Gun Debate Research Articles

Legitimacy, issue management, and gun debate

This study examined how two opposing advocacy organizations, National Rifle Association and Moms Demand Action, legitimize issues related to gun violence. Through topic modeling and social network analysis of tweets from both organizations, this study analyzed how advocacy organizations dealing with controversial issues use communication to achieve certain types of legitimacy. With the consistent outbreak of school mass shootings, this study also explored the communication strategies employed by advocacy organizations to manage issues and enhance legitimacy to garner policy initiatives. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

Multimodal rhetorics in the gun debate: Encouraging youth agency in March for Our Lives’ “The Most Vicious Cycle”

ABSTRACT In October 2018, March For Our Lives (MFOL) released “The Most Vicious Cycle,” a music video designed to mobilize collective agency among youth voters in the midterm election. The video, which features the song “Safe,” performed by Sage (featuring Kesha, Chika), utilizes a Rube Goldberg machine sequence to visually depict the “vicious cycle” of gun violence and the predictability of the gun control debate. Rhetorical scholars have largely examined the gun control debate by analyzing the public address of political elites and argumentation presented in gun rights discourses. There exists, then, a need to consider how youth activists, who have been excluded from the gun control debate, are using emergent discursive strategies like the music video to claim authority and exercise agency. I argue that the video’s multimodal discourse employs visual, lyrical, and sonic elements to create an immersive and instructional experience that performs a collective youth agency grounded in struggle. The video acts as a pedagogical tool to inspire collective agency by visualizing gun violence and amplification, visually refuting the status quo, and displacing authority. In moments when discourse and debate have become static, multimodal elements can provide a new perspective, making arguments felt, immediate, and grounded in experience.

Modeling Political Activism around Gun Debate via Social Media

The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the predictors of offline political activism, at both population and individual level. We show that it is possible to classify the stance of users on the gun issue, especially accurately when network information is available. Alongside socioeconomic variables, network information such as the relative size of the two sides of the debate is also predictive of state-level gun policy. On individual level, we build a statistical model using network, content, and psycho-linguistic features that predicts real-life political action, and explore the most predictive linguistic features. Thus, we argue that, alongside demographics and socioeconomic indicators, social media provides useful signals in the holistic modeling of political engagement around the gun debate.

Protection Narratives and the Problem of Gun Suicide

Abstract Even though gun suicides account for well over half of all U.S. gun deaths each year, they largely are absent from collective attention, policy discussion, and rhetorical study. Using stories about gun suicide from Everytown for Gun Safety's website, “Moments That Survive,” this essay examines how the authors depict gun suicide as a public problem and a gun problem rather than as a private problem limited only to the individual gun user. In so doing, these stories revise three of the gun debate's key terms: collective grief, character, and agency. More than simply drawing attention to gun suicide, these stories critique the dominant narrative of protection (protection from “them”) and urge readers to reimagine suicide, protection, and gun violence.

The massacre generation: Young people and attitudes about mass shooting prevention

AbstractObjectiveWe propose that citizens navigate an increasingly complex social and political world using a “cultural toolkit” shaped by firearms and gun violence. Young people in particular have experienced more mass shootings than any previous generation and have witnessed a lack of government response to these massacres. This article explores the attitudes that members of the Massacre Generation express about mass shooting prevention.MethodsWe analyze data from several public opinion surveys conducted following major mass shootings in the United States using logistic regression. These surveys were fielded and sponsored by a variety of organizations and asked a nearly identical question about whether mass shootings can be prevented by societal and governmental action.ResultsWe find that the Massacre Generation is indeed more likely to think the government can prevent mass shootings by implementing stricter gun control laws. We find evidence of these attitudes in multiple public opinion surveys from 2012 to 2018. Furthermore, we find no age effect in multiple surveys conducted between 1999 and 2011, suggesting that these attitudes are a relatively new phenomenon.ConclusionYoung people today express that government regulation (i.e., stricter gun laws) can prevent gun violence, placing them at odds with older generations. We discuss the implications of our findings for gun policy development and the future of the gun debate.

Re-Sighting the Gun Debate: Defining Patterns of Firearm-Related Death to Help Focus Prevention Efforts.

