknowledged that good grounding in formal engineering expertise is important, only this ineffable knack allows for the deepest artisanship. Hardly unique to this family or this craft, the idea of “having the gift” is a material culture phenomenon of great importance to the study of artisanship. That it is so explicit in this family’s crafting tradition gives Atwood’s admirable study special interest.
With this data-rich, deep dive into a face-to-face, gun-based folk community as a high bar, it is tempting to judge a number of the other contributions to Gunlore as methodically thin. For example, Raymond Summerville, in “Young Guns,” relies on another researcher’s preexisting data from thirty “semistructured interviews” (49) to make his case about the value of gun fetishism among troubled youth. The result feels notably limited by comparison to the depth of Atwoods’s work. Oddly, those contributions that deploy a bewildering surfeit of “data” have, in my view, a different kind of thinness. I will return to this point below.
On the positive side of the ledger, several of the other essays are based on direct encounter and documentation of concrete, folk cultural phenomena, lending heft to their analyses. Notable in this regard is London Brickley’s “Nerf Punk,” which looks at fantasy firearms created for alternative history cosplay. She begins her essay effectively with an immersive, first-person account of entering Atlanta’s annual, “multi-genre cosplay event,” Dragon Con. Having set the ethnographic scene, she zeroes in on the profusion of fantasy firearms on display as elements of “this heightened ostensible fever dream of expressive performance and creativity” (136). The excellent photographic documentation supporting Brickley’s discussion reveals the remarkably varied ingenuity and imagination of the alternative reality of firearms designers. As with Atwood’s essay, Brickley’s work here offers the kind of ethnographic substance that justifies her analysis and theoretical conclusions.
Though complexly developed, the crux of her argument is that “the performances of Alt history firearms serve as one big thought experiment on just how many different things a gun can symbolize – how many different forms of meaning a gun can bear” (161). And the very fact that these fantasy firearms have no practical “ballistic” function throws into high relief their function as “symbolic object(s) to be read, understood and seen” (ibid.) If there is one theme that does run through several of the essays in Gunlore, it is that firearms are both concrete artifacts and bearers of meaning, especially as constructed through story and display. Narrative and visual representation are the twin engines of signification. This point is hardly unique to firearms. In fact, the interplay of materiality and meaning is a pervasive feature of folk material culture broadly. Brickley’s essay does a very fine job of illustrating this fundamental meta-principle.
At something like the opposite extreme from Atwood’s and Brickley's ethnographic depth is the microscopic focus of Nathan E. Bender’s examination of the early nineteenth century rifle conversions of flintlock to “percussion-ignition systems.” I draw this contrast between the former two essays and Bender’s not as a criticism of his contribution, but rather as a recognition that he is working in a very different scholarly mode, namely, expert “connoisseurship.” As a premier firearms historian with the extensive resources of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West at his disposal, Bender is more than qualified to unpack for us this seemingly minute topic in the story of firearms development, a topic he reveals as being both an important moment in the history of firearms technology and as a site of vernacular innovation and artistry. Though in a different scholarly mode, Bender’s contribution completes a triad, along with Atwood and Brickley, of satisfyingly concrete, deeply researched studies that make Gunlore worth the price of admission. And I would add to these three two others, Tim Frandy’s “From Forest to Freezer” and the previously mentioned offering by Tok Thompson. Both these essays emerge from personal participation in specific hunting communities, lending authority to their authors’ observations about the complexities of meaning that firearms carry in such contexts.
Reflecting quite a different scholarly mode from these essays is a second triad of contributions with commonalities of method and source data. Annamarie O’Brien Morel’s “Moms Who Carry,” Noah D. Eliason’s “4chan, Firearms, and Folklore,” and Robert Glenn Howard’s “Dangerous Tools of Expression” all undertake to explore the immense digital jungle of online content relating in one way or another to firearms. The authors turn to the seemingly bottomless archives of Facebook, Reddit, online forums, hashtag links, etc., etc., to find strands of meaning and shared identities.
