Published 2010-11-09T15:11:00Z”/>
Alexander Seymour
Gun nuts are crazy.
Luckily, there are much fewer gun nuts in Chico than people have been led to believe.
Whether the reason is for recreation or personal defense, gun ownership is about responsibility and safety. However, these are often not a person’s first reaction when he or she learns that someone owns a firearm.
Freshman Alyssa Reyes usually assumes that a person who owns a gun is a bit over the top or intense, she said.
“It’s intimidating, and they probably have some insecurities of some sort,” Reyes said.
Generalizations like this are not based upon reality and serve to socially marginalize gun owners.
Senior Rick Fowler thinks people often act differently around him when they learn he owns a gun, he said.
“To an inexperienced person who hasn’t known gun owners or been around firearms, all they see is the news on TV,” Fowler said.
Most news programs and television shows are profit-driven organizations that have more interest in entertainment and gaining viewers than they do in informing people. This causes them to focus on shocking and violent stories, like killings by gun-wielding perpetrators.
While most people realize that profit-driven media organizations usually have an agenda of one sort or another, we aren’t always in the critical thinking mindset to filter out these agendas when we flop down on the couch to watch some TV at the end of the day.
So the stereotypes filter in and are reinforced when we enter centers of higher education.
Sophomore Nikki Macdougall quickly recognized the biases some Chico State teachers hold against gun owners, she said.
One teacher brought up how differently the government would view a group of black individuals that carried unloaded guns as opposed to white tea party members, Macdougall said.
“I raised my hand and said she was stereotyping, and she retorted by claiming that I, as a white female, wouldn’t need a gun other than to look cool,” she said.
But the most damaging stereotypes are propagated by the few gun owners that don’t pay the proper reverence to their hobby.
Activities like displaying a picture of yourself holding a gun on Facebook or proclaiming gun ownership in conversation may be intended to imply passion for an activity or as a way to find people who share interests, but it is often not read that way.
Some people, such as student Danielle McCutcheon, more often assume that the gun owner is making a display of oafish toughness and may be unpredictable.
“When I hear that somebody owns a gun, it indicates that they might be aggressive or trying to display toughness,” McCutcheon said.
Combined with media and educational biases, the behavior of these few gun owners causes the less vocal majority to be stereotyped, and as a result, all gun owners feel the tension.
Macdougall tries to bring up the issue of gun ownership as rarely as possible around school, since it is such a liberal institution, she said.
Fowler feels the same tension when sometimes talking to non gun owners.
“I was brought up not to tell people about it, because there is a negative stereotype,” Fowler said. “I had a friend a few years ago who thought I was a redneck because I liked to go to the shooting range, and it strained our friendship. I didn’t dislike her for being a tennis player.”
Contrary to popular belief, sporting is exactly how most gun owners view their status. They see their guns as a sort of tennis racquet, albeit one that requires more responsibility than typical sporting equipment.
Because of this heightened sense of responsibility, fewer children die annually from the mishandling of firearms than by drowning in pools, according to statistics from the Brady campaign and Kdhnew.com. Maybe owners of other pieces of sporting equipment should take a clue from this figure.
Clarity in statistics is a step in the right direction, but that will not change the stereotype of gun owners single-handedly. While snap judgments made about gun owners are unfair and wrong, those few who use their firearms as a status symbol, either purposefully or by accident, need to be more conscious of the difficulty it causes for all gun owners.
In the words of psychology major Tara Reese, “I would like it if gun owners treated the subject with a little more subtlety.”
Alex Seymour can be reached at