Gun violence remains a significant public health problem. Although gun violence prevention efforts mostly target homicides, nationally, two-thirds of all firearm deaths are suicides. The purpose of this study was to define patterns of firearm-related deaths and examine the effect of population size. All firearm-related deaths in the US between 1999 and 2016 were analyzed. Homicides and suicides were obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, respectively, comprising the database. For each state, the largest metropolitan city by population and a corresponding small urban city were selected. Firearm-related deaths were stratified by type and city size and compared. Rates of firearm-related homicides and suicides per 1 million population were stratified by year and compared over time using simple linear regression. 544,749 firearm-related deaths occurred across the US over the study period (38% homicides, 62% suicides). The median rate of firearm-related suicides was significantly greater than firearm-related homicides regardless of city size and across the US. Linear regression analysis failed to identify a significant change in the rate of firearm-related homicides over the study period. However, the rate of firearm-related suicides increased significantly regardless of city size between 1999 and 2016. Although homicides account for the majority of firearm-related deaths in metropolitan areas, suicides constitute a disproportionate number in smaller urban areas. Although the rate of homicides has stabilized, the rate of firearm-related suicides continues to increase significantly, underscoring the need for better direct prevention efforts and public health policy.

The Extraordinary Ethics of Self-Defence: Embodied Vulnerability and Gun Rights among Transgender Shooters in the United States

ABSTRACT Ethical ways of being form in response to bodily perceptions of vulnerability. Arguments that position firearms as defensive tools have become increasingly common in debates about gun legislation over the last two decades. This rhetoric has its origin in counter-hegemonic movements like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, which argued that African-Americans need guns to resist state-sanctioned violence from the police. For white men and women, as well as transgender gun rights activists in San Diego, California, vulnerability forms a key part of the argument for expanding access to guns as defensive weapons. This ‘vulnerability politics’ (Carlson [2014a]. From Gun Politics to Self-Defence Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate. Violence Against Women, 20(3):369–377) represents both a lived experience and ideological lens that informs ethical behaviour. Firearms owners fashion an ethical self through a combination of the prescribed, normative politics of gun rights rhetoric and creatively innovate with these scripts through their embodied experiences of threat.

Conspicuously Concealed: Federal Funding, Knowledge Production, and the Criminalization of Gun Research

A popular narrative in the U.S. gun debate concerns federal funding of gun research: Because of a right-wing backlash against gun-related public health research (centered on the controversial Kellermann et al. study), federal funding of gun research has been frozen since the mid-1990s. How accurate is this popular “funding freeze” narrative—or is the federal funding of gun research better described as a “chill”? If the latter, what kinds of funding have persisted within this “chill”? Drawing on public data on funded project abstracts from 1996 to 2016 from three major federal institutes (the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health), this paper shows that despite funding cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), federal funding for gun research has continued, especially for studies that construct the focus of their study as gun crime. Specifically, we find that a criminal justice approach to the study of guns and gun-related topics dominates the project abstracts analyzed and that this approach also casts a shadow on other approaches—especially public health and social justice approaches—to the research of guns. Examining federally funded gun research from a social constructionist lens provides insight not just into federal funding of gun research but also into the dominant framings of gun policy within the United States: criminal justice approaches to gun research may reinforce an understanding of gun violence as a problem of crime and justify criminalizing strategies in gun policy.

CraigRood. After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock. Eau Claire, WI: Penn State University Press, 2019. pp. 200. Paperback. ISBN 978‐0271083841.

Although it was written with the specific intention of analyzing the gun debate through a rhetorical, academic lens, the lessons in I After Gun Violence i can be applied outside of the ivory tower and more broadly to issues beyond gun violence. Dishearteningly, gun violence has become commonplace in America: there are more mass shootings here than anywhere else on earth, the gun homicide rate is over 25 times greater than in other high-income countries, and the gun suicide rate is 8 times greater. The United States' prioritization of individual liberty has become increasingly conspicuous in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and politicization of wearing masks. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of World Medical & Health Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rising Gun Sales in the Wake of Mass Shootings and Gun Legislation.

Although gun control laws are intended to reduce exposure to gun violence in communities across the country, the passage of gun control laws is often linked to a substantial rise in the number of guns sold in the U.S. National polls indicate that most individuals purchase firearms for protection, but some cite the fear of gun-buying restrictions as the main reason for purchasing a gun. It is unclear what impact gun legislation has on patterns of gun sales, as mass shootings continue to bring the U.S. gun debate to the forefront. Using statewide data on gun transactions in Massachusetts from 2006 to 2016, we examined patterns in gun sales following the passage of gun legislation and high profile mass shootings. Specifically, we used three events to test and refine the argument during this time period: (1) the Newtown shooting, (2) the San Bernardino shooting, and (3) the passage of the 2014 Massachusetts Gun Violence Reduction Act. Results from these time-series analyses indicated different patterns in handgun sales, with significantly larger increases occurring among first-time handgun buyers. Our findings complement prior work explaining the impact of mass shootings and gun control laws on the exposure to guns in communities.

