Gun Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice 9781138904262, 9781315696485

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: new approaches to research on guns
Introduction
References
1. The rise of self-defense in gun advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918–2017
Introduction
A brief history of and approach to studying changes in American gun culture
Data and methods
Results
Conclusion
Notes
References
2. Semi-automatics for the people? The marketing of a new kind of man
Introduction
Reflections and contexts
Arming America or gunning America?
Upgrading police weaponry: Loss leaders for the civilian market?
The magazine survey
Present arms
Words and pictures
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Firearms magazines used in the survey
Notes
References
3. ‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’
Introduction
Marketing innocence: Children and guns
‘Refuse to be a victim’: The NRA’s outreach to women
Conclusion: The long history of children and guns in the United States
Notes
References
4. Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles: a review of the empirical evidence
Introduction
Using trace data to examine Los Angeles’ illegal gun market
Trace analysis
Policy response: Letter campaign
Beyond trace data: Examining local, illicit gun markets with arresstees in LA county jails
Methodological overview
Findings
Policy implications
Concluding thoughts
References
5. Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy: integrating marketing research and firearms studies
Introduction
Connecting marketing research and firearms research
An overview of marketing research
Existing marketing scholarship on firearms
Marketing strategy
Marketing strategy research relevant to firearms studies
Consumer behavior
Consumer behavior research relevant to firearms studies
Consumer culture
Consumer culture research relevant to firearms research
Market system dynamics
Extending market system dynamics research to firearms research
Conclusion
Notes
References
6. Fighting the Left and leading the Right: NRA politics and power through the 2016 elections
Introduction
Leader of the (C)PAC: mobilizing resources
The mobilizing effect of threat
Slippery slopes, culture war tyranny, and freedom fighters:
Framing the gun debate
The past as prologue: NRA and gun rights politics in 2016 and beyond
Notes
References
7. Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? Gun control politics over two decades of change
Introduction
The missing movement for gun control in America
The gun violence prevention movement
Strategy: The gun violence prevention movement’s pragmatic turn
Gun rights challenges to the new gun violence prevention movement
Notes
References
8. What if we talked about gun control differently? A framing experiment
Introduction
Partisanship, policy preferences, and framing
Research design
Results
Discussion
Notes
References
9. Gun control: an Australian perspective
Introduction
Port Arthur 1996 and the response
Contrast the USA
The evidence for gun control as a means of reducing violence
Recent Australian developments
Police and firearms carriage
Police firearms and public safety
Conclusion
Notes
References
Cases
10. Prosthetic gods: on the semiotic and affective landscape of firearms in American politics
Guns as tools, guns as signs
A heuristic
Guns as prostheses
Conclusion
References
11. Bullet Riddled: Living and Suffering in Killadelphia
Introduction
The pain and shame of being wounded
A badge of honor
The downward spiral
Conclusion
Notes
References
12. Guns, intimacy, and the limits of militarized masculinity
Introduction
Guns, history, male intimacy
War, masculinity, and moral injury
Guns as lies
References
13. Lawfully armed citizens and police: a proposal for reducing armed encounters with agents of the state
Introduction
Police license to use violence and the risk of escalation in police encounters
A proposal for technological intervention to reduce armed interaction between citizens and state agents
The normative case for intervention: Comparison and benefits
Conclusion
Notes
14. ‘The worst that humanity has to offer’: on looters and law-abiding citizens in a state of emergency
Introduction
#HarveyLootCrew and savage man-beasts: How to manufacture a state of exception
State outsourcing and the weaponization of self-care
Selective memory and perpetual states of emergency
Notes
15. Gun violence, gun control and self-defense in the governance of security of Latin America
Introduction
Latin America’s homicide epidemic
Gun proliferation and violence
Gun control and the governance of security
Conclusions
Notes
References
16. Firearms and violence
Introduction
Does the weapon matter?
Firearms ownership and use
Strategies of firearms control
References
17. The effect of firearms on suicide
Introduction
Case-control research on the effect of exposure to
firearms on suicide
Are suicide attempts by shooting more deadly than attempts by methods likely to be substituted if guns were not available?
Is suicide method substitution likely to occur
Macro-level studies of firearms levels and suicide rates
Conclusions
References
18. Gun policy research: personal reflections on public questions
Philip J. Cook
David Kopel
Robert J. Spitzer
References
Index

Citation preview

Gun Studies

As cultural, social, political, and historical objects, guns are rich with complex and contested significance. What guns mean, why they matter, and what policies should be undertaken to regulate guns remain issues of vigorous scholarly and public debate. Gun Studies offers fresh research and original perspectives on the contentious issue of firearms in public life. Comprising of global, interdisciplinary contributions, this insightful volume examines difficult and timely questions through the lens of: • • • • • •

Social practice Marketing and commerce Critical theory Political conflict Public policy Criminology

Questions explored include the evolution of American gun culture from recreation to self-protection; the changing dynamics of the pro-gun and pro-regulation movements; the deeply personal role of guns as sources of both injury and security; and the relationship between gun-wielding individuals, the state, and social order in the United States and abroad. In addition to introducing new research, Gun Studies presents reflections by senior scholars on what has been learned over the decades and how gun-related research has influenced public policy and everyday conversations. Offering provocative and often intimate perspectives on how guns influence individuals, social structures, and the state in both dramatic and nuanced ways, Gun Studies will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology, political science, legal history, criminology, criminal justice, social policy, armaments industries, and violent crime. It will also appeal to policy makers and others interested in and concerned about the use of guns. Jennifer Carlson is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology and School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, USA. Kristin A. Goss is an associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, USA. Harel Shapira is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Routledge Studies in Crime and Society

Violence, Sex Offenders, and Corrections Rose Ricciardelli and Dale C. Spencer Caribbean Crime and Criminal Justice Impacts of Post-Colonialism and Gender Edited by Katharina J. Joosen and Corin Bailey Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture Robin Maria Valeri and Kevin Borgeson Digital Piracy A Global, Multidisciplinary Account Edited by Steven Caldwell Brown and Thomas J. Holt Offender and Victim Networks in Human Trafficking Ella Cockbain Mothering and Desistance in Re-Entry Venezia Michalsen Cyber-risk and Youth Digital Citizenship, Privacy and Surveillance Michael Adorjan and Rosemary Ricciardelli Gun Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice Edited by Jennifer Carlson, Kristin A. Goss, and Harel Shapira For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Crime-and-Society/book-series/RSCS

Gun Studies Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice Edited by Jennifer Carlson, Kristin A. Goss, and Harel Shapira

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Jennifer Carlson, Kristin A. Goss and Harel Shapira; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jennifer Carlson, Kristin A. Goss and Harel Shapira to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-90426-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-69648-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: new approaches to research on guns

vii 1

JENNIFER CARLSON, KRISTIN A. GOSS, AND HAREL SHAPIRA

1

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

9

DAVID YAMANE, SEBASTIAN L. IVORY, AND PAUL YAMANE

2

Semi-automatics for the people? The marketing of a new kind of man

28

PETER SQUIRES

3

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’

52

LAURA BROWDER

4

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles: a review of the empirical evidence

75

GEORGE E. TITA AND MELISSA BARRAGAN

5

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy: integrating marketing research and firearms studies

95

AIMEE DINNIN HUFF AND MICHELLE BARNHART

6

Fighting the Left and leading the Right: NRA politics and power through the 2016 elections

117

SCOTT MELZER

7

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? Gun control politics over two decades of change KRISTIN A. GOSS

136

vi Contents 8

What if we talked about gun control differently? A framing experiment

151

SIERRA SMUCKER

9

Gun control: an Australian perspective

177

RICK SARRE

10

Prosthetic gods: on the semiotic and affective landscape of firearms in American politics

196

PATRICK BLANCHFIELD

11

Bullet Riddled: Living and Suffering in Killadelphia

211

JOOYOUNG LEE

12

Guns, intimacy, and the limits of militarized masculinity

224

MICHAEL A. MESSNER

13

Lawfully armed citizens and police: a proposal for reducing armed encounters with agents of the state

241

NICHOLAS J. JOHNSON

14

‘The worst that humanity has to offer’: on looters and law-abiding citizens in a state of emergency

258

CAROLINE LIGHT

15

Gun violence, gun control and self-defense in the governance of security of Latin America

271

DIEGO SANJURJO

16

Firearms and violence

294

FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING

17

The effect of firearms on suicide

309

GARY KLECK

18

Gun policy research: personal reflections on public questions

330

PHILIP J. COOK, DAVID B. KOPEL, AND ROBERT J. SPITZER

Index

341

Acknowledgements

Many of the essays included in this volume were originally presented at the 2017 Gun Studies Symposium at the University of Arizona. This symposium was made possible by generous support from the Rombach Institute, the School of Government and Public Policy, the School of Sociology in the Social and Behavioral Sciences College and the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona, as well as from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. We are especially grateful to the Marketing and Communications team at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, particularly Jenna Rutschman, Lori Harwood, and Miles Fujimoto, for making sure the event came off without a hitch, as well as to organizer extraordinaire and sociologist Jessica Pfaffendorf for creating an intellectual space for open, interdisciplinary debate surrounding the social life of guns. Accordingly, we also want to acknowledge the generosity of panelists, attendees, and discussants. We especially thank Timothy Luke and William Vizzard, who provided indispensable insight to the panelist-authors. The editors would also like to acknowledge the team at Routledge, led by Hannah Catterall and Thomas Sutton. Their encouragement and flexibility allowed us to develop a truly interdisciplinary text that captures the breadth of gun studies today. Last but not least, we are inspired by the theoretical and empirical breadth of the authors in this volume – and by what the future of gun studies holds.

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Introduction New approaches to research on guns Jennifer Carlson, Kristin A. Goss, and Harel Shapira

Introduction Until recently, the study of guns was predominantly focused on understanding the relationship between guns and crime. This focus can be traced back to the post-war era and the work of criminologists such as Marvin Wolfgang (1958) and Franklin Zimring (1968a, 1968b), who helped establish the field of gun studies. Their original emphasis on studying guns by studying the relationship between guns and crime was connected to a series of coinciding historical events: high-profile assassinations of political figures; increasing levels of gun crime; so-called riots in urban areas in the 1960s; and, finally, dramatic spikes in the sale of long guns and handguns. These scholars raised a series of important questions that remain key areas of inquiry within the field, including: What is the relationship between specific gun control policies and specific kinds of gun crime? What is the correlation between gun availability and various kinds of violent and non-violent crime? What is the relationship between gun ownership and risk of victimization? While such questions remain important and demand continued investigation, one of the aims of this edited volume is to identify and advance emerging research agendas within the growing field of gun studies. Specifically, the volume helps to promote empirical and theoretical understandings of how people live with, experience, and think about guns in their day-to-day lives. Doing so requires bringing together scholars who are doing research on everyday people and their guns, but also scholars who are addressing a wide range of people embedded in institutions that interact with firearms and engage in firearms politics: from the National Rifle Association (NRA) to social movements for gun regulation, including participants in legal and underground gun markets, and from the police officer to the military veteran. The contributors to this volume examine people and institutions through a variety of analytical lenses associated with various disciplinary traditions. These analyses draw upon a wide mix of empirical sources, such as surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, media content, laws and policies, and gun-trace data. Most of the essays in this volume were originally drafted for a symposium held at the University of Arizona in October 2017. Driven by the desire to

