What is going on when a firearm isn't just something that's taken out for hunting during hunting season, but it's actually something that's part of your everyday life.

Hello, welcome to this recline show on the Vox Media podcast network.

So a couple of weeks ago, we had another awful, awful, awful mass shooting.

One of the things that has begun to happen as I've been in journalism now for a while and I've been at Vox for a while is I've become many of us have become in a way that is chilling, used to covering these.

The news begins to come over the transom. You see it on cable or you see it on Twitter or you hear it some other way.

And we spring into action and we know in this way that breaks my heart, we know exactly what to do.

We know which content to begin to move. We know how to contextualize the larger question of gun violence in America.

We begin punching out these statistics like the fact that America has 4.4% of the world's population and almost 50% of its civilian owned guns or that our murder rate is X amount that of any other developed nation or gun murder rate or that suicides are in fact the bigger problem with gun violence that most gun deaths in America are actually suicides.

And it's not that any of this is wrong. It's that we do it every time because it doesn't stop being true. Right.

But there is something in the way there's never any movement in the overall debate in the way it just pushes us all to our corners that I don't know. I've begun to be really.

I don't know what to do with it. I don't know if we're making things better or making it worse. I don't know how to unlock this. I mean the fact that things are hard to unlock doesn't mean there is an answer.

There's obviously a more excitement and energy this time around the students and the student movement. But for the early winds that began to rack up and even for that bipartisan conference trump did.

That seems to have stalled at least at the national level as well. So there's something really depressing here. And I want to make sure that at least conceptually we don't just mire in it. We don't just stay doing the same thing thinking the same thing or you know at least on this show.

So I've been trying to think about how to look at the gun debate a little bit differently.

And I remembered a book that was recommended to me actually on this podcast in the Evan Osnos episode called Citizen Protectors by Jennifer Carlson. Carlson is a sociologist at the University of Arizona.

And her book is a deep study of gun carriers in Michigan. What the gun is doing as an identity for them. How it changes their experience of the world.

I want to be pretty clear here. It is not my view that what the gun debate just needs is empathy. I'm not sure that empathy will lead to any different outcome. I'm not sure that a different understanding of the identities of play will somehow unlock a compromise. You'll hear me talk about this. I don't have that optimistic view of it.

But I do think appreciating the identity of gun ownership on a deeper level is important to do nevertheless even if it is only to understand why nothing is happening here.

Even if it is only to understand why and I'm guessing that many of you like me fall on the gun control pro gun control side of this debate.

Even if it's only to understand why what can seem obvious if you're on that side of the debate if you're looking at it through that lens seems not just not obvious but noxious on the other end.

So this is a conversation about what it is like to carry a gun about how that changes your sense of self.

About how one might see that and how the NRA in its training arm which is important and does not get that much political attention encourages you to see it as a civic duty.

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