Gun Studies and the Politics of Evidence

This review is about scholarly contributions to a hotly debated issue—gun policy. Teasing apart the politics of evidence within gun politics, it examines both how research agendas shape gun policy and politics as well as how gun policy and politics shape research agendas. To do so, the article maps out two waves of gun research, Gun Studies 1.0 and Gun Studies 2.0. Gun Studies 1.0 emphasizes scientific evidence as a foundation for generating consensus about public policy, and it includes criminological studies aimed at addressing guns as criminogenic tools, public health work aimed at addressing guns as public health problems, and jurisprudential scholarship aimed at adjudicating guns as legal objects. Reviewing how these approaches incited popular debates and public policies that, in turn, shaped subsequent conditions of gun scholarship, the article then turns to Gun Studies 2.0. Instead of taking evidence as self-evident, this body of scholarship tends to prioritize the meaning-making processes that make meaningful—or not—evidence surrounding gun policy. Accordingly, Gun Studies 2.0 unravels the political and cultural conditions of the contemporary US gun debate and broadens inquiries into gun harm and gun security. In addition to discussing areas for future study, this study concludes by encouraging gun researchers to attend to the politics of evidence as they mobilize scholarship not just to inform the gun debate but also to transform it.

The effect of mass shootings on the demand for guns

AbstractUnfortunately, mass shootings are common occurrences in the United States. When one occurs, it makes national news, becomes fodder for the ongoing national gun debate among politicians and activists, and may impact the demand for guns through fears of violence and future gun regulation. We attempt to estimate the overall effect of mass shootings on gun demand in the United States and how this effect varies across the nation, time, and other factors. Mass shootings are found to increase the national demand for firearms, with the effect lasting up to 2 months. Stronger effects are found in gun‐heavy and/or Republican states but not necessarily near where the shooting occurred. Demand spikes are also larger if the shooter was White, female, or if the event took place in a rural setting, but seemingly less related to the specific venue, the shooter's age or known mental health, the number of fatalities, or weapon characteristics.

Defensive Gun Use (DGU) in the American Gun Debate

These instructions give you guidelines for preparing papers for ASEJ Scientific Journal. Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 2003 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The format of this paper is a letter size, one column text, with 20 mm top and bottom margins and 16,5 mm left and right margins. Do not cite references in the abstract. The abstract should be self-contained and should not exceed 200 words. Follow the style of structured abstracts, but without headings. It should contain main items: place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study, briefly describe main methods or treatments applied in the paper, summarize the paper's main findings; indicate the main conclusions or interpretations with the proviso that it cannot contain results which are not presented and substantiated in the text.

Sensing school shootings

ABSTRACT School shootings are mediated by ways of sensing—through seeing bloodless, distant photographs and hearing retroactive eyewitness accounts. Yet at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, students’ cell phones offered a more immediate and immersive experience. This new way of seeing and hearing created a unique rhetoric situation. In the immediate aftermath, Emma González, a student and survivor of the Parkland shooting, seized upon this perspective to invent a new figure, the “Parkland Kid,” a generational stakeholder in the gun debate. The new subject position of the “Parkland Kid” expanded the range of thinkable thoughts, opened novel discursive strategies, and moved the intractable gun debate forward.

Debating Gun Control in Canada and the United States: Divergent Policy Frames and Political Cultures

The weakness of the antigun lobby in the United States is attributed to the “collective action problem” of trying to mobilize “free riders” behind a public purpose. But the Coalition for Gun Control emerged in Canada to successfully lobby for the Firearms Act of 1995. If the “collective action problem” is not limited to the United States, then are its effects “mediated” by political culture? To address this research question, we content analyze (1) media coverage, (2) party platforms, (3) presidential, and (4) ministerial rhetoric. Three frames represent “restrictive” gun policies that ban or regulate firearms, “punitive” gun policies that penalize the person for the unlawful use of firearms, or “lenient” gun policies that encourage gun ownership and gun rights. Marked differences in framing the gun debate help explain why an antigun coalition emerged in Canada but not the United States.

