A Sociologist Walks Into a Gun Range . . .

Harel Shapira, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the country’s leading scholars of the American political right. For his first book, Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America (Princeton University Press, 2013), Shapira spent years embedded with a militia group, which helped point him to his next subject, gun culture. To research his new book, Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America (Pantheon, September 15), Shapira spent four years immersing himself in that culture, participating in firearms and self-defense training courses in Texas and around the country and getting to...