2 Carlson, Goss, and Shapira bring together scholars who were pushing gun studies in new theoretical and empirical directions, we sought out scholars from different disciplines (including law, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, and political science), and we wanted contributions both from scholars focusing on the contemporary moment and those offering a more historical analysis. Finally, aware that gun studies is a collective intellectual project spanning decades, we also wanted to put into conversation scholars who have engaged gun studies at different waves of inquiry, from senior scholars who have been formative in establishing the field to junior scholars who are new to the field. This broad range of contributors does not mean that this volume is comprehensive. Rather, it is eclectic, focused less on reviewing the canon than on highlighting innovative data for analysis, emerging areas for inquiry, and persistent questions in need of answer. While readers seeking an encompassing survey of the field will find bits and pieces of the canon, this volume showcases innovation and provocation rather than orthodoxy. On the topic of breadth, we note that this collection, as with the field of gun studies more generally, is focused mostly on the United States. This focus is grounded in an empirical reality: U.S. civilians own just about half (48%) of the world’s estimated 650 million civilian-owned firearms (Small Arms Survey, 2007). That said, this volume aims to encourage comparative understandings of guns and gun cultures by including international scholars, as well. Furthermore, the contributions make clear that even within the United States, the story of guns in our lives is a complex one, with tangled histories and many cultural nuances. Gun-owning Americans are disproportionately white, married, conservative men; nevertheless, the experience of gun ownership is diverse across demography and ideology, as is the experience of gun violence. The ways that guns are used, symbolically defined, legally regulated, and politically mobilized have changed over time. One of the significant changes that has taken place over the past few decades within American gun culture has been a transition away from hunting and toward self-defense as the primary reason for gun ownership. A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center documents the enormity of this transformation. In 1999, the primary reason gun owners gave for owning a gun was hunting (49%), with only a minority (26%) claiming protection as their motivation. By 2013, these figures were reversed, with protection becoming the number one reason (48%), and hunting dropping to a secondary motivation (32%) (Goo, 2013). These attitudinal changes are part of a broader transformation in American gun culture. In their contribution to this volume, ‘The Rise of Self-Defense in Gun Advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918–2017,’ David Yamane, Sebastian Ivory, and Paul Yamane examine these changes though a content analysis of advertisements in “The National Rifle Association’s flagship magazine.” Their analysis documents the evolution of a gun culture rooted in hunting and target shooting to one focused on self-defensive ‘armed citizenship.’ The decline in hunting and the turn toward tactical self-defense have been accompanied by

Introduction 3 other changes, as well. The total number of guns in civilian hands has increased substantially, from 192 million in 1994 to 265 million in 2015 (Azrael et al., 2017). However, this surge has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the proportion of gun owners, according to available survey data (see, e.g., Linshi, 2015; Smith & Son, 2015). Part of the explanation for this seeming puzzle is that those who own firearms tend to own more than one, and furthermore, that a small subset of gun owners (14%) own so many firearms that they account for nearly half (approximately 130 million) of the total civilian gun stock (Azrael et al., 2017). How and why do people come to own multiple firearms? Moreover, how do we account specifically for the rise of semi-automatic firearms, which have largely displaced revolvers among gun owners? These questions sit at the heart of Peter Squires’ essay, ‘Semi-Automatics for the People? The Marketing of a New Kind of Man.’ While there are many forces at work, Squires points us to the importance of the advertising industry and how it produces a sense of need among people to own guns. As Squires shows, these needs are not only symbolic ones, in which advertising agencies target men’s sense of masculinity and self-identity, but also practical needs, connected to producing feelings of physical danger in the absence of firearms ownership. Indeed, as Squires shows, firearms advertising is often organized around the idea that one can never be too prepared – that is, too armed – such that bigger, faster, lighter, and more accurate firearms become a necessity. Historicizing gun culture by looking at how guns are marketed to people also forms the basis of Laura Browder’s essay, ‘The Gun Industry Wants to Sell Your Kid an AR-15.’ Browder focuses specifically on the ways in which women and children have been defined and incorporated into gun culture by what she refers to as the ‘gun industry,’ which includes not only advertisers but also organizations such as the NRA and other gun rights groups seeking to legitimate and support the ownership of firearms in the United States. As Browder shows, women and children play a key symbolic role within the gun industry’s efforts to market and frame gun ownership as a safe, family-friendly, and communal pursuit. Rather than instruments of violence, guns become associated with intimacy and family life. The gun industry not only markets guns to women and children but also through women and children, making make guns palatable to a wider audience. When examining the market for firearms, we need to remember that there is both a legal and an illegal market. In their essay ‘Understanding the Illicit Gun Market in Los Angeles: A Review of the Empirical Evidence,’ George Tita and Melissa Barragan focus on the illicit market for guns in Los Angeles. One of the challenges of studying illicit markets is obtaining accurate data; after all, these transactions occur ‘off the books.’ The authors draw on two sources of data: trace data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on guns recovered as part of the investigation of a crime and survey data of inmates in Los Angeles area jails. Tita and Barragan provide fascinating insights into the workings of the underground economy for guns, as well as the very

4 Carlson, Goss, and Shapira methods by which we study it. Lastly, the authors highlight the different pathways by which guns used in crimes are acquired – for example, through friends and acquaintances versus straw purchases. Different policy interventions may be warranted for these different contexts. Each of these essays opens up the importance of thinking about the marketing side of gun culture, and not merely as an expression of that culture, but also as its producer. Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart expand on these themes in their essay, ‘Consumers, Culture, Marketing Strategy, and Market Systems: Integrating Marketing Research and Firearms Studies.’ They provide a kind of manifesto for scholars of consumer studies to make the study of guns a more central part of their work. As Huff and Barnhart show, the field of consumer studies provides a number of theoretical frameworks that can and should be enrolled to understand people’s relationships to firearms. Guns exist not just as consumer goods, but also as political objects. Indeed, the two are related, and especially in the American context, guns are a key element of people’s political identities. In his essay, ‘Fighting the Left and Leading the Right: NRA Politics and Power through the 2016 Elections,’ Scott Melzer argues that changes in gun politics have been intertwined with shifts in American politics. Focusing on the NRA, the preeminent gun rights organization in the United States and the world, Melzer shows how gun ownership has become an increasingly partisan issue, connected over time with conservative political identity. And as Melzer argues, the NRA has helped produce this partisanship, presenting gun ownership as a collective identity that is as much rooted in being pro-gun as it is in being opposed to liberal policies and ideas. The NRA is often credited with being one of the primary reasons that gun laws in the United States are relatively lenient, particularly at the federal level, compared to most other countries. While the pro-gun movement’s political organization and influence certainly matter, we should not overlook dynamics on the other side, namely the many organizations and political actors working for stricter gun laws. This insight animates the contribution by Kristin Goss, ‘Whatever Happened to the “Missing Movement?” Gun Control Politics Over Two Decades of Change.’ Goss reviews the factors that stymied a vigorous and sustainable movement for gun control in the latter decades of the 20th century and then illustrates what has changed since then. She finds that the ‘missing movement’ is no longer missing. A newly branded ‘gun violence prevention movement’ has strategically adapted to prior failures, enjoyed a surge of resources and activist energy, and adopted a pragmatic policy-reform strategy that has yielded important state-level victories. At the same time, the legions of newly energized gun reformers must make up for lost ground against a gun rights movement that has consolidated political victories and grown in organizational capacity in recent decades. A major policy goal of the new gun violence prevention movement is to keep perpetrators of domestic abuse from obtaining, possessing, or using firearms. Sierra Smucker examines whether framing such policy measures as

Introduction 5 efforts to combat ‘domestic violence’ might generate more support among the public compared to framing the measures as ‘gun control.’ She finds weak but statistically insignificant support for this proposition. She concludes that simple changes in how advocates talk about gun regulation are unlikely to result in wholesale shifts in public opinion on this highly salient issue. Questions about the relative power of the pro-gun rights and pro-gun regulation lobbies often come to the fore after high-profile shootings, when commentators question why lawmakers decline to enact stricter gun laws. These commentators hold out Australia as a counter-example that Rick Sarre explores in his essay, ‘Gun Control: An Australian Perspective.’ After a gunman killed 35 people and seriously wounded 18 others in Port Arthur in 1996, Parliament moved quickly to enact a suite of strict gun laws, including a ban on automatic and most semi-automatic long guns and a requirement that civilians demonstrate need to possess a firearm. As Sarre’s essay discusses, these laws were accompanied by large-scale gun buybacks. Evidence suggests that these policies reduced gun violence and mass shootings, though there remains a ‘gray market’ of non-surrendered firearms. Nevertheless, the reduction in civilian firearms may account, in part, for why police are much less likely to kill people in Australia than in the United States, Sarre argues. Firearms are not only political, but also personal. Several essays explore people’s intimate experiences of firearms, which Patrick Blanchfield describes as ‘flashpoints for powerful, visceral feelings; tokens of and litmus tests for complicated attitudes and beliefs about authority, legitimacy, and identity.’ His contribution, ‘Prosthetic Gods: On the Semiotic and Affective Landscape of Firearms in American Politics,’ draws on psychoanalytic theory to explore how firearms act as prosthetic devices that, in the human hand, quite literally extend personal power. As prostheses, Blanchfield theorizes, firearms make owners whole by compensating for vulnerability and reinforcing dignity. Like eyeglasses and cellphones, they are parts that become a part of us upon which we depend. Understanding how firearms can become a part of us helps to explain why the threat of gun regulation generates such deep emotions. Michael Messner’s contribution, ‘Guns, Intimacy, and the Limits of Militarized Masculinity,’ also sees firearms through the lens of social connection. Messner’s focus is on how firearms provide a safe means for men to bond with other men in a society that increasingly has vitiated traditional masculine roles while retaining heteronormative strictures on male intimacy. In this analysis, gun control proposals represent a threat not just to individual men as gun owners, but also to the relationships that men have with their fathers, sons, and brothers. Messner extends the social version of the ‘warrior narrative’ to actual warfare, illustrating through interviews with veterans the long-term, very intimate, and oftentimes private damage that results when man fires upon his fellow man. Jooyoung Lee picks up this theme, but in the context of U.S. urban life. In his essay, ‘The Life and Times of Scarfo,’ Lee describes in vivid and unsparing detail how a Philadelphia club-goer named Deondre (a.k.a. Scarfo) makes

6 Carlson, Goss, and Shapira sense of the bodily damage he endured from two experiences of being shot. One experience provided an opportunity for swagger; the other led to enduring physical pain and a cascade of problems from addiction to job loss. When one bullet entered his leg, Scarfo experienced firearms in a most intimate way; because that bullet remains lodged within him, this intimate experience produced a cycle of private efforts to manage suffering. While studies of gun violence often focus on deaths, Lee’s work is a powerful reminder that gun violence is also a story of the people who survived. The next three chapters offer different perspectives on the armed citizen and the state. In her essay, ‘“The Worst That Humanity Has to Offer”: Looters and Law-Abiding Citizens in a State of Emergency,’ Caroline Light explores how the neoliberal state has promoted ‘DIY security’ in which armed citizens police public spaces against racialized and gendered threats. She argues that granting of such prerogatives constitutes a ‘necropolitics’ in which the state renders disposable the lives of vulnerable people. States of emergency – such as natural disasters – provide openings for the expansion of these arrangements. Nicholas Johnson also asks us to think about the intersection of guns, race, and the state in the context of citizen encounters with law enforcement officers. Police commit more than 1,000 justifiable homicides every year in the United States, disproportionately resulting in the death of African Americans and Native Americans. In his essay, ‘Lawfully Armed Citizens and Police: A Proposal for Reducing Armed Encounters with Agents of the State,’ Johnson describes the broad discretion that police officers have to wield firearms against civilians when routine encounters escalate. Using comparative legal analysis, Johnson suggests that one way to reduce the potential lethality of such encounters is by depersonalizing them through technology of the sort used to fine speeding motorists, collect tolls, register cars, and punish jaywalking. Diego Sanjuro considers how citizens, firearms, and the state interact in a non-U.S. context. In ‘Gun Violence and Defensive Firearm Use in the Governance of Security of Latin America,’ Sanjuro shows wide variation across Central and South America both in the prevalence of gun homicide and in the percent of all homicides committed with firearms. This variation directs our attention to different types of gun violence dominant in different nations – for example, incidental interpersonal violence versus organized violence arising from the drug trade. Nevertheless, gun violence is on the rise throughout Latin America, and perceiving the state’s incapacity to maintain order, citizens are increasingly seeking to arm themselves for self-defense. Citizens become ‘nodes’ in the governance of security, while strict firearms laws go largely unenforced and unheeded. The final three chapters present the views of seasoned scholars of gun violence and firearms policy. In ‘Firearms and Violence,’ Franklin Zimring presents a synthesis of decades of work on questions at the core of the American gun debate. He considers the relationship between gun availability and the prevalence of crime, including homicide; the role of guns in selfdefense and in the deterrence of violence; the prevalence of gun ownership;