Session to Separate Fact From Fiction on Gun Violence, Mental Health Link

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Institute on Psychiatric ServicesFull AccessSession to Separate Fact From Fiction on Gun Violence, Mental Health LinkNick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:5 Sep 2018https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2018.9a1AbstractMarc Manseau, M.D., M.P.H., will discuss the common media misconceptions about mental illness and give messaging tips so psychiatrists can be more effective advocates for gun reform.iStock/Onandter_seanThe spate of mass shootings in the United States has brought the topics of gun violence and mental illness into the public spotlight.“After every mass shooting, people will come on television and say that it’s a mental health problem and that if we had better mental health services, we could prevent these tragedies,” said Marc Manseau, M.D., M.P.H., a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone School of Medicine. Some psychiatrists might view these moments as an opportunity to obtain more resources for mental health care, but Manseau believes it’s more important to correct the flawed—and stigmatizing—perception that people with mental illness are more prone to carry out violent acts. That mischaracterization will be one of the topics that Manseau will cover at his session at this year’s IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference in Chicago: “Mental Illness and Gun Violence in the United States: Facts and Messaging Tips for Psychiatrists.”Mark Manseau, M.D., M.P.H., hopes that his session on gun violence and mental illness will help psychiatrists provide better public messaging as well as improved dialogue with their patients about firearms.Manseau will highlight that, contrary to popular belief, research has shown that people with mental illness are only slightly more likely than the general population to commit gun violence against others, with factors such as illness severity or comorbid substance use influencing the increased risk. The pressing gun problem associated with mental illness is not homicide, but rather suicide, which accounts for approximately two-thirds of all nonaccidental gun-related deaths.The other major theme Manseau will tackle is gun policy. Universal background checks and assault-weapon bans are commonly proposed ways to reduce gun violence, and while Manseau believes they are necessary, they are not sufficient. Moreover, they will not effectively address the risk of suicide among people with mental illness. Extreme risk protection orders, in which officials can temporarily remove guns from people who display “red flag” suicidal behaviors, have been shown to be more effective, and Manseau will discuss these.“Of course, another important consideration is the influence of the gun lobby,” Manseau told Psychiatric News. “It doesn’t matter what policies might work if we cannot get any laws passed or agencies like the CDC cannot do gun-related research.”Register Now!Advance registration rates are now in effect for IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference. Register online at psychiatry.org/IPS, where you will also find information about housing and the full scientific program.There are many layers to go through in the gun debate, Manseau said, adding that his IPS presentation will just scratch the surface. However, he hopes attendees will learn enough to be able to provide more nuanced and contextually correct messages when discussing the intersection of mental illness and gun violence.While proper messaging is important when advocating on behalf of people with mental illness, it is also critical when talking with patients.“Psychiatrists should be able to discuss gun ownership with their patients, be aware of how access to firearms affects a patient’s risk for violence and suicide, and be knowledgeable on what they can do to separate patients from their guns if necessary,” he said. ■“Mental Illness and Gun Violence in the United States: Facts and Messaging Tips for Psychiatrists” will be held Friday, October 5, 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. ISSUES NewArchived

The Gun That Won the West

The Gun That Won the West Siân Griffiths (bio) Winchester Let's not pretend I was an unbiased researcher. I had intentions. I had best laid my plans. I set out to write an essay about guns and guilt and the female body. That's the story I'd first encountered all those years ago while watching a random episode of A&E's America's Castles. The legend lodged in me, building a little home in which to live, paying little board. It went like this: A widow and heiress, consumed by grief at the loss of her husband and infant daughter, consults a Boston medium. He identifies the source of her bad luck: she's haunted by those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that won the West, the sale of which had made her fortune. She sought escape in motion, moving from Connecticut to California. She bought a house and hired laborers to construct elaborate traps and tricks to fool the phantoms who pursued her. The house, an icon of Victorian womanhood, became the receptacle and representation of all her torment. She constantly devised new wings, custom ordered glass, designed everything from stairwells to faucets. Building continued twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year until her death. In effect, she had scapegoated herself, shouldering her country's shame like a heavy woolen mantle. She fled directly into her own madness and transmuted guilt into architecture. How could I not be fascinated? Ghostlike, she's haunted me all these years, until finally, I began in earnest to research and write. Her story was perfect as a plum, weighty and dripping with juice. The problem, I would learn, is that the story wasn't true. 1988: Gun #1 I was a fifteen-year-old white girl living in the booming Los Angeles suburbs, amid the palm trees and orange groves of the Inland Empire. My [End Page 56] school, Riverside Poly High, was called the ''rich kids' school,'' though as one of our teachers snidely reminded us, if any of us were really rich, we would have been in private school. Her point was moot. We were generally doing well enough. Many of us had backyard pools. A lucky few got cars for their birthdays, including our future valedictorian, who had scored a white bmw complete with sun roof. I had moved from small-town Ohio a few years earlier and lacked the fashion sense to know Gucci from Jordache. Even so, I felt safe if not accepted. If there's one thing rich kids' schools specialize in, it's cultivating outsiders. Looking back, it's easy to recognize the kid who sat behind me in US History as just another outcast. I didn't recognize him as one then only because he wasn't on my radar at all. He was quiet. I don't remember even being aware of him behind me each day until the day he nudged me before class, opening his school bag and inviting me to look inside. I remember the backpack as an oily blue, the gun itself as chrome and shining. I don't remember him saying anything. I don't remember speaking either. The situation, more than anything, confused me. Why the need to show the gun? Why to me? In those pre-Columbine years, I didn't exactly feel threatened. If there was a right way to respond, I still don't know what it was. States The gun debate in this country basically boils down into two factions holding a disparate set of beliefs. Pro-Gun: I love guns and everyone should have one. Anti-Gun: I don't like guns and so no one should have one. The Pro-Gun faction believes the world will be safer only when everyone is armed. The Anti-Gun faction suggests we melt the guns. Neither stance is productive. Neither wants to be persuaded. Winchester The widow may have moved west for any number of reasons. She and her late husband had traveled to the Bay Area years before, and she had loved her time there. More recently, her brother-in-law had taken a job...

“Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control

ABSTRACTThe warrant of the dead refers to an explicit or implicit claim that the dead place a demand on the living. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action: since they died, we should do X. Seeing this rhetorical move as a warrant is useful because the connection between the dead and the requested action of the living is often assumed rather than argued outright. This essay examines how, why, and to what effect President Barack Obama used the warrant of the dead in his gun control rhetoric since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. By extending, expanding, and intensifying memories of the victims of gun violence, Obama used the warrant of the dead to try to establish sustained concern for those victims and thus sustained commitment to gun control. Yet Obama’s effort to transform gun control supporters into gun control activists proved largely ineffective. Examining this partial rhetorical failure offers rhetorical scholars important insights about the warrant of the dead, the gun debate, and, more generally, the challenges of public argument and deliberation in an era of fleeting engagement.

From Play to Peril: A Historical Examination of Media Coverage of Accidental Shootings Involving Children*

ObjectivesTo examine how firearms‐related incidents are defined as social problems versus personal tragedies. This is achieved by examining a case of gun violence where the actors immediately involved are apparently blameless: child‐involved accidental firearms deaths and injuries. Specifically, we examine changing narratives of these incidents from the mid‐19th century to the present.MethodsA database of 314 New York Times articles on child‐involved accidental shootings from the mid‐1800s to the present day was compiled and analyzed using Atlas.ti.ResultsOur content analysis shows that despite declining prevalence and coverage over time, these incidents were increasingly framed as social problems through narratives of criminalization and responsibilization. These discursive frameworks differ in how they allocate blame and advance appropriate social responses to child‐involved shootings. First, “criminalization” involves a police response to both the child shooter and, especially after the 1911 promulgation of New York's Sullivan Act requiring a license for concealable firearms, to adult custodians. Second, “responsibilization” allocates responsibility for the proper management of guns to adults at home (since the 1970s) as well as to society at large (since the 1980s) within a discourse that frames child‐involved accidental shootings as indicative of broader social disorder.ConclusionsNarratives of child‐involved shootings reflect a broader social transformation of accidents into public problems that occurred in the 20th century. As such, the results provide insight into both the contemporary gun debate and the moral valuation of children.

Cascades in metaphor and grammar

Public discourse on highly charged, complex social and political issues is extensive, with millions of sentences available for analysis. It is also rife with metaphors that manifest vast numbers of novel metaphoric expressions. More and more, to understand such issues, to see who is saying what and why, we require big data and statistically-based analysis of such corpora. However, statistically-based data processing alone cannot do all the work. The MetaNet (MN) project has developed an analysis method that formalizes existing insights about the conceptual metaphors underlying linguistic expressions into a computationally tractable mechanism for automatically discovering new metaphoric expressions in texts. The ontology used for this computational method is organized in terms of metaphor cascades, i.e. pre-existing packages of hierarchically organized primary and general metaphors that occur together. The current paper describes the architecture of metaphor-to-metaphor relations built into this system. MN’s methodology represents a proof of concept for a novel way of performing metaphor analysis. It does so by applying the method to one particular domain of social interest, namely the gun debate in American political discourse. Though well aware that such an approach cannot replace a thorough cognitive, sociological, and political analysis, this paper offers examples that show how a cascade theory of metaphor and grammar helps automated data analysis in many ways.