How in the world might we go about changing white masculinity? Or can we open a space to talk about why white men feel they need guns in the first place? What threats do they imagine, and what safety or reassurance do guns represent? Put another way, the data hints at the possibility that white male gun suicide may be a side effect of both loose gun policies and conceptions of white masculinity, in addition to the effects of troubled individual minds. And that in this sense, white men writ large make a Faustian bargain in order to accept the larger benefits of gun ownership more broadly.