Introduction 7 and the status of laws to regulate gun transfers, possession, and use. These questions are unsettled to varying degrees, but Zimring’s contribution offers a succinct primer on our knowledge to date. Zimring also identifies questions that are subject to much speculation but a paucity of research. One set of questions concerns suicide, which comprises the majority of gun deaths in the United States. Does gun availability increase the likelihood of suicide (and hence the overall rate), or would people who intend to kill themselves do so by other means if guns were less easily obtained? As Zimring notes, it’s an open question: On the one hand, suicide attempts with guns are more lethal than those attempted with drugs or cutting, but on the other hand, methods such as jumping from a tall building are likely to be as lethal as suicide by gun. In his essay, ‘The Effect of Firearms on Suicide,’ Gary Kleck addresses this conundrum. He begins with a multipronged, methodological critique of studies that find an effect of firearms availability on suicide. He suggests that this work has failed to account sufficiently for factors that might predict both firearms ownership and suicide. He then uses public health data to challenge the ‘instrumentality effect’ of firearms on suicide – the idea that a suicide attempt by gun is more likely to result in death than an attempt by other means. Kleck finds that suicide by hanging has roughly the same fatality rate as suicide by firearm and provides suggestive evidence that those who die by guns might be especially motivated to try another method if a firearm were not available. The chapter provides a provocative analysis that is sure to advance Zimring’s call for more research on the urgent topic of suicide and firearms. The concluding chapter, ‘Gun Policy Research: Personal Reflections on Public Questions,’ features three veterans of the American gun debate and their thoughts on public-facing scholarship. Philip Cook, an economist, discusses advances in research on guns and gun policy over five decades, including key points of consensus and contention. David Kopel, a lawyer, traces the constitutional right to possess a gun by documenting how legal research influenced landmark Supreme Court rulings. Robert Spitzer, a political scientist, offers a perspective on the long and racially fraught history of gun policy in America and how he navigated gun laws to inform his scholarship. This chapter thus ends the book with an invitation to the reader to consider the double life of gun studies: both as scholarly inquiry and as personal practice.

References Azrael, D., Hepburn, L., Hemenway, D., and Miller, M. (2017) “The stock and flow of U.S. firearms: Results from the 2015 National Firearms Survey.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3(5), pp. 38–57. Goo, S.K. (2013) “Why own a gun? Protection is now top reason.” May 9. Pew Research Center. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/09/why-own-a-gunprotection-is-now-top-reason (Accessed: 27 June 2018).

8 Carlson, Goss, and Shapira Linshi, J. (2015). “This chart shows the hidden problem in America’s gun debate.” March 10. Time. http://time.com/3739370/guns-gss-pew-gallup/ (Accessed: 3 September 2018). Small Arms Survey. (2007) Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Smith, T., and Son, J. (2015) “Trends in gun ownership in the United States, 1972– 2014.” General Social Survey. Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago. Wolfgang, M. (1958) Patterns in Criminal Homicide. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zimring, F. (1968a) “Is gun control likely to reduce violent killings?” The University of Chicago Law Review, 35(4), pp. 721–737. Zimring, F. (1968b) “Games with guns and statistics.” Wisconsin Law Review, 4, pp. 1113–1126.

1

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising The American Rifleman, 1918–2017 David Yamane, Sebastian L. Ivory, and Paul Yamane

Introduction This chapter examines changes in the core of American gun culture through a content analysis of advertisements in The American Rifleman magazine for every year from 1918 to 2017. We understand the changing themes represented in these ads as a specific measure of a change from what gun journalist Michael Bane calls Gun Culture 1.0, rooted in hunting and recreational target shooting, to Gun Culture 2.0, centering on personal protection through armed citizenship. Central to Gun Culture 2.0 is the legal carrying of concealed weapons, mostly handguns, in public by ordinary Americans. By way of introduction, consider the differences in gun advertisements in a randomly selected issue of a gun magazine in 1918 and 2017. The February 2, 1918 issue of Arms and the Man, the fortnightly official publication of the National Rifle Association (NRA) of America, runs just 19 pages and includes 16 advertisements. The ads include familiar products, such as bore cleaning paste, shooting gallery targets, reloading tools, and .22 caliber cartridges. Gun industry household names (like DuPont, Remington, and Hoppe’s) sell their powders, firearms, and solvents; and books are offered for sale by Edward C. McKay of Cleveland, Ohio. On the inside front cover – prized magazine advertising real estate – a half page ad placed by The Peters Cartridge Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, touts the ‘exclusive and superior features’ of Peters shotgun shells. The ad highlights the success of W.H Heer of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and Woolfolk Henderson of Lexington, Kentucky, the amateur trapshooters with the highest averages in 1917. In fact, it was the 6th time in the past eight years that highest amateur honors were won with Peters shells. The back cover of the issue has four advertisements, the largest of which is a half-page ad placed by Colt’s Patent Firearms Mfg. Co. of Hartford, Connecticut. Drawings of soldiers carrying M1911 auto-pistols, one in a U.S. Navy uniform and one in an Army uniform, bookend the ad’s large font declaration of Colt Firearms to be ‘Ready for Duty.’ The smaller ad copy in the right column elaborates: On the Battlefield – In the Preservation of Law and Order – The Protection of Home and Country – Whenever and wherever armies or individuals

10 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane have to enforce right with might – COLT’S FIREARMS have been creating, building and maintaining a reputation for merit, efficiency and reliability that has resulted in a position of unquestioned superiority. The ad concludes with the assertion: ‘You make no mistake when you follow the Government’s example and adopt COLT’S for YOUR Firearm needs.’ Examining this gun magazine 100 years later highlights some similarities and many differences. It remains the official journal of the NRA, though it was renamed The American Rifleman in 1923 and is now published monthly. It continues to have almost as many advertisements as pages, but it has swollen to 118 pages with 75 advertisements in the January 2017 issue. The American Rifleman continues to include ads for guns, ammunition, reloading equipment, and targets. Colt Firearms returns with its ad for the Combat Unit Rail Gun, a modern updating of its historic Government Model .45 Auto M1911 service pistol. Remington does not have an ad in this particular issue, but other brandname gun manufacturers do, including Browning, Heckler & Koch, Sig Sauer, Sturm, Ruger & Co., Savage, Walther, and Smith & Wesson. One of the biggest changes from 1918 to 2017, and the focus of this chapter, is in the ways companies try to motivate consumers to buy guns and related accessories. While the 1918 Colt Firearms ad includes a brief reference to ‘The Protection of Home,’ the January 2017 issue is full of advertisements for products specifically designed and sold for personal protection, especially through concealed carry. In an advertisement that covers the entire back page, the M&P Shield semi-auto pistol from Smith & Wesson is described as ‘slim, concealable and powerful,’ making it ‘comfortable to carry’ and ‘comfortable to shoot.’ Another full page ad in the same issue again shows the M&P Shield, this time equipped with a combination laser and flashlight to assist with target acquisition. Manufactured by Crimson Trace, a pioneer in selling laser sights in the civilian marketplace, the ‘Laserguard Pro offers the ultimate advantage in personal protection.’ The ad also includes a smaller picture of the M&P Shield in a holster specially designed to accommodate the gun with Crimson Trace’s aftermarket light/laser combo. This reminds us that carrying even a slim and concealable handgun requires some sort of holster. Enter BUGBite Holsters. Their full page ad shows a man resting on his right knee and pulling up the left pant leg on his jeans to expose a neoprene calf sleeve, like those worn by ailing athletes, above his white sneaker and ankle sock. But this particular calf sleeve, with built-in pockets to hold a small pistol and spare ammunition magazine, is actually a ‘new holster concept.’ As the ad copy asserts: ‘Revolutionizing what it means to carry a firearm in comfort and concealment.’ These impressionistic observations of the differences in ads placed in a 1918 issue of Arms and the Man and a 2017 issue of The American Rifleman are suggestive of broader changes taking place in American gun culture over the past century. After briefly reviewing the history of American gun culture, we discuss our analytical approach to studying gun culture through advertising and explain the specific data and methods employed here. Our analysis of this

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 11 advertising data documents the pattern of decline of Gun Culture 1.0 over the past 100 years and the ongoing rise of Gun Culture 2.0. We also identify the point at which the two centers of gravity in gun culture cross paths.

A brief history of and approach to studying changes in American gun culture As others have argued at great length, guns were part of the social reality of the United States well prior to its Declaration of Independence from the British crown and its Constitutional founding (Cramer, 2006; Winkler, 2011; Whitney, 2012). The reality of guns which began at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock continues in America today, confounding some critics of American gun culture. In 1970, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter (1970) published an influential essay in American Heritage Magazine called ‘America as a Gun Culture.’ In it, he lamented the uniqueness of the United States ‘as the only modern industrial urban nation that persists in maintaining a gun culture.’ In Hofstadter’s account, America’s gun culture is rooted in the reality of widespread, lawful possession of firearms by a large segment of the population. One reliable estimate of gun ownership in early America found guns in 50–73% of male estates and 6–38% of female estates. These rates compare favorably to other common items listed in male estates like swords or edged weapons (14% of inventories), Bibles (25%), or cash (30%) (Lindgren and Heather, 2002). Today, at least 40% of American households still probably have a gun or guns in them (Yamane, 2017a). Early on, a gun was a tool much like a shovel. According to historian Pamela Haag (2016, p. xii), ‘in the key years of its diffusion, and for many years thereafter, it was like a buckle or a pin, an unexceptional object of commerce.’ Today Oliver Winchester is a legendary name in the firearms industry, his namesake company having celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2016. But in Haag’s (2016, p. xiv) account, Winchester ‘went into the gun business the way his compatriots went into corsets or hammers.’ She continues, ‘In the Winchester company’s early ads, the gun comes across as closer to a plow than a culturally charged object, more on the tool side of the equation than the totem side’ (Haag, 2016, p. xvii). Over time, the uses and meanings of guns have changed; which is to say, gun culture has changed. ‘What began as a necessity of agriculture and the frontier,’ Hofstadter (1970) observes, ‘took hold as a sport and as an ingredient in the American imagination.’ Fraternal shooting clubs in major American cities like New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and San Francisco predated the NRA’s founding and promotion of long-range shooting competitions (Hummel, 1985; Gilmore, 1999). Hunting became not only a source of food, but a dominant form of recreation for many (Marks, 1991). Receiving a ‘real’ rifle came to be a rite of passage from boyhood into manhood (Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011). And the attachment to guns was soon routinely expressed in

