Gun Culture in Appalachia - Exploring Kentucky's Past and Present - Part 1
Gun Culture in Appalachia - Exploring Kentucky's Past and Present - Part 1
The Last of the Pawn Shops in Harlan
Last month, GVPedia president and founder, Devin Hughes, took a trip to Kentucky for a crash course in the history and hypocrisies of one of the nation’s deepest gun cultures. This is part one of a three part series.
By: Devin Hughes
In mid-September, I had the opportunity to visit Lexington, Kentucky, along with Jennifer Mascia of The Trace. We were there to visit Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), who, over the course of three days, would give us a crash course in Appalachian gun culture.
To any of those who may doubt Mark’s bona fides to serve as a guide on this tour, that just means you don’t know anything about him.
He was born in Harlan, Kentucky, to a family with deep roots in the coal industry (his grandfather died in a partial mine collapse); was present during the famous 1973 strike there; has been carrying and firing guns longer than I’ve been alive; could complete the live-fire training for a concealed carry permit blindfolded when it used to be required in some states; initially funded GVA by selling off some of his collection of firearms; and he personally owned all but one of the firearms Jennifer and I would shoot at the range. While many extreme pro-gun folks like to pretend they grew up “hard,” Mark actually did.
Our first excursion was a several-hour drive to Harlan, a town famous for coal, strikes, and grinding poverty. Harlan definitely gave off a “Try that in a small town” vibe.
While some towns have World War 1 and World War 2 memorials to commemorate all of the fallen soldiers from there, Harlan has one dedicated to all the coal miners who have perished in the mines (not including those who would later die from cancer due to coal inhalation).
The monument has two stone pillars with more than 1,300 names engraved in them. For context, Harlan’s peak population was 42,800 in 1978, and has declined to just over 26,000 presently. Death, sadly, was an everyday part of life.
Along with visiting the aforementioned monument and some of the town's other notable sights, we visited the Harlan Pawn Shop. As we would later find out, it was the last pawn shop in Harlan due to the ATF cracking down more forcefully on illegal gun sales during the Biden administration.
The shop was one-third gun store, two-thirds everything else. I was surprised by the wide range of firearms on display. There were the older revolvers, hunting rifles, and shotguns that I anticipated, but alongside those were bull-pup rifles, .50 caliber sniper rifles, tactical shotguns with extended magazines, and a typical assortment of AR-15 variants. Overall an incredibly pricey collection for a poverty-stricken town that has been somehow surviving for decades.
This, however, highlighted one of the points Mark raised during our travels: that in Appalachia — and more broadly — guns are used as a type of currency.
Sure they are bought for self-defense and used for hunting and sport, but if you are short a couple grand on a car that you want to buy, adding a gun to the pile of cash can easily secure the purchase. While the most recent estimate of private sales of guns is 20% of total sales (meaning roughly 80% would go through a background check), the regularity with which guns are used as currency likely means this is an underestimate.
Another aspect that was quite apparent in the pawn shop — as well as the gun store and gun show we later visited — was the distinct clash between older and modern gun culture.
The older rifles, shotguns, and even handguns were either purely functional or works of art themselves with intricate designs and noticeable craftsmanship. This was in stark contrast to the “tacticool” and occasionally flashily painted polymers that often looked startlingly like toys. As gun culture shifted from hunting and sport to self-defense and parading around with rifles as a political statement, it felt like a sense of gravitas was lost in the firearms themselves.
Appearance alone does not change a firearm’s lethality, but it is telling that it is “tacticool” weapons and handguns that are increasingly ending up at crime scenes, not carefully crafted shotguns from decades back.
On a different tangent, having been born and raised in the terminally flat Oklahoma, it felt super weird to have a sunset before the sun actually sets….
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Images courtesy of Devin Hughes; two photos of Harlan Pawn Shop via their Facebook.
Compelling investigative journalism with a flavor of the classical essay with Devin's adumbrations on how Harlan folks buy their guns in the last Pawn Shop standing, or that a cash purchase of a car might be bolstered by a gun's sliding across the counter there from buyer to seller. The cinematic power of the Jason Aldean link makes for a brilliant slice of Americana.