Don earned his advanced degrees from Purdue University, where he specialized in the social and organizational sciences. Before retiring as a civilian academic from the U.S. Military Academy, Don taught at a number of other well-known universities (e.g., Iowa, Duke, U.S. Air Force Academy, National University of Singapore, etc.). Some of his publications from these earlier times are highlighted in the Research Section of the website.

Don’s interest in gun culture stemmed from his research examining military and paramilitary organizational cultures. As he followed the gun debate in the news media and popular publications, he became frustrated with the diametrically opposed empirical assertions made by pro-gun and anti-gun proponents. While social scientists researching an area often disagree about specific details, they generally agree about the broad picture. They generally can tell what’s likely to work and what probably won’t, and why something should work, or why it might not. But not so with the gun issue. The radically different empirical assessments swirling around gun control and gun policies appeared impossible to reconcile. What was going on here?

His attempt to answer this question eventually evolved into America’s Gun Wars, which offers a cultural interpretation of the conflicting perspectives. Then a follow-up effort, Guns in America: Examining the Facts, focused on 37 controversial but specific questions passionately debated in gun arguments. The book examines and evaluates the evidence central to reaching informed conclusions about these questions. His most recent book, The Second Amendment in Court: Defining the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, assumes that the gold standard for understanding the Second Amendment lies in the reasoning contained in the state and federal court cases centered on gun restrictions. Thus, the book examines a representative set of foundational cases spanning the origins of the country to the present.

On a personal level, Don has been at various times a chess enthusiast, scuba diver, private pilot, and certified pistol instructor. He divides his time between Colorado Springs and Westcliffe, Colorado, supervising a border collie whose two great joys in life are ball-chasing and shedding black and white hair onto just-vacuumed carpets.