Sometimes (but Not This Time), a Gun Is Just a Gun: Masculinity Threat and Guns in the United States, 1999–2018

Today, despite national campaigns and mass shootings, gun sales continue to rise. The majority of gun owners in the United States are men, and prior research has documented the complex relationship between masculinity and gun ownership. However, a majority of the research has remained on the micro level. In this article, we look at the effects of men’s unemployment on gun ownership. Using both national- and state-level Federal Bureau of Investigation background-check data as well as economic indicators, we find that worsening economic conditions for men (relative to women) lead to increases in gun sales. Moreover, this effect is exacerbated by the prevalence of guns in an area. We supplement these analyses with nationally representative survey data showing a strong relationship between perceptions of threat to men’s gender identities and opposition to laws limiting access to guns.     

Morally Controversial Leisure: The Social World of Gun Collectors

In this article I examine the world of gun collectors. When dealing, collecting and showing this group sees guns as fascinating collectibles. Yet, collecting and other leisure pursuits are often controversial. Academics, politicians and media persons perceive gun collectors and their collections as symbols of deviance and their guns as threats to society. The moral controversy created by the anti-gun position, and the gun collectors' accounts of their activities, shows how other hobbies may become social problems.     

Theorising gun control: the development of regulation and shooting sports in Britain

Utilising an account of the development of gun control legislation in Britain and the work of Norbert Elias, this paper argues that there are a number of processes that influence the development of such legislation, both in Britain and elsewhere. It argues that while processes such as the state's predisposition to consolidate its monopoly on the use of violence and advances in people's threshold of repugnance at violence influence the development of legislation, they can also lead to a blurring of the distinction between legally held sporting guns and illegal firearms in the hands of criminals. The paper concludes by considering other factors such as the efficacy of the prohibitionist lobby on the one hand and the gun lobby on the other, together with historical factors that may, in part, account for international variation in regimes of gun control.     

The sociology of U.S. gun culture

Despite the fact that a robust culture centered on the legal ownership and use of guns by law‐abiding gun owners exists in the United States, there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture. Rather, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. As a corrective to this oversight, I outline what a sociology of U.S. gun culture should look like. In the first section, I give a brief history of U.S. gun culture from the founding era through the 1960s. Guns began as tools of necessity in the colonies and on the frontier, but evolved into equipment for sport hunting and shooting, as well as desired commodities for collecting. The second section examines these recreational pursuits which formed the core of U.S. gun culture for most of the 20th century. Although recreation remains an important segment, the central emphasis of U.S. gun culture has gradually shifted to armed self‐defense over the course of the past half‐century. The third section examines the rise of this culture of armed citizenship, what I call “Gun Culture 2.0,” the current iteration of the country's historic gun culture. I conclude by suggesting important avenues for future research.     

Separating batterers and guns: a review and analysis of gun removal laws in 50 States

Firearms play an important role in lethal domestic violence incidents. The authors review state laws regarding two policies to separate batterers from firearms: laws authorizing police to remove firearms when responding to a domestic violence complaint ("police gun removal laws") and laws authorizing courts to order guns removed from batterers through a protective order ("court-ordered removal laws"). As of April 2004, 18 states had police gun removal laws; 16 states had court-ordered removal laws. The authors examine relevant characteristics of the laws and recommend that these laws be mandatory, apply to all guns and ammunition possessed by an abuser, and include clear procedures to enhance implementation.     

Carrying Firearms for Protection: A Causal Model*

The authors develop a causal model of the determinants of carrying firearms for protection. It is argued that the examination of carrying a gun as a dependent variable is methodologically more advantageous than using gun ownership as the dependent variable. Through use of path analysis, the direct and indirect effects on gun carrying behavior are identified. The results suggest most crime specific variables, e.g. fear of criminal victimization, do not directly influence the tendency to carry a gun, although these factors had minor indirect effects on the dependent variable. The most important direct influences on carrying a gun were age, gender, and the belief that the presence of guns is an effective deterrent to crime.     