12 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane popular culture, from Ernest Hemingway’s novels to High Noon with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. These examples highlight the diversity of American gun culture. Indeed, some go as far as to say that there is no such thing as gun culture (in the singular), but only gun cultures (plural). In her important book, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures, Abigail Kohn (2004, p. 4) defines a gun culture as ‘one that uses a common language about guns and shares a set of signs and symbols pertaining to guns in everyday life.’ Kohn observes several such cultures in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 20th century: those who own guns because they like them and enjoy shooting them for sport, those who hunt, and those who have them for self and home defense. Among the sport shooters are a subgroup who are very involved in an organization called the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS). SASS sponsors ‘cowboy action shooting’ matches, which draw heavily on realities and myths of frontier life in the 19th century. The participants dress in period garb (Old West or Victorian) and shoot courses of fire using the kinds of firearms available at the time: single-action revolvers, pistol caliber lever-action rifles, and side-by-side (double-barreled) shot guns. As noted in our introduction, while recognizing the existence of various subcultures of guns in America, this chapter focuses on the core of center of gravity of gun culture. What constitutes the core, has it shifted over time, and (if so) when did the shift take place? We hypothesize that there is indeed a center of gravity in U.S. gun culture, and that it has evolved over time from Gun Culture 1.0, the historic gun culture that Hofstadter described, to Gun Culture 2.0, America’s contemporary gun culture. There are a number of differences between Gun Culture 1.0 and Gun Culture 2.0, but most significantly, Gun Culture 1.0 was grounded in sport shooting and hunting, and Gun Culture 2.0 is centered on personal/family/home defense and concealed carry (Yamane, 2017b). We test our hypothesis using data drawn from gun advertising. Although not a perfect representation of gun culture, using advertising as one measure of culture has some distinct benefits. In The Gunning of America, Haag (2016) argues that the gun industry – companies like Winchester and Remington – manufactured not only firearms but American gun culture itself. Although this goes too far in our view, it does highlight the fact that, as with many cultures, gun culture has a material dimension based in humanly fabricated products and these products circulate as commodities in the consumer marketplace. A major way in which people participate in gun culture is through consumption of these products. Understanding the production and distribution of this material culture requires examining what the sociologist of culture Wendy Griswold (2012, p. 73) calls the ‘complex apparatus which is interposed between cultural creators and consumers.’ According to Griswold (2012, p. 73), ‘This apparatus includes facilities for production and distribution; marketing techniques such as advertising, co-opting mass media, or targeting; and the creation of situations that bring potential cultural consumers in contact with cultural objects.’ Of the

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 13 various aspects of the cultural apparatus Griswold highlights, advertising provides one of the most consistent sources of data over a long period of time. Her overreach on business and the making of American gun culture notwithstanding, Haag is exactly correct in observing the parallel between the rise of consumer capitalism in the 20th century and the gun industry’s embrace of mass advertising. In the marketplace of commodities, ‘the gun was no exception to the business trends of the day in a new consumer culture, whether the product was soap or a rifle’ (Haag, 2016, p. xviii; see also Marchand, 1986; Lears, 1995). We are not the first to conduct content analysis of gun magazines or advertising in gun-related magazines. Philip Lamy (1992) analyzed eight years of Soldier of Fortune magazine (1983–1990) to document the presence of apocalyptic millennialism in the text, and Elizabeth Hirschman (2003) examined the expression of the core American value of rugged individualism in the editorial content and advertising in nine different magazines for one year, including Guns & Ammo and Rifleshooter.1 Although interesting, these studies examine how wider cultural values and beliefs get expressed in gun magazines as opposed to what themes are internal to gun culture itself. James Jacobs and Domingo Villaronga (2004) begin to fill this gap by providing a ‘map’ of American gun culture by examining the overall focus, editorial content, and advertising for 77 different gun magazines they identified in 2001 and 2002. Broadly speaking, they identify 39% of magazines as focusing on hunting, 18% on sport shooting, and 8% on military and law enforcement. Nine percent are trade publications and 26% are what they called general interest magazines, like The American Rifleman and Guns & Ammo.2 Although the most comprehensive in terms of the number and different types of magazines covered, Jacobs and Villaronga’s study is cross-sectional and gives equal weight to magazines with vastly different levels of circulation, creating a static and distorted map of gun culture. The article that most directly inspired the research presented in this chapter examined firearms advertisements in all 27 currently publishing, ad-accepting magazines listed in the ‘guns and shooting’ category in the 2002 edition of Bacon’s Magazine Directory. Elizabeth Saylor, Katherine Vittes and Susan Sorenson (2004) identified all advertisements for guns placed by firearms manufacturers in a single 2002 issue of each of the 27 magazines and used a systematic content analysis coding protocol to identify the themes depicted in those advertisements. Considering just the dominant overall theme in each ad, the most common attributes of firearms used to sell the products were ‘attributes of the gun’ (38.1%), ‘hunting/outdoors’ (20.4%), ‘patriotism’ (15.0%), and ‘combat/military’ (7.1%). ‘Self-protection’ (2.7%) is the 11th most common theme of the 14 themes coded. Despite its virtues, this article misrepresents the core of American gun culture by giving equal weight to the advertisements in magazines that target smaller, more particular market niches – such as Accurate Rifle (circulation in 2001 of 8,000) and Shotgun Sports (2001 circulation 15,500) – and magazines that have broader circulations by virtue of their more general interest – such as Guns & Ammo (2001 circulation 607,971) and The American

14 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane Rifleman (2001 circulation 1,366,073). In addition, like Jacobs and Villaronga’s (2004) work, Saylor, Vittes and Sorenson (2004) also cannot speak to changes in gun advertising over time. We go beyond these other more empirically limited studies by systematically analyzing the content of gun advertising in The American Rifleman magazine over the past century, from 1918 to 2017. In the following section we describe our data and methods at some length.

Data and methods This study analyzes advertising in the oldest and largest circulation general interest gun magazine in the United States: The American Rifleman. The magazine has been continuously published since 1885, as The Rifle until 1888, Shooting and Fishing to 1906, and Arms and the Man to 1923. In 1916, then-owner and former NRA president James A. Drain sold Arms and the Man to the NRA for $1. It has been published by the NRA since then, and given as a membership benefit since the 1920s, driving its circulation ever upward (Serven, 1967; Hardy, 2012; Rajala, 2012).3 Among those magazines that submit to audits by the Alliance for Audited media, The American Rifleman’s circulation of 2,056,368 ranks first in the ‘Fishing & Hunting’ category, doubling the circulation of the popular outdoor magazine Field & Stream (1,005,811) and dwarfing the next highest circulation general interest gun magazine, Guns & Ammo (377,584). Considering consumer magazines as a whole, The American Rifleman has a smaller circulation than Sports Illustrated (2,759,243) and ESPN The Magazine (2,137,290) but a larger circulation than Golf (1,412,093) or Car and Driver (1,207,714).4 Just as America’s sporting culture cannot be reduced to what appears in and who subscribes to Sports Illustrated, so too is American gun culture not reducible to The American Rifleman and its subscribers. The same can be said for the publisher of The Rifleman – the National Rifle Association. Although it is the most prominent association of gun owners, only a small proportion of the 60–70 million gun owners in the U.S. today are members of the NRA. The NRA itself has claimed over 5 million members, though some analysts maintain the number is closer to 4 million. That said, in an interesting recent survey, the Pew Research Center found that nearly one in five gun owners (19%) claim membership in the NRA (Parker et al., 2017), suggesting the possibility of a strong sense of affiliation among gun owners with the NRA even when they do not send in annual dues. Because of its official journal status and broad audience, The American Rifleman must be inclusive of all aspects of gun culture in its editorial content and advertising. Therefore, analyzing the content of advertising in this magazine provides a conservative test of our hypothesis about changes in American gun culture overall.5

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 15 Sampling

The sample of advertisements analyzed in this study comes from a single randomly selected issue of The American Rifleman for each of the 100 years from 1918 through 2017. We used a random number generator set from 1 (January) to 12 (December) to determine which of the 12 monthly issues to examine for each year. We then acquired the specified issues either from the first author’s collection (for more recent issues) or purchased them through eBay (for older issues). To be included in the sample, an advertisement had to meet three main criteria. First, the ad had to be at least one-quarter of a page in size. Second, the ad had to be placed by the manufacturer, licensed dealer, or importer of the product (e.g., Firearms International Corporation, Remington, Charter Arms). Ads placed by comprehensive sporting goods stores (e.g., Gander Mountain, Warhsal’s Sporting Goods, Hudson Sporting Goods) or gun stores (Midway USA, Brownell’s, United Arms Company) were not coded unless the store was selling their own brand of product. These store advertisements tended to be too extensive and comprehensive in the number and type of products being sold to make coding them reliable and sensible. Third, the ad had to be for firearms (handguns, rifles, shotguns, or a variety of gun types), ammunition (but not separate parts of ammunition or reloading equipment), gun accessories (products designed to be attached to or affect the utility of a firearm in some way), or some combination of these products. As described in this chapter’s introduction, firearms themselves are just one of many commodities circulating within gun culture.6 These inclusion criteria resulted in a total of 1,708 advertisements from 100 issues of The American Rifleman.

Coding

Adapting the work of Saylor, Vittes and Sorenson (2004), our content analysis began with nine themes: technical superiority, hunting, collecting, military, law enforcement, sport/recreation, tactical, personal protection/ self-defense/home or family defense, and concealed carry. After dropping advertisements that had none of these nine themes, we were left with 1,456 advertisements. Because our interest in this chapter is in examining the shift from Gun Culture 1.0 to Gun Culture 2.0, we focus here on just four of these themes, described in Table 1.1. Of these four themes, hunting and sport shooting are reflective of the older Gun Culture 1.0; and personal protection/self-defense/ home or family defense, and concealed carry are reflective of the newer Gun Culture 2.0. Unlike Saylor, Vittes, and Sorenson who coded the ‘main’ theme of an advertisement, we coded all themes present in each advertisement as many reflected multiple themes. Hunting and sport shooting are often found together, though are not identical. Likewise, many products coded for

16 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane Table 1.1 Gun Magazine Advertisement Coding Scheme CODE

CODE DEFINITION

Hunting

Product is associated with hunting, through images (e.g., owner in hunting-related camo, animals in crosshairs) or text (e.g., ‘small game’) Product is promoted for informal recreational shooting (except hunting), or linked to any of the various traditional (precision rifle, clay target shooting) or action shooting sports (3-gun, USPSA, IPSC, IDPA, Olympic shooting, etc.), through images (e.g., a shot timer, clay pigeons) or text (e.g., ‘competition,’ ‘plinking’). Product is portrayed as an effective and/or important means of home, family, and/or self-defense; through images (e.g., confronting an assailant in a parking lot or alley, hiding behind bed with gun) or text (e.g., ‘engineered to defend,’ ‘comfort runs in our family, so you can protect yours’). Product is portrayed as designed to facilitate the carrying of a concealed firearm, through images (e.g., an inside the waistband holster) or text (e.g., ‘IWB,’ ‘carry more comfortably’).

Sport/Recreation

Personal Protection/ Self-Defense/Home or Family Defense

Concealed Carry

concealed carry are also coded for personal protection/self-defense, but they too are distinct categories. Extensive tests were undertaken to ensure that researchers applied the coding scheme identically. Krippendorf’s α (alpha) was used to assess intercoder reliability. According to Krippendorf (2013), it is customary to require α ≥ .800 to conclude that the coding scheme and instructions are reliable.7 By the fourth round of coding, each specific attribute coded had Krippendorf’s α > 0.80, and all attributes collectively had α = 0.87. At that point, trained researchers coded advertisements independently, with the lead investigator spot-checking the results. Analysis

Later issues of The American Rifleman contain more advertisements than earlier issues. The average number of ads for the last five years (2013–2017) is 32.6 per issue, while the average number for the first five years (1918–1922) is 4.8 per issue. Therefore, we normalize our results for each individual year. Rather than giving each advertisement equal weight and calculating the percentage of advertisements in each issue that reflect a particular theme, we normalize the advertising content by looking at the proportion of all coded advertising space as the denominator. We do this by recording and adding together the size of each ad that meets our selection criteria for each issue (two, full, half, third, or quarter

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 17 page). The total coded advertising space ranges from 2.0 pages in February 1918 to 26.82 pages in October 2017. (The general trend is upward, but there are anomalies along the way, like the 22.16 pages of advertising coded in October 1936 and 4.33 pages in May 1999.) We then multiply the presence of each coding theme in each advertisement by the size of the ad. For example, a half page ad for a hunting rifle is 0.5, a one-third page ad for a concealed-carry holster is 0.33, and so on. Combing those products for each advertisement in each issue then dividing them by the total coded advertising space produces the percentage of total advertising space with that particular attribute. For example, 2.5 advertising pages in the October 1920 issue included hunting as a theme, out of 5.0 total advertising pages coded in that issue. So, 50% of all coded advertising space in that issue of The American Rifleman included hunting as a theme. By contrast, 9.25 advertising pages in the October 2010 issue had the hunting theme, out of 28.08 total coded advertising pages, for a 33% proportion of all coded advertising space in that issue. This procedure not only controls for the increasing number of advertisements over time, but also captures the reality that a full-page advertisement matters more than a half-, third-, or quarter-page advertisement.

