I like guns. Quite a bit. I also like whiskey, cars, and movies. I have called myself a gun nut, a whiskey aficionado (classy!), a gear-head, and a movie buff. If you watch Top Gear, they talk a lot about petrosexuals and petrolheads – people who identify so strongly with car culture that it becomes one of their defining traits.\
I know people who are accomplished USPSA shooters that don’t consider themselves “gun nuts”, or really even part of the gun culture. To them USPSA is no different than playing in a weekend softball league. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s just something they do for fun. Now, I obviously consider myself part of the gun culture, because for me there’s so much more involved than just shooting. Of course, that’s also the best part of the culture – the actual shooting of guns. For me, everything else is window dressing.
But even within the gun culture, I don’t think you could reach a consensus on what makes someone a genuine gun nut or not. For example, most of the readers of Gun Nuts would probably consider Andrew from Vuurwapen Blog to be a fellow gun nut…but Andrew probably wouldn’t agree with that. Obviously, there are plenty of people that self-identify as “gun nuts” or “gun buffs” or whatever synonym of “aficionado” you want to use. But what about identifying other gun nuts? The question is “how would you define someone else as gun nut or not?”
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