Concealed Ownership: Americans’ Perceived Comfort Sharing Gun Ownership Status with Others

While much is known about how Americans feel about guns and gun control policy, less is known about how Americans perceive gun owners, or how gun owners and nonowners view themselves. The present study examines how comfortable individuals feel disclosing their gun ownership status with family, friends, coworkers, employers, doctors, teachers, police, and strangers. This article uses stigma theory as a guiding framework. Data were obtained from a nationwide survey conducted in February 2016 of more than 250 current gun owners and more than 250 nonowners. Analyses utilize ordered logistic regression. Findings show that whites, older Americans, and those with more pro-gun attitudes express more comfort sharing whether they own a gun. Respondents also indicate that familiarity with the individual requesting gun ownership information and concern over how that person might react are key factors that affect comfort with disclosure. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Unpacking Heat: Dueling Identities and Complex Views on Gun Control among Rural Police

Using 20 semistructured interviews with police officers from a rural sheriff's department, we present what we believe is the first in‐depth examination of U.S. rural officers’ views on gun control. We find that officers possess complex views about gun control, reflecting their multiple identities as both gun‐oriented rural citizens and police who seek to control the situations they encounter at work. Specifically, we observed that rural police officers: (1) embrace a rural identity that implies support of gun rights over gun control; (2) report that police work experiences have caused them to embrace their police identity and to distance themselves from some gun‐related aspects of rural identity (e.g., they have lost interest in guns over time and have increasingly dissociated from gun‐enthusiast peers); and (3) have learned to incorporate aspects of both identities into their views on gun control, universally advocating for some gun control measures in the name of community safety, but rejecting others as part of rural ideological views about personal freedom. We discuss research and policy implications and suggest that policymakers must better appreciate the nuances and culture of rural places in order to gain rural citizens’ and rural police officers’ support for gun control legislation.     

THE INFLUENCE OF FEAR OF CRIME, GENDER, AND SOUTHERN CULTURE ON CARRYING FIREARMS FOR PROTECTION

This research examines the influence of fear of crime, gender, and a southern cultural tradition on the frequency of carrying firearms for protection against criminal victimization. Analysis of carrying guns for protection, as opposed to having them in the home or owning them for this purpose, is argued to remove some methodological problems plaguing much previous research. Fear of crime is not found to be a significant predictor of carrying; however, gender and cultural context do have predictable influences. Males and persons residing in a traditionally southern cultural context carried guns most frequently, compared to others, for protection against crime. One important finding is an interaction effect between gender and culture: southern culture levels the difference between genders by increasing female more than male carrying of a gun. Theoretical and research implications are discussed.     

Gun violence exposure and trauma among rural youth

This study compared rural youth exposed to gun violence and rural youth not exposed to gun violence on a number of variables: anger, anxiety, dissociation, depression, posttraumatic stress, total trauma, violent behavior, parental monitoring, and levels of violence in the home, school, and community. One-fourth (25%) of the rural youth in this study reported having been exposed to gun violence at least once. Youth exposed to gun violence reported significantly more anger, dissociation, posttraumatic stress, and total trauma. In addition, youth exposed to the violence of guns reported significantly higher levels of violent behaviors and exposure to violence in other settings and also reported lower levels of parental monitoring. The present study contributes to the growing body of literature addressing the stereotype that rural communities are not immune to the violence of firearms. This stereotype acts as a barrier to mental health practice, research, and policy issues in rural communities.     

Firearm advertising: product depiction in consumer gun magazines

In contrast to tobacco, alcohol, and other consumer products associated with health risks, we know very little about how firearm manufacturers advertise their products. The authors examined advertisements for firearms in all 27 ad-accepting magazines listed in Bacon's Magazine Directory "guns and shooting" category. Sixty-three manufacturers spent an estimated $1,195,680 on firearm advertising during the month studied. Annual advertising costs ranged widely; manufacturers spent an estimated $28.16 in advertising per firearm produced. Firearms generally were presented as a part of a lifestyle. Self-protection was noted infrequently in the advertisements. By contrast, attributes of the gun, typically technological characteristics, were noted in almost every advertisement.     