Results Examining Gun Culture 1.0 themes of hunting and sport/recreational shooting first, we see that these themes are present throughout the 100 years of advertising in The American Rifleman we analyzed. However, the relative proportion of all advertising space coded that reflected these themes declined by 2017. The two themes did show different patterns over the century. The black trend line in Figure 1.1 shows the pattern for hunting. Hunting as a theme in gun advertising increased through the 1960s, and only then began to decline quite precipitously in the most recent decade. This increase in the presence of the hunting theme in The American Rifleman through the 1960s is reflective of the increasing identification of hunting with the nuclear family – particularly socialization of sons by their fathers through hunting (Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011) – and the strong interest in outdoor recreation more generally during this time period, including fishing, visiting National Parks, and RV camping (Wright, Rossi and Daly, 1983, pp. 53–55; Pergams and Zaradic, 2008). But even as these outdoor recreation activities continued to grow through the 1970s, the representation of hunting in gun advertising began declining, signaling a shift in the core of gun culture away from hunting. It is important to consider that the National Rifle Association introduced a magazine dedicated to hunters, American Hunter, in 1973. It is possible that part of the decline in hunting-themed advertisements in The American Rifleman is due to advertisers shifting hunting ads to American Hunter. The specific data points (the jagged line in Figure 1.1) do not strongly support this alternative hypothesis. The proportion of total coded advertising space with the hunting theme was 38.6% in 1972, then jumped up to 46.1% in 1973 – the year American Hunter

18 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane

Figure 1.1 Presence of Hunting Theme as Percentage of Total Coded Advertising Space, The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

debuted. It jumped again to 57.4% in 1974. Although the hunting theme dropped precipitously to 24.9% in 1975, it rebounded dramatically to 75.8% in 1976. These fluctuations also remind us of the importance of looking at the overall trend (in black), and remembering that these trend lines only capture part of all of the change (e.g., in Figure 1.1, R-square = 0.55). In Figure 1.2, we see a different pattern initially for the sport and recreational shooting theme compared to the hunting theme, with advertisements drawing on this theme declining steadily through the period studied. The contrast is especially evident in the middle decades of the 20th century (1948– 1968) when hunting was peaking as an advertising theme – essentially displacing part of the dominant sport and recreational shooting theme. That said, sport and recreational shooting continued to be an important part of American gun culture even as it declined as a proportion of advertising we coded. Taken together, hunting and sport and recreational shooting accounted for the majority of advertising space coded through the end of the 20th century, even as the overall pattern for both from the 1970s forward is one of decline. As noted in the introduction, home defense was a theme in some gun advertising even in 1918. But ads drawing on any of the themes in the broad category of personal protection/self-/home or family defense were exceptional for most of the 20th century. As shown in Figure 1.3, Gun Culture 2.0 began

Figure 1.2 Presence of Sport/Recreational Shooting Theme as Percentage of Total Coded Advertising Space, The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

Figure 1.3 Presence of Personal Protection/Self-Defense/Home or Family Defense Theme as Percentage of Total Coded Advertising Space, The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

20 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane to gain strength in the 1970s, indicated by the trendline for personal protection/defense edging upward from that point forward. The social turbulence of the 1960s and the rising fear of crime in the 1970s certainly stimulated interest in armed self-defense. This interest was reflected, for example, in the establishment of the first civilian gun training school by Col. Jeff Cooper at Gunsite Ranch in 1976 (Gibson, 1994). It was made still more concrete in the movement for liberalization of concealed-carry laws beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Patrick, 2009). Figure 1.4 shows the trend in advertising drawing on the concealed-carry theme and reveals a pattern similar to that of personal protection/defense, but with a delayed onset and steeper increase in the trend. Although Florida did not create ‘shall-issue’ concealed carry in 1987, it did open the floodgates for a massive expansion in the number of states with liberalized concealed-carry laws. By 1990, a dozen states had laws favoring the right to carry concealed weapons by ordinary citizens (Cramer and Kopel, 1994), and over the next six years, that number more than doubled as another 16 states passed shall-issue laws. This dramatic liberalization of concealed-carry laws has led to a growing number of Americans with concealed-carry permits (Lott, 2017). As Yamane (2018) argues at length, these gun carriers are hungry consumers of commodities – guns,

Figure 1.4 Presence of Concealed-Carry Theme as percentage of Total Coded Advertising Space, The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 21 holsters, clothing, and bags – that promise to address the challenges of carrying a sufficiently lethal weapon in public in a manner that is safe, accessible, comfortable, and concealed. Advertisements like the previously discussed BUGBite Holster seek to tap into this burgeoning market, at the same time they also foster the market for concealed-carry products. To return to the questions posed at the outset, then, has the core of American gun culture shifted from hunting and sport shooting to concealed carry and self-, home, and family defense? As measured through gun advertising, it is safe to conclude yes. Gun Culture 1.0 themes are found in a declining proportion of advertisements in The American Rifleman over the past 100 years, and Gun Culture 2.0 themes are increasing. Although their trajectories are converging, have Gun Culture 2.0 themes overtaken Gun Culture 1.0 themes in advertising? To begin to answer this question, we combined the proportion of ads with the hunting and sport/ recreational shooting themes, and the proportion of ads with the concealed carry and self-, home, and family defense themes, and plotted those two trends together on the same graph. Figure 1.5 shows the convergence of the trend lines for these two themes from the 1970s forward, their meeting in 2014, and divergence thereafter, with Gun Culture 2.0 themes superseding

Figure 1.5 Change in Hunting and Sport/Recreational Shooting Compared to Personal Protection/Self-Defense and Concealed Carry as Percentage of Total Coded Advertising Space, The American Rifleman, 1918–2017

22 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane Gun Culture 1.0 themes. Looking at the underlying data, in 2014, 45.3% of all advertising space coded reflected Gun Culture 2.0 themes, while only 15.9% reflected Gun Culture 1.0 themes. Although hunting and sport/ recreational shooting themes rebounded to 28.6% of all advertising space in 2017, personal protection/defense and concealed carry remained higher, with 46% of all advertising space reflecting these themes.

Conclusion This systematic content analysis of gun advertising in Arms and the Man/The American Rifleman has two primary aims. First, to expand and improve studies of gun-related media, specifically advertising. Second, to offer preliminary documentation of a shift in the core emphasis of U.S. gun culture from hunting and recreational shooting to armed self-defense. The data show that the predominance of Gun Culture 1.0 themes in advertising persists through the 1970s and into the 1980s, when the center of gravity of gun culture begins to shift decisively toward the Gun Culture 2.0 themes of personal protection/defense and concealed carry. This trend continues through the 1990s and 2000s, with the two emphases crossing-over in just the past few years. Gun Culture 2.0 is now America’s dominant and still expanding core gun culture today. As a first take on this material, our study is not without shortcomings. By identifying them here, we hope to encourage other interested scholars to expand and improve on our work. First, we use the content of gun advertising as an indicator of cultural change over time. We cannot answer the question of whether the change in the content of advertising we observe merely reflects or also constructs more fundamental social changes. Indeed, the question of whether advertising is a ‘mirror’ reflecting social practices or a ‘mold’ influencing them is one that advertising scholars continue to confront with no obvious answers (Eisend, 2010). The most likely answer is that the causal arrow is two-headed and the process is iterative, but to conclude this with certainty requires an independent measure of social change. A second and related limitation of this work is that a comprehensive understanding of culture – including advertising – requires understanding not only the production or ‘encoding’ of culture as analyzed here. It also requires understanding the reception or ‘decoding’ of culture (Hall, 1980). Although it is not a reception study, per se, Bernard Harcourt’s (2006) Language of the Gun explores the ways in which youths detained at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections’ Catalina Mountain School assign meanings to guns. As part of his interviews, Harcourt showed interviewees pictures of guns to elicit not just their views but also their emotional reactions. This methodology could be applied in broader studies of gun advertising to assess the extent to which the encoding and decoding of meanings articulate. Third, we argue that there is a core of U.S. gun culture that has been changing over time, as reflected, in part, in advertising placed in a core cultural organ of gun culture. An alternative perspective is that gun culture has simply

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 23 become more differentiated and specialized, as have many cultural activities. To be sure, from the beginning U.S. gun culture has been differentiated. Even in the early 20th century, at the beginning of our period of study, self-defense was part of gun culture alongside hunting, recreational shooting, and collecting. It was simply a smaller, less central part of gun culture than it is today, in the same way that hunting and recreational shooting remain a part of gun culture today, although smaller and less central than before. Here ‘Gun Culture 2.0’ is not merely a catchy phrase, but intentionally draws on the language of ‘versions’ or ‘generations’ of the World Wide Web shifting from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 (and beyond). Just as Web 2.0 grew out of, but did not simply replace, Web 1.0, Gun Culture 2.0 developed out of and added new elements to Gun Culture 1.0. Some individuals raised in Gun Culture 1.0 became leading figures in the development of Gun Culture 2.0, while others only partially transitioned. Those who have begun to move out of the historic gun culture but have not yet firmly settled into contemporary gun culture can be thought of as Gun Culture Version 1.2, 1.6, etc., depending on how far they have transitioned. And, of course, there are some who have remained steadfastly at home in Gun Culture 1.0. The newer gun culture even has a name for these throwbacks to the old gun culture: ‘Fudds,’ after the Looney Tunes cartoon character Elmer Fudd, the hapless hunter who can never bag his prey, Bugs Bunny. Highlighting the dynamism of gun culture, efforts are being made to combine the historic interest in shooting sports with the contemporary interest in personal protection and concealed carry in competitions sponsored by organizations like the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA). In IDPA events, competitors shoot courses of fire designed to replicate possible defensive shooting situations, like home invasions or parking lot robberies. Fourth, more subtle, qualitative analyses of these changing themes would add flesh to the skeleton of trend data we have constructed here. For example, Jennifer Carlson (2015), William Gibson (1994), and Angela Stroud (2016) all highlight the importance of class, race, and/or gender dynamics in contemporary gun culture. The existing literature on images of race and gender in advertising (Coltrane and Messineo, 2000), therefore, could be profitably applied to gun advertising. In fact, the senior author of this paper is currently applying Erving Goffman’s (1979) gender advertisements perspective to this same dataset of gun advertisements to assess the extent to which gender displays in advertising have changed over the past 100 years (cf. Belknap and Leonard, 1991; Kang, 1997). Finally, it is important to recognize that being a part of gun culture is not simply about holding a particular set of beliefs. According to Stebbins (2001, p. 54), ‘Serious leisure participants typically become members of a vast social world, a complex mosaic of groups, events, networks, organizations, and social relationships.’ The same is true for participants in both recreational and self-defense gun culture. America is not just a ‘Gun Show Nation,’ to use Burbick’s (2007) famous phrase; it is a nation of gun clubs, training classes, shooting events, network meetups, gun collectors and shooters associations. Kohn (2004) approaches gun culture

24 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane this way in Shooters, but more solidly ethnographic work like hers is necessary. Going forward, further attention should be paid especially to the social organization of armed citizenship and concealed carry, building on Carlson’s (2015) fine work, as well as the complex personal dynamics of becoming a gun carrier, following in Stroud’s (2016) and Shapira and Simon’s (2018) footsteps. As Yamane (2017b) has argued, social institutions – including the legal system, economy, and technology – shape American gun culture. These institutions require greater attention, as well. In the larger project of which this chapter is a part, Yamane applies this perspective to Gun Culture 2.0. For example, the passage of shall-issue concealed-carry laws facilitate the widespread practice of legally carrying guns in public. The growing practice of concealed carry also creates a number of new challenges for the individuals who do so, as well as for the broader social worlds (other people, spaces, places) in which they do so. The developing culture of armed citizenship addresses these challenges both through the ‘hardware’ of material culture (like guns, accessories, and other products) and the ‘software’ of ways of thinking, legal frameworks, and the development of relevant abilities. Gun studies scholars have not adequately studied these aspects of Gun Culture 2.0 to date.

