About this Website: Academia and Firearms

Article by Steve N. Jackson (v. 1)

The theory in academic research is that no topic that does not result in the purposeful harm of another human being is closed off from the possible consideration of a professor. In fact, with so many professors vying for tenure and seeking original routes of research, some very obscure research is done. Most professors in fact, publish in journals read by less than a thousand people articles that will be cited once or twice in a decade and will end up on the bottom shelf of a single library (or digital archive) where it will be checked out only once before it is discarded. This does not make the research done by these people invalid - if they learn and become better teachers it has done part of its job, However it is a sign that there is not a real limit of what topics can be addressed. Although this is a website, with French rifles its excuse to exist, there is nothing invalid about studying firearms.

There is, however, a difficulty that few other items of physical culture present for an academic with regard to serious academic study. If I was studying beads, then I could arrange for the university museum to create a collection of these items, and they would be available for me to look over and photograph right on campus. It is even possible for professors who study nuclear materials, pornography (even the most unsavory types when studies for the purpose of protecting victims) large items like furniture and vehicles, dangerous plants and animals, and diseases with extreme lethality to keep samples of their work under appropriate safeguards on campus. Few, if any universities allow firearms onto their campus even for legitimate study. Quite literally I can carry a vial of mycotoxin onto campus, assuming I do so safely and have reason to have it, but I cannot carry securely store a 200-year old firearm in a departmental vault. Likewise I can use my University credit card to order a Corvette, and have the purchase raise no eyebrows if I can defend its purchase from an academic stand point (after all, it is not my Corvette) but a long obsolete bolt action rifle is beyond my ability to acquire for a university collection.

To make matters worse, there is simply no grants available for the professor who wants to study the history of firearms even if you could bring them onto campus. I can get money to help my students make movies, to study Russian cinema, critique Brazilian cinema, compare Russian cinema to Brazilian cinema, and nearly any other subject under the sun, if I am smart enough to outline why I want to study these subjects in a way that makes sense, but there is not, and likely never will be, money devoted by the historical shooting public toward study of these older weapons. This is not to say that some small businesses are not very generous with their support, but that there simply is no source of funds to pursue studies such as this.

So the professor that wants to study French rifles in a university setting has to buy every rifle themselves, take all of their own photographs, forgo the pleasures of a graduate assistant to work by your side and work alone, and cannot even bring the fruits of your labor into the office except in digital form.

Of course, it is not like any of my colleagues object about what I do with my free time for research. There really is no vast left-wing conspiracy to prohibit the study of firearms in history - most faculty, even politically opposed to gun ownership, are accepting of the validity of the topic of my study, and those that oppose it can leap in a lake - my tenure status protects me from their machinations.

So this website was created to be a tool for collecting, collating, and distributing information about one area of physical culture (the French Rifle) but doing this for little cost except time and outside of the normal boundaries of the university.