“People Will Bury Their Guns before They Surrender Them”: Implementing Domestic Violence Gun Control in Rural,Appalachian versus Urban Communities

Though gun violence is a global issue, the risk of firearm death is substantially higher in the United States than in other high‐income nations. Guns are deeply rooted within American culture; however, different subcultures exist along the urban‐rural divide. Such differences between urban and rural communities related to gun culture have been dubbed “firearm localism.” We investigated firearm localism in a state that has the highest proportion of firearm‐related domestic violence homicide and a large rural area representing a subgroup of rural culture: Appalachia. Specifically, key professionals reported issues related to domestic violence gun control in their communities. We conducted phone and in‐person surveys with a sample of community professionals (N = 133) working in victim services and the justice system in urban and Appalachian communities. Despite evidence of a strong gun culture in the rural communities, both urban and rural professionals estimated that about two‐thirds of their community would support restricting abusers' firearm access. Additionally, rural professionals were more likely to show concern for abusers' Second Amendment rights when discussing unintended negative consequences of gun confiscation; urban professionals were more likely to point out that gun confiscation can provide a false sense of security for victims. Policy implications are discussed.     

高职文秘专业语文教学中培养学生创新思维能力的途径

为适应社会对创新人才的需要,作为高职文秘专业基础课程之一的语文教学必须注重培养学生的创新思维能力。文章结合作者的教学体会,探索在语文教学中通过教学内容的选择、文本解读、教学手段等途径,培养学生的创新思维能力。     

“We been dying,and you got me on a call helping you stay alive”: Black and Latinx youth organizers' experiences of racism in gun violence prevention organizations

This study explored Black and Latinx youth organizers' experiences of racism within national gun violence prevention organizing spaces. Interview data were analyzed from 17 Black and/or Latinx youth (M_age = 20.17, 47% women) across the United States who organized against gun violence. The findings identified three forms of racism that Black and Latinx organizers experienced in national organizations: (1) being tokenized for their racial identities and experiences without having real decision making power; (2) feeling a burden to educate their white peers about the structural causes of gun violence and how to improve organizing spaces for other youth of color; and (3) being silenced in their racially conscious organizing efforts to address the structural causes of gun violence in their communities. This research highlights how Black and Latinx youth gun violence prevention organizers contend both with structural racism in their everyday lives and racism in organizing spaces.     

A Chinese beauty story: how college women in China negotiate beauty,body image,and mass media

This study examines how young Chinese women negotiate beauty and body image in context with mass media, paying particular attention to the relationship between ongoing sociocultural change in contemporary Chinese society and the attitudes and behaviors among young women towards beauty. Qualitative in nature, this study explores the “beauty stories” of 13 college women in mainland China through in-depth interviews. Several distinctive themes were found: (1) These women believed the ideal beautiful Chinese woman should have a tall and thin body, big eyes, a watermelon seed-shaped face, fair skin, and qi zhi (inner beauty); (2) Body image issues were centralized in these women's everyday experiences, and they were under significant cultural, societal, familial, and peer pressure to pursue physical beauty; (3) Cultural and media influences on their perceptions of beauty were complex and multi-layered; and (4) The women were hopeful of both potential positive social change and the liberation of Chinese women, and they were concerned about the superficiality and extreme beauty standards advocated in the media. The findings suggest that the contemporary Chinese beauty story is essentially different from the Western one, extending the existing literature on beauty and body image to include an Eastern and Chinese perspective.     

Perceptions of child beauty pageants and their impacts: What really lies behind the tiara?

Child beauty pageants continue to be controversial, particularly as more beauty pageant reality television programs appear. One common complaint about child pageants are that they are sexualizing the girls and lead to abuse. In this study the uses and gratification approach is used to explore why millions of individuals choose to watch these programs. Research participants reported whether they had seen the shows Toddlers & Tiaras or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, or had seen adult pageants in general (i.e., Miss America) along with their motivational factor(s) for watching. All participants were also asked to rate different pageant perception items. This study found that female individuals are more likely to watch these programs, entertainment is a consistent motivational factor for all three programs, and there is a strong relationship between an individual’s favorable perceptions toward the programs and their decision to view the programs.     