Notes 1 Although not a content analysis, Blair and Hyatt (1995) conducted an experimental study to examine whether exposure to gun advertising affects gun-related attitudes. 2 There are also errors in the article which cast some doubt on its findings. Although they claim in the text to have identified 84 U.S. gun magazines (Jacobs and Villaronga, 2004, p. 136), the Appendix lists only 77 (Jacobs and Villaronga, 2004, pp. 151–53). Also, in the text they claim there are 16 sport shooting magazines, including Shooting Times, but in the Appendix they list only 14 sport shooting magazines not including Shooting Times, which is instead listed under the trade category. In fact, Shooting Times is a general interest gun magazine. Last, the December 2001 issue of Concealed Carry Handguns magazine is quoted in the text under the general interest category (Jacobs and Villaronga, 2004, p. 146) but is not included in any of the categories in the Appendix. 3 Today, NRA members can opt to receive American Hunter (published since 1973, current circulation 931,314) or America’s First Freedom (published since the 1990s, current circulation 651,966) instead of The American Rifleman. 4 Circulation data is the Alliance for Audited Media average for the six months ended 30 June 2017. 5 Our confidence that what is portrayed in American Rifleman advertising reflects broader trends, and is not unduly affected by its status as an official NRA journal, is reinforced by an ongoing related analysis of Guns magazine from 1955 to 2018 which shows the same pattern of change as we report here (Yamane, Ivory and Yamane, in progress). 6 Without ammunition, for example, a gun is just a paperweight. And the increasing number of advertisements for holsters is among the strongest indicators of the increasing centrality of self-defense in gun culture (Yamane, 2018). 7 We used the free reliability calculator, ReCal3: Reliability for 3+ Coders, on Deen Freelon’s web page: http://dfreelon.org/utils/recalfront/recal3/. See Yamane, Ivory and Yamane (in progress) for more details on the tests for inter-coder reliability.

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 25

References Belknap, P. and Leonard, W.M. (1991) “A conceptual replication and extension of Erving Goffman’s study of gender advertisements.” Sex Roles, 25, pp. 103–118. Blair, M.E. and Hyatt, E.M. (1995) “The marketing of guns to women: factors influencing gun-related attitudes and gun ownership by women.” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 14(1), pp. 117–127. Burbick, J. (2007) Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy. New York: New Press. Carlson, J. (2015) Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline. New York: Oxford University Press. Coltrane, S. and Messineo, M. (2000) “The perpetuation of subtle prejudice: race and gender imagery in 1990s television advertising.” Sex Roles, 42(5–6), pp. 363–389. Cramer, C.E. (2006) Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc. Cramer, C.E. and Kopel, D.B. (1994) “”Shall issue”: the new wave of concealed handgun permit laws.” Tennessee Law Review, 62, pp. 679–757. Eisend, M. (2010) “A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences, 38(4), pp. 418–440. Gibson, J.W. (1994) Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America. New York: Hill & Wang. Gilmore, R.S. (1999) “‘Another branch of manly sport’: American rifle games, 18401900.” In: Dizard, J.E., Muth, R.M. and Andrews, S.P. (Eds.), Guns in America: A Reader. New York: NYU Press, pp. 105–121. Goffman, E. (1979) Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Griswold, W. (2012) Cultures and Societies in a Changing World. 4th edn. Los Angeles: Sage. Haag, P. (2016) The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books. Hall, S. (1980) “Encoding/decoding.” In: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128–138. Harcourt, B.E. (2006) Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hardy, D.T. (2012) “American Rifleman.” In: Carter, G.L. (Ed.), Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law. 2nd edn. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Hirschman, E.C. (2003) “Men, dogs, guns, and cars: the semiotics of rugged individualism.” Journal of Advertising, 32(1), pp. 9–22. Hofstadter, R. (1970) “America as a gun culture.” American Heritage, 21(6) [online]. Available at: www.americanheritage.com/content/america-gun-culture (Accessed: 23 March 2015). Hummel, R. (1985) “Anatomy of a wargame: target shooting in three cultures.” Journal of Sport Behavior, 8(3), pp. 131–143. Jacobs, J.B. and Villaronga, D. (2004) “Mapping the U.S. gun culture: a content analysis of Gun Magazines.” Journal on Firearms and Public Policy, 16, pp. 135–155. Kang, M.E. (1997) “The portrayal of women’s images in magazine advertisements: Goffman’s gender analysis revisited.” Sex Roles, 37(11–12), pp. 979–993.

26 Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane Kohn, A.A. (2004) Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press. Krippendorff, K. (2013) Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lamy, P. (1992) “Millennialism in the mass media: the case of ‘soldier of fortune’ magazine.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(4), pp. 408–424. Lears, T.J.J. (1995) Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books. Lindgren, J. and Heather, J.L. (2002) “Counting guns in early America.” William & Mary Law Review, 43(5), pp. 1777–1842. Littlefield, J. and Ozanne, J.L. (2011) “Socialization into consumer culture: hunters learning to be men.” Consumption Markets & Culture, 14(4), pp. 333–360. Lott, J.R. (2017) “Concealed carry permit holders across the United States: 2017” [online]. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3004915 (Accessed: 26 April 2018). Marchand, R. (1986) Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marks, S.A. (1991) Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parker, K., Horowitz, J.M., Igielnik, R., Oliphant, B. and Brown, A. (2017) America’s Complex Relationship with Guns [Online]. Available at: www.pewsocialtrends.org/ 2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/ (Accessed: 29 May 2018). Patrick, B.A. (2009) Rise of the Anti-Media: In-Forming America’s Concealed Weapon Carry Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pergams, O.R.W. and Zaradic, P.A. (2008) “Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(7), pp. 2295–2300. Rajala, T. (2012) “Gun magazines.” In: Carter, G.L. (Ed.), Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law. Volume 2, 2nd edn. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 351–354. Saylor, E.A., Vittes, K.A. and Sorenson, S.B. (2004) “Firearm advertising: product depiction in consumer Gun Magazines.” Evaluation Review, 28(5), pp. 420–433. Serven, J.E. (1967) Americans and Their Guns. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books. Shapira, H. and Simon, S.J. (2018) “Learning to need a gun.” Qualitative Sociology [online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9374-2 (Accessed: 28 May 2018). Stebbins, R.A. (2001) “Serious leisure.” Society, 38(4), pp. 53–57. Stroud, A. (2016) Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Whitney, C.R. (2012) Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment. New York: Public Affairs. Winkler, A. (2011) Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. New York: W.W. Norton. Wright, J.D., Rossi, P.H. and Daly, K. (1983) Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Yamane, D. (2017a) Statistics on Gun Ownership in the United States – Updated and Collected Posts [Online]. Available at: https://gunculture2point0.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/ statistics-on-gun-ownership-in-the-united-states-updated-and-collected-posts/ (Accessed: 29 May 2018).

The rise of self-defense in gun advertising 27 Yamane, D. (2017b) “The sociology of U.S. gun culture.” Sociology Compass, 11(7) [Online]. Available at: 10.1111/soc4.12497 (Accessed: 31 May 2018). Yamane, D. (2018) “‘The first rule of gunfighting is have a gun’: technologies of concealed carry in Gun Culture 2.0.” In: Obert, J., Poe, A. and Sarat, A. (Eds.), The Lives of Guns. New York: Oxford University Press. Yamane, D., Ivory, S.L. and Yamane, P. (in progress) “Targeted advertising: Documenting the emergence of America’s new gun culture in Guns Magazine,” Unpublished working paper, Department of Sociology, Wake Forest University.

2

Semi-automatics for the people? The marketing of a new kind of man Peter Squires

He saw it in a window the mark of a new kind of man. He kinda liked the feeling, so shiny and smooth in his hand. The Eagles: ‘A Certain Kind of Fool’

Introduction The lyrics to Eagles’ song, ‘Certain Kind of Fool,’ from the band’s second album, Desperado, describe how a shiny new gun, enticingly displayed in a shop window, effectively created a new kind of man – the gunman, or perhaps outlaw – the ‘certain kind of fool’ of the song’s title. In similar fashion, the discussion in this paper explores an equivalent process; the way in which gun industry advertising sustains ‘gun culture’ and drives contemporary gun consumerism and, we might even add, sponsors a whole generation of fools. This paper develops a discussion, begun elsewhere, (Carlson, 2014; Squires, 2014) concerning the ‘empowerment effects’ of routine gun possession (Kleck, 1997, p. 218) and what might also be termed the psycho-social and cultural antecedents of widespread firearm ownership. More specifically, the paper takes up an argument recently developed by Haag (2016), that the gun culture is a product of the gun industry, notwithstanding the influence of a wide range of factors, including: the ‘Independence narrative’ (the ‘shot heard round the world’) and the Second Amendment; the ‘Southern’ culture of violence (Brown, 1975; Nisbett and Cohen, 1996); the twin imperatives of genocide and race control described by Dunbar-Ortiz (2018), and the particular significance of the Civil War in distributing firearms across the country and, most recently, the celebration of rugged western frontier masculinity. Despite all this, what we regard today as the ‘U.S. gun culture,’ and the men – largely men (Melzer, 2009) – who inhabit it, are very substantially a product of gun industry marketing itself. Taking a lead from Haag’s historical work, this chapter explores the ways in which gun industry advertising significantly reshaped the U.S. gun market during a period beginning in the mid-1980s through to the mid1990s. This period is vital in a number of ways: it saw a large number of U.S. federal and policing agencies upgrade their standard duty firearms from

Semi-automatics for the people? 29 revolvers to semi-automatic pistols; it saw a shift in the balance of production from revolvers to semi-automatic pistols and the gearing up of the civilian semi-automatic pistol market prior to the significant decline in U.S. firearm production (following a fall-off in sales) after 1995 (BATF, 2001/ 2002; Cook and Goss, 2014, p. 74); it coincided with an increasing deployment of feminist rhetoric to market ‘self-defence’ firearms to women (Bugg and Yang, 2004; Twine, 2013; Koeppel and Nobles, 2017) and it witnessed a devastating increase in drug and gang related violence, culminating in a peak year for U.S. firearm homicides – 1993 – and prompting a debate about the particular contribution of semi-automatic pistols to gun violence and homicide trends.1 Although the period largely predated the substantial increase in school and workplace mass shootings; it coincided with a rising tide of gun advocacy and political activism centred upon citizen self-defence and concealed-carry firearms. In effect, extending the argument, it might be argued that the new phase of firearm marketing connected with the gun advocacy politics leading to the ‘concealed-carry’ movement which was a precursor for the new ‘combat culture’ (the socalled ‘Gun Culture 2.0’: see Yamane, 2017) clearly anticipated in much semi-automatic pistol advertising, product testing and gun trade journalism. The engine, relentlessly driving this new culture, during the decade from 1985, was the gun industry’s quest for new sales in a crowded and saturated market in a country whose citizens already owned more guns than almost anywhere else in the world (Canada, 1995; Diaz, 1999). Judging by the advertising and product testimonials, weapon and ammunition manufacturers seemed in search of a Holy Grail known as ‘stopping power’ (Bruchey, 1979; Marshall and Sanow, 1992; Caruso, Jara and Swan, 1999). In turn, semiautomatic pistol advertising accented calibre, firepower, lethality, accuracy, magazine capacity and rapid target acquisition, that a new kind of customer – the self-defence, concealed-carry gun owner – might need to survive the dangerous city. The next step in the lethality stakes, another lifeline for the gun industry, was the upgrade to military-style assault weapons – another controversy (Diaz, 2013). Yet, just as it is something of a cliché to suggest that gun industry advertising ‘sells fear’ (Blair and Hyatt, 1995; Eldredge, 2013, thereby inducing citizens to purchase guns, the apocryphal queues that form at the gun stores following major instances of disorder speak to a certain truth in these claims.2 In fact, however, the gun industry sells far more than fear, it markets an attitude, a feeling for weaponized security, a kind of mental toughness, an affinity for firearms and a sense of the sovereign individual self that has sometimes been seen as the essential man of modern neo-liberalism (Foucault, 1977; Carlson, 2014) – a new kind of man. Yet this masculinity is founded upon a simple market contradiction, for just as I can purchase the latest and most lethal firepower to give me the edge in the combat zones for which the new weapons have been designed, so can everyone else – ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ alike. Following a brief discussion of Haag’s argument, the paper turns to consider the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s when the gun industry and

30 Peter Squires its marketing transitioned to semi-automatic pistols. Next, we reflect upon some of the consequences of this, before, in the final sections of the paper, turning to an analysis of the imagery, advertising copy and gun industry journalism that shaped the new gun culture and its politics and, arguably, helped bring it all into being. As Saylor, Vittes and Sorenson (2004) have noted, there is relatively little research exploring firearm advertising, still less reflecting upon the messages inherent in the advertising or the consequences of these promotional firearm discourses. In this regard, Haag’s work represents a significant and useful departure. In the present paper, an attempt is made to nudge that discussion a further step, employing her insights in order to better understand contemporary gun cultural affinities, premised as they are upon semi-automatic weaponry and combat preparedness.