Each of these offerings has its own value to a greater or lesser degree. Morel lays out an interesting catalog of female empowerment through the sharing of digital photographs, especially selfies highlighting the subjects’ gun-forward display of potentially lethal agency. An array of gendered identities emerges from this online compendium of self-representations. Eliason’s tour through the tangled thickets of gun-focused image boards housed on the 4chan platform reveals a domain of anonymity where “gun porn,” casually domestic images of firearms around the home, and “comic” narratives of the mishandling of firearms, among other things, populate a “magical place” where pervasive ambiguity about the tone and intent of posts is a key feature of the digital space. Robert Glenn Howard lays out an elaborate, some might say arcane, methodology for the automated winnowing of huge amounts of digital information to isolate folkloric expressions, in this case, a widely known gunlore proverb, to subject to focused analysis by the human researcher. Especially interesting is his examination of how a freely floating folk expression can, without active manipulation or a guiding intention, serve the financial interests of a large corporation, in this case, a particular gun manufacturer. This issue of the subtle interplay between vernacular production and dominant official systems is another of those meta-themes with much importance for folklore studies generally. It is especially relevant in the digitally mediated world we all now inhabit.
While I happily acknowledge the legitimacy and interest of these forays into online cultural worlds, I come away from them feeling vaguely dissatisfied. The sheer immensity of the potential data, which proliferates non-stop in sorcerer’s apprentice fashion, leaves the feeling of a certain arbitrary randomness and tautological circularity in topic identification and data selection. The uncertainty of topic boundaries in digital space and the slipperiness of identities and human social contexts yield, in my view, a kind of thinness to the results that I don’t find in the more ethnographically and materially rich contributions I have highlighted above. I might summarize this contrast by juxtaposing the online, anonymous, free-floating archive of gun-porn photographs with Frandy’s socially grounded discussion of one hunting family’s firearms display in vernacularly decorated gun cabinets. Though very narrow in its focus, it feels to me that the latter carries more scholarly “stopping power” than the former. With the entirely appropriate embrace of the digital domain as legitimate terrain for folklorists, this contrast of scholarly orientations is another of those larger issues this volume exemplifies.
To conclude, I will mention one rather obvious theme that appears, either centrally or peripherally, in several of the essays: the connection between guns and spirituality. Whether in explicitly religious terms or in more nebulous suggestions of sacrality, it is hardly news that for many in America, owning a gun is a “God-given” right and firearms are revered objects of quasi-magical, ecstatic power. Jay Mechling, in his essay “Gunplay as Vernacular Religious Experience” takes head on this issue of guns and religion. He deploys an impressive array of major thinkers and theoretical systems to make the case that, where play, ritual, and fantasy inform engagement with guns, we are in a realm of vernacular religious experience, especially ecstatic experience. With characteristic sophistication, Mechling builds out from the vogue for play with toy guns in post-World War II America to a broad-based reflection on vernacular spirituality.
Megan L. Zahay, in “God’s Warriors,” examines a case of the dark underside of this vernacular spirituality. Mainly drawing on their prepper manual, she unpacks the disturbing ethos of the White-supremacist, Christian-nationalist survivalist group known as the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. Guns in this context are sacred instruments of vengeance in the hands of self-anointed agents of God’s wrath. Their imagined deployment of gun violence in the apocalyptic battle to come is a divine mission, and they devote themselves to preparing for it. As with many of the other cultural contexts examined in the Gunlore essays, guns are signifying instruments of personal empowerment and group identity. In this case, the dangerously powerful agency of firearms takes a turn into very dark territory.
And this leads me to a last question this volume raises for folklore studies. Working in a field of inquiry that generally champions the vernacular production of group identities and empowering unofficial discourses, how does the folklorist establish solid moral footing in scholarly arenas where not all identities and discourses are unequivocally wholesome and admirable? Our primary inclination is to herd, as if naturally, in the direction of research areas that are not morally ambiguous or controversial, so that difficult moral issues are not overtly in play. A related mechanism, the one that informs this volume, is to take for granted that it is not the scholar’s job to pass judgment on the moral standing of the topics and the tradition bearers being studied. Of course, this is usually very appropriate. However, in some cases, and gunlore in America is perhaps the epitome here, there is a profound moral/ethical universe hovering above all the interesting particularities of individual scholarly investigations. I do not mean any simple national debate between pro-gun and anti-gun political forces. Rather, it is the sheer material pervasiveness and visibility of these powerful objects and their all-too-often destructive deployment that would seem to call for at least acknowledging, even in a scholarly context, that the topic of gunlore is morally heavily loaded. I think this book’s valuable contribution to folklore studies could have benefitted from a forthright discussion of some of the moral implications of taking gunlore seriously as a realm of folk expression.
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[Review length: 2525 words * Review posted on February 2, 2026]