Guns, guts and god from a sociological perspective

I have traveled in some 40 or so countries around the world and a number of the US states. I also lived in major US metropolitan areas - New York, Baltimore, Washington DC. In all those places I have never experienced a situation in which I wished I had a gun or for that matter any other weapon to get out of a threatening situation. This means there was not a situation in my life in which using deadly force or even violence would do anything useful. Not a single one. 

My personal experience is not unique and is, in fact, quite common as evidenced  by empirical data.  According to the National Crime Victimization Survey - the most comprehensive data source on crime in the US conducted by the Department of Justice, less than 2 percent of crime victims used guns, or for that matter any weapon, to defend themselves from attackers.  This may seem strange when you consider the prevalence of guns in the US - about 1 gun for every adult, the highest in the world, but it  makes sense if you consider the demographics of crime.  Most victimizations occur among people who know each other, family members, friends, neighbors and the like.  Violent crimes against strangers are relatively rare, even if they get most media attention.  Most people do not bring weapons to interactions with family members and friends.

So why is that a good share of the US population, many of whom have not left their home state in their lifetime, feel that they need to have a gun to 'protect themselves' against strangers and become aggressive if anyone questions it? What is the reason behind such attitudes? 

A popular view, especially among liberals, is that such attitudes are a byproduct of racism.  White people, the argument goes, are afraid of Black people and buy guns to 'protect' themselves, rationalizing it as anti-crime measures.  The obvious problem with this 'explanation' is that gun ownership and gun violence are more prevalent in Black communities than in White communities.  Conservatives would label it  'reverse racism' but this is the same bunch of nonsense as the original argument.

My hypothesis rests on two concepts championed by the French sociologists Emile Durkheim to explain different suicide rates in different countries: social alienation and social integration.  Alienation basically means weak social bonds among isolated individuals whereas integration means the opposite - very strong social bonds. Durkheim's theory was that too much of either increases suicide rates but for different reasons - despair in alienation and guilt over failure to meet obligations in integration. The implication of it was that you need a balanced society with not too much alienation and not too much integration.

My theory is that the concept of balance is fundamentally alien to the American culture - where extremes coexist side by side. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty is what comes to mind. However, a less obvious is coexistence of extreme alienation with extreme integration. 

On the one hand, the US society is extremely individualistic with weak social bonds, as evidenced for example by geographic mobility patterns. People tend to move on a drop of a hat, often over long distances - to get a better job, to buy a bigger house or whatever other individualistic reasons. This is very different from Europe where people tend to stay in the same location. As they say, In Europe 100 miles is far far away, in America 100 years is long long time ago. 

On the other hand, however, the American society consists of social enclaves with high level of integration. Most suburban communities belong to this mold. When you live there, you have to conform to certain norms - have a house of a certain type, mow your lawn every week, display an American flag, be of a certain ethnicity and so on. 

 Another example is religious community which, unlike in Europe, tends to congregate people who are alike. In Europe, churches tend to be gathering places of people from different walks of life, but in the US every group tends to form their own church. 

 As a result, many if not most people experience both - too much alienation and too much integration - at the same time. They are tightly integrated to their local groups where they experience pressure to conform to group norms, but at the same time they are alienated from other groups. In a way, this is a form of modern tribalism, like in Africa or Afghanistan, where different clans (pun intended) exercise social control over their own members but are at almost constant war with other clans. The US may put a veneer of modernity over it - modern houses, modern cars, modern jobs, modern life styles - but the social structure is pretty much the same. 

So the social effect of this crazy coexistence of extreme alienation and extreme integration is a combination of nihilism and xenophobia that on the surface resembles liberalism and bigotry at the same time. On the one hand, people do not give a flying fuck about other social groups - they care more about stray cats or dogs than people living a couple blocks down the street. All the care about is themselves. That may create an image of liberal attitudes of "live and let live." 

 But that image is deceptive, because the same people may feel extremely threatened when the folks from a different walk of life "invade" their little social enclave. "Invade" simply means "come to contact" which is tantamount to contamination, akin to flying a foreign flag in an all-American community or rooting for the other football team instead your "own." While such acts have no material effect on people around, they disrupt the sense of "coziness" and bring the alienation right into the middle of integrated community which violates its norms to conform.

This "invasion" of alienation into integrated groups of sameness creates a constant sense of threat and danger, putting people on the defensive. Hence the urge to acquire 'defensive' measures - such as guns or security systems. The liberals mistakenly label it 'racism' - but I do not think it is racism in a conventional sense of the word i.e. belief in supremacy of one 'race' over another. This is evidenced by the fact that non-white communities operate in pretty much the same way - extremely strong pressure to conform (e.g. the rigid dress code of Blacks, for example) combined with extreme mistrust of other groups.

America can be described as a social experiment that failed. Instead of the lofty goal of creating an integrated and balanced society it created a modern version of clanish, tribal-like structures that combines extreme conformity with extreme alienation. An analogy is the place with a nice moderate climate, say the Mediterranean, contrasted with a place with extreme desert conditions - very hot in the day, very cold at night. Both may have the same average temperatures, but the second one is a far less pleasant place to live. This is not unique to America, but it evolved on a much larger scale here, thanks for the most part to commercialization of life that promoted it.