Reflections and contexts In this discussion I’m returning to some of the first themes and issues that originally animated my interest in firearms and society. These were always for me, primarily sociological questions, rather than gun control or political questions; the criminological and political questions always came later. I described my Gun Culture or Gun Control? book, published in 2000, as a sociological text (Squires, 2000), but five years earlier I’d written an initial exploratory analysis: ‘Deadly Technology in the Post-Industrial Society’ (Squires, 1996) trying to get to grips with the ideas relating to the responsibilities, assumptions and social relations of mutual dangerousness seemingly associated with widespread civilian firearm ownership. Central aspects of this analysis concerned the conceptions of individuality, identity and autonomy, connected with the inevitable empowerment, or enhanced capacity that firearm carriage entailed. This kind of analysis should prompt little surprise, as firearms advocates have long been accustomed to referring to firearms as ‘tools of freedom.’ Furthermore, debating with Wayne La Pierre in March 2012, he had remarked how ‘the only free people to walk the earth, had been armed people.’ Elsewhere we are told, I think somewhat misleadingly, that ‘an armed society is a polite society.’ But the general point, that, certain characteristics, values or ‘ways of being’ might be associated with firearm ownership, and that firearm ownership was and still is underscored by certain essential values, remains true. I briefly returned to this theme in my last book (Squires, 2014), attempting to develop a broader appreciation of the multiplex power (social, psychological, physical) of the gun. As we have seen in response to recent terrorist outrages in the United Kingdom, after every heroic rescue by armed law enforcement, the redemptive power of the gun is vindicated. Addressing this very point, Kantola, Norocel and Repo (2011) develop an argument regarding ‘armed masculinity’ and redemption, as the good guys (the police) intervene to restore the order and security that the ‘bad guys’ (terrorists and criminals) have disturbed. However, this power issuing from the barrel of a gun transcends the nominally legal status of particular weapons. For as Smith has argued ‘those without access to . . . weapons

Semi-automatics for the people? 31 (the “unarmed”) are forced to cede a potentially very unequal power ratio’ to those in possession of firearms (Smith, 2006, p. 728). Other commentators refer to the ‘seductive transformation’ that a body, grasping and shooting a gun, undergoes (Springwood, 2007, p. 3) or to the ‘transformational qualities’ associated with this particular handheld technology (Overton, 2015; Squires, 2017) which, as Brey, argues, is a feature that most technologies share: an ability to extend the scope and capacity of individuals (Brey, 2017). At the very least, this is a technology that can extend our reach, as Carlson (2014) suggests, establishing a new kind of sovereignty in public space, echoing Foucault and ‘governing at a distance’ (Foucault, 1977). Policing scholars likewise point to the different ways in which armed and unarmed officers develop a different policing style; context is important too, but at the very least policing with a gun demands different policing tactics and protocols (Squires and Kennison, 2010; Hendy, 2014). As McCarthy concedes, ‘guns are empowering when possessed. . . guns permit their owners a sense of uniqueness and individuation. . . they are the ultimate extension of self’ (McCarthy, 2011, p. 321). That, of course, will be true ‘whether firearms are held legally or illegally. . . guns are guns’ (Smith, 2006, p. 728). Central to the argument developed here is the suggestion that such interpretations of armed empowerment are likely to be a primary consequence of the ways in which firearms have been marketed in the first place. In 2016 Patricia Haag published her erudite study entitled The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of the American Gun Culture, its central thesis being that the familiar, whether celebrated or castigated, the distinctly U.S. ‘gun culture,’ was a consequence of the marketing strategies adopted by the early firearm entrepreneurs who created the first mass markets for their products. Her core question centres upon how a ‘mundane item of commerce became invested with such ideological and cultural power’. She continues, ‘one answer to the question “Why do Americans love guns?” is, simply that we were invited to do so by those who made and sold them.. . . What was once needed had to be loved’ (Haag, 2016, pp. xviii, 250–251). There is no suggestion here that firearms were not a power in the land – employed to exterminate native peoples, appropriate their land and to reinforce the slave-owning economy – well before their mass production, something that Dunbar-Ortiz finds least acceptable in the similar revisionist histories of Haag and Michael Bellesiles (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2018, pp. 180–194). As Dunbar-Ortiz has more recently confirmed, the essential culpability of the gun industry here rests upon its continuing legitimation of righteous violence, the way in which its ‘relentless advertising, has normalised and domesticated its [lethal] product’ (DunbarOrtiz, 2018, p. 175).

Arming America or gunning America? Haag’s analysis opens up a series of questions pertaining to the development of a gun culture that were earlier addressed in the now rather discredited work of Michael Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000). Bellesiles

32 Peter Squires had argued, ‘America has not always been subject to a gun culture. It has not always been this way. . .. America’s gun culture is an invented tradition’ (2000, p. 13). Bellesiles based his case, in part, on some (some say flawed, some ‘selective’ and others deemed fraudulent: Katz, Gray and Ulrich, 2002; Lindgren, 2002) research on wills and household inventories which, he claimed, indicated firearms to be a relatively infrequent feature of colonial households. By way of contrast, Haag bases her case on the rather stronger ground provided by the promotional activities of leading firearm producers seeking to create the markets – the demand – upon which their ambitions for mass production would depend. While both authors acknowledge the significance of the American Civil War in fundamentally increasing the production and distribution of firearms (arguably, a function of all wars: Thayer, 1969; Louise, 1995; Small Arms Survey, 2002; Haag, 2016, p. 110). For Haag, the Civil War, just as it accelerated the weaponisation of American life, also exposed the commercial unreliability of military contracts during peacetime and the corresponding need to generate demand in order to seduce purchases from ‘otherwise indifferent customers who had little need for rifles as tools’ (2016, p. xviii). Haag contends that the marketing exploits of the firearm entrepreneurs help dismantle two foundational myths of the U.S. gun culture and the role of the American firearms industry within it. The first concerns the myth that, in the United States, guns ‘just sold themselves’ – in fact there was no ‘pristine demand unsullied by the need for promotion’ (2016, p. xv), and the second concerned the myth of ‘hidden hand’ of the free market, for ‘the creation, discovery, invention and reinvention of gun markets – the visible hand of the gun industrialist at work – was a recurrent, bedrock project of the gun business’ (2016, p. xiv). The seeming paradox, that the firearm which served as such an iconic totem of American individualism and frontier spirit was itself a product of mechanised mass production and carefully calculated marketing, became lost in the myths of time.3 For, just as vital as the mechanical invention of a mass-produced, repeating firearm, was the invention of a world in which it would be desired and then purchased in large numbers (Haag, 2016, p. 64). The firearms industry was an early pioneer of mass market advertising techniques, Henning and Witkowski (2013) have shown how firearms manufacturers drew upon a wide range of ‘expert testimonials,’ tales of heroic exploits or fears of robbery and home invasion, and boasts of quality, military endorsements or honours awarded in shooting competitions. They have noted how firearms historians have generally regarded such advertising as largely ephemeral and unimportant, overlooking their contribution to the wider gun culture. Developing this argument, Haag proceeds to show how gun culture, frontier masculinity and the very myth of the ‘Wild West’ should, more accurately, be seen as products of ‘the eastern corporate industrialism and [its] vanguard technologies’ (2016, p. 170). While it is now a commonplace that the ideology and imagery of the ‘Wild West’ was always a much mediated and fabricated reality produced by the fertile imaginations of the East, designed to serve the voracious appetites of the East (Slotkin, 1992; Wright, 2001) it served to install a populist psychology of a new

Semi-automatics for the people? 33 maverick, sovereign – armed – individualism and the myth of the gun man, which has persisted to the present day. This new identity drew upon and incorporated the attributes and characteristics of the new firearms; transforming, empowering and emboldening the man. Gun industry advertising drove this psychological transformation, perhaps even suggesting weaponisation as an aspect of the civilisation thesis; bringing precision, accuracy, order, resilience and thereby facilitating ‘a momentous step in a journey toward an emboldened individual shooter. . . a distinctly modern character’ (2016, p. 91). In some senses the analysis developing here draws upon some of Marcuse’s insights in One Dimensional Man (1964), where a ‘sweeping industrial rationality’ propels an increasingly competitive consumerism, shaping individual needs and aspirations around a flawed, irrational and ultimately unsustainable vision of the advanced industrial society. Such themes become increasingly explicit in the final section of the chapter, where the gun industry advertising copy for semiautomatic pistols is analysed. Here, the conception of an antagonistic armed and dangerous sovereign individual freedom, setting the freedoms of each and every one at odds with those of others, shatters the possibility of a more collective freedom. In Marcuse’s own words, these critical concepts, freedom and right, ‘share the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises’ (Marcuse, 1964, p. 19). Thus, the very perception that one needs a concealed firearm to walk around freely and safely represents the very antithesis of freedom. Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional society’ premised upon false needs (gun ownership) and contested individualities (the embattled individuality of the ‘Wild West’; Wright, 2001) also recalls Brown’s analysis of ‘waning sovereignty’ (Brown, 2010), the terminal throes of a failing liberal individualism, rather than its apotheosis. The specific allure of the firearm resided in the qualities that gun ownership could confer upon its user, this is a narrative still very evident, for instance, in criminal adolescent aspirations regarding guns (Harcourt, 2006; Pogrebin, Stretesky and Unnithan, 2012); in the stories of victimised classroom avengers (Klein, 2005); the ‘self-defence’ vignettes of contemporary firearm magazines (Stroud, 2012; Bird, 2014) and, above all, as we shall see later, in much of contemporary firearm advertising. As Agger and Luke (2008), have argued, picking up a gun to seek a violent vengeful redemption is as American as apple pie, and the storyline of almost every Hollywood western. As Haag notes, the core appeal of sovereign self-defence relies upon ‘good guys with guns’ where use of a firearm is invariably righteously motivated in marked contrast with the more typical ‘grubby, routine, domestic, impulsive and stupid’ firearm homicides which punctuate contemporary gun culture (Younge, 2016). In this way preferred forms of violence obscured the other ‘collateral’ violences (including suicides) endemic to the gun culture. This ideology of firearm use and possession enshrined an entire mass psychology of the gun replacing the functional – gun as tool – identification with a far more emotional bond where a gun in the hand trumped law (because law was often distant), order (because order was often unequal) and justice (because justice was often capricious and slow). Instead the gun offered the ‘capable’ and ‘righteous

34 Peter Squires man’4 an instant remedy and a solution of last resort to any perceived threats to the integrity of the self. These themes were reflected in the so called ‘predicament’ advertising of firearms during the later decades of the 19th century. Images showed characters frozen at the point of maximum risk: hunters trapped on a ledge by a grizzly bear, lone travellers confronted by outlaws or ‘savages.’ The scenes depicted a dilemma, inviting the viewer to confirm that the only and obvious response would be to draw one’s gun and shoot the aggressor. Here, the gun represented the difference between life and death, or hope in a hopeless situation. The emotional bond between man (or woman) and gun became fundamental. Firearm advertising has continued with these highly charged emotional contexts to the present day, even as early as 1907, beginning to court the potential female market (Haag, 2016, p. 323).5 Concluding her discussion of these themes, Haag noted how 20th-century firearm advertising had come to settle, above all else, upon the ‘emotional resonances’ of firearm ownership and use. Twentieth-century mass consumerism had shifted firearm advertising from ‘narrative’ (what firearms could do) to ‘lyric’ (how they made a gun owner feel) (2016, p. 332). This implied that advertising, appealing to the emotional over the rational, (337) had to cultivate these very values, inviting the would-be purchaser to thrill to the heft, power and quality of a firearm; feel its rugged and robust construction and imagine what it might do for them. Modern consumer advertising would still endorse the qualities and characteristics of different weapons, especially the ways in which each new generation of firearm was deemed to have surpassed its predecessor, but these meticulously engineered and ergonomic qualities would also be addressed to the psychological needs and emotional states cultivated in modern citizens. New firearms would offer much and generate high expectations to push the market incessantly forwards, each innovation and every augmentation in firepower promising an essential edge in a dangerous world. Formerly, the Colt revolver had been retroactively mythologized as the ‘equaliser’ or ‘peacemaker’; the Winchester repeating rifle guaranteed confidence and a rate of fire sufficient to make an army of every man; while the new pistols of the early 20th century promised the dubious virtue of allowing their owners to fire rapidly and ‘automatically (without thought)’ (Cited in Haag, 2016, p. 331). Effective self-defence derived from ‘speed over skill’ and ‘the ability to fire the first shot.’ Apparently, ‘no gun could be brought into action faster’ (Ibid., 331). As we shall see, firearm advertising would continue to carry and renew such claims throughout the 20th century, especially as one class of firearms replaced another.