The Child Outside the Door: Primal Scene,Caesura, and the Primary Trauma of Race

ABSTRACT

We are supposedly a “postracial” America, yet we cannot contain our own excess, cannot keep the unmetabolized beta elements of our racial history out of the bedroom or let race stay in the bedroom so the mature genital couple can do what it pleases. Not only do we surveil, police, and monitor race’s own primal scene but also we continuously break and enter into its most intimate chambers, guns drawn, tanks crashing in, in order to prevent the primal scene from ever taking place. This article explores the idea of race in America as denied its own primal scene and the ways in which, contrary to the importance to Bion (1991) of preventing “someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space” (p. 578), we cannot allow race to hold open its own empty space, find its own manifestations of O. I draw from the work of Wilfred Bion, Fred Moten, Jean Laplanche, and others to attempt to theorize the complexities of “postracial” America’s relationship with race vis-à-vis the primal scene.     

Europe and Security in the Caucasus

The Caucasus has become, as a long-lasting seismic wave, a framework of enormous and underestimated relevance and uncertainty. But even so, we have not to become prisoner of a short-term “cage”. There is neither strategy nor policy, diplomacy, or war that can exist without four fundamental intellectual preconditions: historical knowledge, security knowledge, ethnic-cultural-religious knowledge, and knowledge of the geopolitical, economic, and international order. These have been recalled by some crucial comments taken from a revisited version of Homer’s Iliad, recently published by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, to better focus the concepts. “Men have always flung themselves headlong into battle, like moths attracted towards a fatal flame. There is no fear or self-disgust which has managed to keep them away from that flame” – he wrote – “because it is within that flame that they have always found the only way of emerging from the shadows of life. For this reason, I believe that no one will stop searching for an alternative beauty to that represented by the war path or stop looking for a reason to about face. Sooner or later we will succeed in calling Achilles away from this fateful war. Neither fear nor horror will bring him home. It will be some other completely different beauty, more dazzling than his own and infinitely more humble”. We are, in fact, aware of examples of very poor governance skills at a global level as regards the management of medium-and long-term international order options. And the Caucasus is really a case study. For these many reasons Europe cannot avoid an effective “neighbourhood policy” with the Caucasian countries. In 2003, the European Union appointed a Special Representative for the region. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all have Partnership and Cooperation Agreements in force with the EU. Actions plans will be soon implemented and Europe represents by and large the preferred and more reliable interlocutor for the Caucasian region.     

Once in Parkland,a Year in Hartford,a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, are viewed as routine whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are extraordinary and worthy of outrage. In this article, we draw on ethnographic observation to compare protest vigils in urban communities comprised predominantly of people of color, in suburban areas that are mostly white, and at the national level in order to uncover the racialized processes of symbolic classification by which this “commonsense” view is produced and how it is challenged by activists. We use the framework of cultural pragmatics to analyze these vigils, making visible the racialized forms of domination that structure activism and, we contend, ultimately divide gun violence into two distinct phenomena rather than constituting a master category. We argue that cultural pragmatics provides a way to understand what it means to challenge culture as emphasized by the multi‐institutional politics approach to social movements.     

Art as Propaganda: Bringing Du Bois into the Sociology of Art

We examine WEB Du Bois's writings about the arts in the NAACP journal The Crisis from 1910–1934 in order to construct a Du Boisian social theory of the arts. The key elements of this theoretical framework are: artists, money, freedom, organization, truth, beauty, and propaganda. The most surprising element is propaganda, which for Du Bois meant that art needs to address racial politics. There is a strong sense in Du Bois's writings that art can and should have socially transformative effects. Comparing Du Bois's work to current theories from the sociology of art, we find that Du Bois emphasizes the role of art in social change, while current work treats art primarily as a tool for social reproduction. We argue for expanding the theoretical toolbox of the sociology of the arts through greater consideration of Du Bois's propaganda concept.