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Basic Pistol
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$37.00
Available on Oct 20, 2026 | 432 Pages
A deeply researched journey through gun culture and the people for whom guns are a way of life
To understand how people die by the gun, we must first understand how people live by the gun.
This is the realization that led sociologist Harel Shapira to embed himself in TK Training, a popular firearms school in rural Texas just outside sprawling Austin. Forty-two classes, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and one concealed carry license later, he has emerged with Basic Pistol, a dark and richly detailed plunge into an obsession that shapes the very fabric of American life.
Basic Pistol follows Shapira’s fraught journey through TK Training’s extensive curriculum. He learns how to hold a gun and how to buy one, how to judge when and when not to shoot, and how to talk to the cops once the trigger’s been pulled. All the while, he immerses himself in a community of complexities and contradictions, for whom gun ownership is livelihood, is tradition, is identity. In so doing, he shows how gun culture—and the fears and fantasies of violence it breeds—erodes the very bonds of American society, empowering white men and placing Black humanity in the line of fire.
Page-turning and paradigm-shifting, Basic Pistol shows that if there’s any hope of reining in the gun violence epidemic, it must start not with the guns themselves, but with the people who carry them.
To understand how people die by the gun, we must first understand how people live by the gun.
This is the realization that led sociologist Harel Shapira to embed himself in TK Training, a popular firearms school in rural Texas just outside sprawling Austin. Forty-two classes, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and one concealed carry license later, he has emerged with Basic Pistol, a dark and richly detailed plunge into an obsession that shapes the very fabric of American life.
Basic Pistol follows Shapira’s fraught journey through TK Training’s extensive curriculum. He learns how to hold a gun and how to buy one, how to judge when and when not to shoot, and how to talk to the cops once the trigger’s been pulled. All the while, he immerses himself in a community of complexities and contradictions, for whom gun ownership is livelihood, is tradition, is identity. In so doing, he shows how gun culture—and the fears and fantasies of violence it breeds—erodes the very bonds of American society, empowering white men and placing Black humanity in the line of fire.
Page-turning and paradigm-shifting, Basic Pistol shows that if there’s any hope of reining in the gun violence epidemic, it must start not with the guns themselves, but with the people who carry them.
Author
Harel Shapira
Harel Shapira is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Columbia University. Shapira uses long- term ethnographic research to understand right- wing politics and gun culture in contemporary America. He is the author of Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America (Princeton University Press, 2013) and the coeditor of Gun Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Jennifer Carlson and Kristin Goss). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and his writing has been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times and The New Republic. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2015 and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 2021.
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