I am an Asian American and lifelong liberal from the San Francisco Bay area and became a 42-year-old first-time gunman in 2011. I embarked on a 14-year journey and entered a strange and complex world of guns. In my work, I draw on my own personal experience and sociological observations to understand the long-standing legal gun culture in the United States.

Contrary to the main academic approach that focuses on gun bias and injury, I found that guns are more than just criminal violence, injury and death. There are more gun owners than straightforward whites; not gun culture, not right-wing politics that undermine democracy.

Let me share five observations that are crucial to understanding American guns:

1. The gun is normal

Today, about 86 million American adults own at least one of at least 400 million guns.

Imagine if everyone who uses Tiktok in the United States owns a gun and then adds to the population of New York City. That's enough gun owners to fill over 1,000 NFL stadiums.

From the beginning, humans used projectile weapons such as rocks and spears. In every society, this uninterrupted history continues, and guns are the weapon of choice for all except the most isolated communities. People who can usually have guns legally in the United States do this. Even today, civilian gun ownership in the United States still exists high in the United States compared to other industrialized countries.

The daily right of Americans to own guns is the depth of American culture contained in the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions.

2. Gun Culture 2.0

Over time, gun culture in the United States has continued to develop.

Before the mid-1800s, guns were primarily used for practical purposes: hunting down food, defending the indigenous population, controlling enslaved people, expanding territory and fighting oppressive rulers.

Starting in the mid-1800s, Americans developed a more complex gun culture, including recreational hunting, organized target shooting and collecting guns. These factors continue today, but, in the transition, Americans are increasingly possessing guns for self-defense.

There are evidence of what I call "Gun Culture 2.0" evolution emerged in three key areas: investigations on why people own guns, relaxation of gun laws starting in the 1980s, and the types of sales of two gun types and how companies promote their changes, especially for small, hiding pistols.

3. Have a variety of guns

Black Americans date back at least to the abolition movement of the 19th century, with a particularly powerful gun possession tradition.

Today, one in four black Americans, as well as one in five Latin Americans and one in four women, own guns in person. 20% of gun owners believe they are politically free. For the four evangelical Protestants who owned the pistol, three people who did not agree with any religion also owned them. Scholars have even begun to discover the importance of LGBTQ+ gun owners.

Gun Culture 2.0 is more diverse and inclusive than the historical gun culture in the United States, because security is a universal concern for humanity.

Responses to insecurity vary. The portfolio of U.S. protection measures includes home security systems, dogs, hyperlocal social networking services next door, gated communities and guns.

4. Guns are deadly tools

Many tools like knives and chainsaws are deadly, meaning they have the ability to cause death. Guns are different because their lethality is the design. Therefore, guns can make dangerous situations more deadly.

Despite its ubiquitous and deadly potential, accidental gun deaths have been relatively few, declining in the United States, with fewer than 500 people a year in recent years. Most gun deaths were intentional, with suicides accounting for 58% and homicides in 2023 at 38% of the 46,728 gun deaths.

Although the United States has a moderate suicide rate compared to other developed countries, it has a much higher suicide rate than these other countries. This is because guns are widely available and highly lethal. When people try to commit suicide with guns, they die in up to 90% of cases.

Similarly, although the United States is not extremely violent or criminal compared to its peers, its criminal violence is more deadly due to the more frequent participation of these deadly tools.

5. Guns are contradictory

Despite the high rates of gun suicide and homicide, most guns in the United States will not kill anyone, and most American gun owners will not commit violent acts against themselves or others. My calculations are based on the 2023 Disease Control and Prevention Data Center, indicating that only one gun death occurs per 8,560 guns and 1,840 gun owners, meaning at least 99.99% of guns and 99.95% of gun owners are not directly involved in the death toll.

Together, these observations point to the final insight: guns resist simple classifications and embody multiple paradoxes.

For different people, they are fun, frightening, dangerous, protective, permeating and concentrated, unified and split, attractive and shocking, fun and controversial, useful, useless, good and bad, neither good nor good.

That said, guns are not born. They have different meanings according to the various purposes people place them.

A realistic perspective requires a clear understanding of the fatal power of guns. But when I think that when it does not acknowledge the normality of guns and the diversity of gun owners, while understandable trends focus on the hazards associated with guns, it is understandable.