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.

Conclusion

This chapter looks toward the future of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun debate more broadly. It discusses potential threats to the NRA's political influence, including its own internal struggles, the rise of more effective gun control advocacy organizations, and the potential downsides of its close relationship with the Republican Party. The chapter also talks about the potential generalizability of the book's findings to other groups and policy areas. It considers the lessons that other groups might learn from the NRA in terms of cultivating and using ideational power. Ultimately, the chapter notes its implications for our understanding of interest groups and political parties, and reflects on the NRA's place in American democracy.

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.

Defensive Gun Use (DGU) in the American Gun Debate

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The Gun Debate

No topic is more polarizing than guns and gun control. From a gun culture that took root early in American history to the mass shootings that repeatedly bring the public discussion of gun control to a fever pitch, the topic has preoccupied citizens, public officials, and special interest groups for decades. In this thoroughly revised second edition of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know® noted economist Philip J. Cook and political scientist Kristin A. Goss delve into the issues that Americans debate when they talk about guns. With a balanced and broad-ranging approach, the authors thoroughly cover the latest research, data, and developments on gun ownership, gun violence, the firearms industry, and the regulation of firearms. The authors also tackle sensitive issues such as the impact of gun violence on quality of life, the influence of exposure to gun violence on mental health, home production of guns, arming teachers, the effect of concealed weapons on crime rates, and the ability of authorities to disarm people who aren’t allowed to have a gun. No discussion of guns in the U.S. would be complete without consideration of the history, culture, and politics that drive the passion behind the debate. Cook and Goss deftly explore the origins of the American gun culture and the makeup of both the gun rights and gun control movements. Written in question-and-answer format, this updated edition brings the debate up-to-date for the current political climate under Trump and will help readers make sense of the ideologically driven statistics and slogans that characterize our national conversation on firearms. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in getting a clear view of the issues surrounding guns and gun policy in America.

Safer with a gun

Chapter 4 examines people’s feelings about gun safety and the connection to gun policy preferences. Those who feel safe around guns are strong supporters of gun rights legislation. Those who feel threatened and not safe around guns prefer strict gun regulations. Personal experiences with guns and the prevalence of guns in people’s social lives are key factors that influence whether people perceive guns as dangerous and a threat to their well-being or safe and a means of protection. Feelings about personal safety or threat are palpable and animate the gun debate in American politics. Given the strong ties between such feelings and gun policy preferences, it is not surprising gun politics are often heated and end in stalemate.

The psychology of guns: risk, fear, and motivated reasoning

The gun debate in America is often framed as a stand-off between two immutable positions with little potential to move ahead with meaningful legislative reform. Attempts to resolve this impasse have been thwarted by thinking about gun ownership attitudes as based on rational choice economics instead of considering the broader socio-cultural meanings of guns. In this essay, an additional psychological perspective is offered that highlights how concerns about victimization and mass shootings within a shared culture of fear can drive cognitive bias and motivated reasoning on both sides of the gun debate. Despite common fears, differences in attitudes and feelings about guns themselves manifest in variable degrees of support for or opposition to gun control legislation that are often exaggerated within caricatured depictions of polarization. A psychological perspective suggests that consensus on gun legislation reform can be achieved through understanding differences and diversity on both sides of the debate, working within a common middle ground, and more research to resolve ambiguities about how best to minimize fear while maximizing personal and public safety.

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.

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.