I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Chi Jang Yin of DePaul’s Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media to discuss her HON 208/320 class: Gun Culture.
To those familiar with CDM’s excellent reputation, and especially the reputation of its School of Cinema Arts, Dr. Yin’s impressive expertise and credentials should come as no surprise. Specializing in experimental film and documentaries, Professor Yin has shown her films internationally, from The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York to the Laznia Center for Contemporary Art in Poland, who in 2009 awarded her short film Lighthouse with the Distinction Prize Award as part of its IN-OUT Festival. As an academic, her research focuses on the humanitarian effects of war, specifically nuclear warfare and gun violence.
Which brings me to HON 208/320: Gun Culture, the course that Professor Yin will be teaching in the Honors Program this winter. When I asked her about why she was so passionate about this topic and this class, the professor told me, “As a documentary filmmaker, I always reflect on the social issue and the issue of power. All history is about the issue of power; who has the power to say ‘this is the narrative.'”
The issue that Dr. Yin thinks is fundamental to contemporary America and American history? The gun.
“Gun Culture is focused on information literacy and history to look into where we were and where we are right now.” The cultural narrative around guns, the professor argues, does not reflect actual trends and statistics but nonetheless informs the average American’s position towards guns and the policies surrounding them. For instance, the largest casualties of gun violence (60%) are victims of suicide and the largest population of gun owners in America are white, middle-class men. Still, the rhetoric around guns almost always circulates around the issue of homicide, both those perpetuating it and those who seek the means to defend themselves from it.
Dr. Yin’s focus, and the focus of her class, is then the analysis of how the media constructs narratives independent of a factual basis and why. “[Gun Culture] is for students to understand that we need to have a critical mind based on information literacy rather than our perception, because our perception is easily manipulated.” One conclusion for this phenomenon of manipulation that the professor drew during our discussion was that America’s founding depended on the construction of the militia man, a revolutionary willing to defend himself often through the use of a gun. This image of the militia man, later codified in the Second Amendment, persists and the gun has subsequently become an object of the American fascination (whether that fascination is based in idolatry or ire).
What is also crucial in understanding American gun culture, the professor mentioned to me, is the market for gun distributors. There is a monetary reason behind the movement against gun reform, as well. There is a lot of money to be made in the trade of guns and ammunition, and there’s a surprising new demographic that manufacturers have identified: women and children.
“The NRA ten years ago, they realized that people who live in the city are less likely to purchase guns for many reasons. The decrease of gun sales from a demographic of men alarmed the gun manufacturers. If a particular group of people is not buying a certain thing, what will you do? You market to a new demographic; you show how a gun can be sexy, how we can make a gun into different colors, a Barbie gun.”
Professor Yin uses the class to encourage students to seek out these kind of marketing strategies as well as statistics for who is buying guns and where. All of this is further indicative of the importance of information literacy: all students, regardless of political affiliation or where they stand on the gun issue, must negotiate their opinions and cultural understandings with data. Once a student identifies how the culture deviates from the actual issue at hand, that student can assess the interests and biases at play.
“It’s not about right or wrong,” the professor emphasized in her final comments to me, “we just have to understand information literacy in order to see things a little bit more clearly.”
Dr. Yin will be teaching HON 208/301: Gun Culture from 2:40-4:10 on Mondays and Wednesdays next quarter. Something that the professor expressed to me was that this is the only class relating to guns taught at DePaul, and one of the few courses of its kind taught in any Chicago university.
I want to thank Professor Yin for her time and such thoughtful insight into this class and issue. Thank you, Professor, for everything you do for our community!
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