Fear of Guns

Who coined the word hoplophobia

Jeff Cooper, a United States Marine widely regarded within the firearms community as the father of the modern technique of shooting, claimed to have invented hoplophobia in the 1960s. One account by gun-rights writers dates the coinage to 1966. It was not proposed by a clinician, it did not arise from a case, and it entered use as a name for a position rather than for a patient.

Wikipedia's treatment reflects that. The word appears in its article on gun culture in the United States under the heading terms applied to opponents, in the same paragraph as gun nut, which it describes as a pejorative stereotype cast on gun owners implying fanaticism or danger. Two coinages, one from each direction, each attributing a defect to the other side.

Where the word has actually been used

In print, in argument. The earliest citation Wiktionary carries is from a United States House of Representatives hearing on firearms legislation in 1979, in which a witness lists the three things gun control laws are proposed to address: crime, accidental shootings, and calming those suffering from hoplophobia.

A Usenet post from 1999 states that hoplophobia has been recognised as an illness by the American Medical Association, is treatable and is covered by most health plans, and advises the reader to see a psychiatrist. That claim has no support anywhere in the sources here and the sentence is a taunt rather than a report.

James Taranto used it in the Wall Street Journal in 2015, arguing that a newspaper's gun-control campaign was motivated by hoplophobia rather than by sincere concern about crime and terrorism.

Three uses across thirty-six years, in a legislative hearing, a newsgroup and a national column, and in each of them the word is doing the same job: attributing an opponent's political position to a mental defect.

The argument about whether it is real is internal

The most substantial case for the term being clinical was made in 2013 by Bruce Eimer, a psychologist, and Alan Korwin, an author on gun law. They argue that hoplophobia is a real, extremely dangerous, widespread and clinically recognisable complex specific phobia, that it meets most but not all of the criteria the American Psychiatric Association sets for phobias, and that it therefore belongs in a category of its own. They propose comorbidities:

• suppressed rage
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• delusional disorder
• panic disorder

The distinctive claim is that one of its avoidance mechanisms works through politics, which they describe as a phobic criterion absent from the existing medical literature. On that account, campaigning for gun control is a symptom.

They are arguing with somebody. Sarah Thompson, a physician who wrote two papers on gun phobia, holds that hoplophobia is little more than name calling and is rare, and Eimer and Korwin dispute her on both points. The whole debate about whether the term is clinical is being conducted between writers on the same side of the gun question, and no diagnostic manual has entered it.

What the search results say about the evidence

A page ranking for the term states that hoplophobia affects between 6.0 and 13.89 per cent of the population, that it is more common in men than women, and that it was first recorded in the 1900s when it was listed as a mental disorder in the classification system of the American Psychiatric Association.

The last of those is not true. The word was coined in the 1960s by a firearms writer and has never appeared in an American Psychiatric Association classification. The prevalence figures have no named study behind them and fall inside the range usually quoted for specific phobias as a class. The catalogue records the page because it is a clean specimen of the templated phobia content Wikipedia's own list of phobias describes, and because that content is what most people searching the word will find.

What a real fear of guns would be

Nothing here rules one out. A person who has been threatened with a firearm, or who was present at a shooting, can plausibly develop a specific phobia of guns, and it would be assessed and coded as a specific phobia with the object named. There is no case series under the Greek name and no prevalence figure for it, and the reason is not that such patients do not exist. It is that the word belongs to a different argument, and a clinician writing notes has no use for it.