Upgrading police weaponry: Loss leaders for the civilian market? From the mid-1980s, police departments across America underwent a firearms procurement upgrade switching from revolvers to semi-automatic pistols. Just as in earlier decades, such as during the thirteen years of alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s which drove the gangster era and prompted a police

Semi-automatics for the people? 35 firearms upgrade (Balko, 2014, p. 33), the rationale was always the same, criminal elements were acquiring superior weapons and were capable of ‘outgunning’ the police, (Diaz, 1999; McNab, 2009; Mihalek, 2014). The change itself, when it came, was pretty dramatic. Only in 1985, the Police Handgun Manual (Clede, 1985) devoted a final chapter to an examination of the competing merits of the revolver versus the semi-automatic pistol. The author equivocates that each had their advantages and disadvantages. Yet, within less than a decade, most major police departments had made the switch (Morrison, 2010). When more firepower was called for, it seemed, the semi-automatic had the edge (Clede, 1985, p. 114). The NYPD made the change in 1993, after months of testing and having reviewed the contrasting merits of different weapons, carefully negotiating a broadly shared public perception that that the guns might be ‘too dangerous in crowded urban settings’ and that the larger magazine capacities might encourage officers to fire more rounds than they might have with revolvers (Wolff, 1993). The NYPD Commissioner justified the decision to follow many other major cities – including Washington, Miami and Houston – by referencing the concerns of police patrol officers that they risked being ‘outgunned’ on the streets. Reiterating the power of effective advertising as well as Scharf and Binder’s (1983, p. 31) point about the symbolic reassurance provided by a ‘credible gun,’ the Commissioner noted ‘there is a psychological element . . . officers feel more secure [with a semi-automatic] and that cannot be discounted.’ (Wolff, 1993). Concluding his piece on the NYPD press conference, Wolff added his own spin to the police firearm upgrade. On the table, as the press conference closed, ‘the .38 revolver with its wood handle looked like a relic next to the sleek metal 9-millimeter models, the American-made Smith & Wesson, the German Sig Sauer and the Austrian-made Glock 19’ (Wolff, 1993). Whatever might be the merits of ‘sleekness’ in a law enforcement firearm, it is difficult to imagine that they would not exceed those of a ‘relic.’ The point underscores our overall argument, even in the functional duty-firearm world of policing where the conception of a gun as a tool of the trade (as opposed to style icon, masculine totem, emotional support or fashion statement) might have been expected to have persisted longest, it clearly matters how firearms are perceived, how they feel and how their owners relate to them. While the functional characteristics of firearms – their performance – is undoubtedly important, the characteristics of firearms translate and merge with those who carry them. This gun ‘appeal’ clearly extended beyond the military and law enforcement to the wider public – in any event, as Diaz (1999) makes clear, government firearm contracts were often little more than loss leader endorsements for the much more lucrative civilian market where, as we will see when we turn to look at the gun magazine and advertising copy, a ‘military’ or ‘special ops’ association added enormously to a firearm’s reputation, its ‘aura’ and mystique (Diaz, 2013:143). In due course, ever in search of new edge firepower to galvanise demand, firearm marketing also shifted significantly towards semi-automatic

36 Peter Squires handguns. For instance, Barrett (2012) describes the lengths to which the Glock company went in marketing loss leader versions of its pistols to police and military agencies in order to exploit these in its civilian advertising. In turn, this new civilian firepower began to make its mark on the streets. Cook and Ludwig (1997) detected evidence of a significant shift to semiautomatic pistols in civilian handgun purchasing in their survey of 1997 for the NIJ. Blumstein and Cork (1996) detected a relationship between these newer firearms entering the market and a significant growth in urban youth homicide rates. Coinciding with a rapid explosion of street gang activity, crack cocaine dealing and open drug markets, the consequences were dramatic. Reviewing Bureau of Justice Statistics data of reports of firearms stolen and or used in criminal activity, Zawitz (1995) showed that while three-quarters of the crime guns traced by the ATF in 1994 were handguns, most of which were semiautomatic pistols, and roughly a third of these were less than three years old. Semi-automatics from the cheaper ‘Ring of Fire’ company origin semi-automatics (including Lorcin, Bryco, Raven Arms and Davis Industries) were prominent on the lists (Hargarten et al., 1996), but also more expensive models, such as from Glock and Ruger. What was appealing to the civilian market about the new semi-automatics also appealed to the criminal elements and gang-involved youth (Wachtel, 1998). ‘Most law-abiding citizens, as well as their criminal counterparts, preferred large-caliber semiautomatic handguns such as the 9mm.’ (Ruddell and Mays, 2003, p. 233).6 Kleck (1997, p. 11) disputed the notion of the semi-automatic as a specific ‘criminal gun of choice’ arguing that offenders simply used the same kinds of handguns as those acquired by noncriminal purchasers, although Pogrebin and his colleagues (Pogrebin, Stretesky and Unnithan, 2012) found some evidence of youth gang members preferring smaller calibre semi-automatics precisely for the ease with which they could be concealed and carried (features also designed to appeal to the law-abiding, concealed-carry gun owner). That said, some of Harcourt’s youthful interviewees expressed a preference for bigger, quicker firing and more powerful 9-mm semi-automatics using words that could have almost come from the firearm advertising copy itself (Harcourt, 2006, pp. 9–10). Almost. According to Wintemute (2000, 2002), in 1986 in LA County semiautomatic pistols had been responsible for just 5% of gang homicides, by 1994 this had risen to 44%, similarly, in Chicago ‘almost the entire increase in handgun homicides during the late 1980s and early 1990s was attributable to semiautomatic pistols. . .and nationwide, it is estimated that more homicides were committed with 9 mm. pistols in 1992 alone than in the entire decade of the 1980s’ (2002, p. 63). Wintemute’s strongest conclusions, comparing pistol production and purchase data with firearm homicide trends, was that ‘pistol production mirrored handgun homicide rates’ (Wintemute, 2000, pp. 54–55). A related issue concerned the supposed ‘lethality’ (or in a related sense the ‘stopping power’) of the newer handguns (Koper, 1997). This was comprised of three elements – the calibre of the weapon, the enhanced magazine capacity

Semi-automatics for the people? 37 (more bullets), and the ease of firing, enabling shooters to pull the trigger more rapidly and more frequently. In light of the evidence of a peak in the number of firearm homicides in and the related evidence of the significant contribution of semi-automatic pistols to this firearm related violence, the following analysis seeks to explore the marketing of semi-automatic pistols in the ‘gun press’ – a series of prominent guns and shooting magazines available in both the United States and the United Kingdom.7 This exploratory exercise is intended to investigate the construction of the semiautomatic pistol market, both in terms of the sheer scale of the advertising of semi-automatics and the ways in which these firearms were marketed, presented or evaluated; the form and content of the marketing, including visual images and the themes present in the marketing, the scenarios in which they were depicted and the statements made about the pistols under consideration. Items under consideration included both advertising and magazine copy, bench test pieces, testimonials and firearm reviews and other news features.

The magazine survey To begin with, it is worth getting some general sense of the quantitative appearance characteristics of this sample of gun magazines, before going on to explore their contents in greater detail. The ‘look’ or typical appearance of a gun magazine comprises a front cover image dominated by a particular type of firearm which is to be tested and reviewed within the magazine itself. This ‘methodological’ approach has been effectively adopted by Bugg and Zottarelli (2005) who studied covers of the U.S. magazine Women and Guns in order to discern the primary marketing approaches towards potential female gun buyers. Of the 54 magazines examined, 34 (or 63%) had front covers exclusively devoted to semi-automatic pistols, a further 12 (22%) featured semi-automatics as well as some other weapon, usually a revolver, while the 8 remaining magazines did not feature a semi-automatic on the cover at all (revolvers, rifles shotguns only). The front cover of the magazine, whilst it is the most prominent ‘advertising’ space, literally fronting the magazine in the display racks, is not the only prominent advertising page. The back cover and inside the front and back covers – similarly full-colour printed on glossy, thicker and higher-quality paper – also represent high-profile advertising positions. These 3 additional pages, in 54 magazines, represented 162 further prominent advertising points. Across all 6 magazines, 79 of these advertising locations (or 49%) were given over to semi-automatics and a further 10 (6%) to advertisements containing both semi-automatics and revolvers. Sixty-one advertisements (38%) featured only long guns and revolvers, and the remainder advertised a variety of other products including cigarettes and even snuff and chewing tobacco (United States only), vehicles, firearm accessories such as holsters, telescopic sights and other optical gear, or ammunition. It is worth noting something of the ‘tone’ of the non-firearm U.S. advertising, insofar as these images give some flavour of the aspirational world of the magazines’ target audiences. The Marlboro

38 Peter Squires cowboy, was there, on one occasion mending a fence in a blizzard, as were other cowboy types pictured in sweeping rural landscapes alongside pickup trucks or on horseback, proclaiming the apparently simple virtues of a rugged, uncompromising, outdoor life in a rugged, uncompromising all-terrain vehicle, the words ‘tough’ and ‘strong’ littering the page. Such images and the aspirations they appeal to have long been associated with firearm advertising in the United States anyway (Haag, 2016, pp. 255–261). A frequently repeated advertisement for shoulder holsters as ‘worn by the best dressed males’ featured the tanned and well-toned upper torso of a man in jeans and tough guy pose, his firearm and spare ammunition clip tucked discreetly away but easily accessible. The holster, in ballistic nylon and soft leather strapping ‘is sized to fit the new breed of handguns’ (that is, semi-automatics). We have established some clear patterns in this gun magazine advertising, especially the substantial focus upon semi-automatics in the American-oriented marketing. It remains now to explore the presentation of the firearms, how they were depicted in the advertising photographs, their primary contexts of use and the claims made for them and about them in the advertising copy. We are, in Wernick’s (1991) terms, exploring that which is ‘enacted and enabled’ in the promotional culture of firearms advertising. This involves deconstructing the commodification of the advertised firearm and how the process of marketing personalised weaponry interpellates powerful discourses of need, identity and desire, showing us what these firearms will do for us and what characteristics these firearms entail which we, on making the appropriate consumer choice, might seek to acquire. Gun advertising frequently picks up on and recycles influential memes, or ‘cultural replicators’ (Heylighen and Chielens, 2009) that affect thought and shape behaviour, permeating a culture as ‘natural common-sense’ and imitable attitudes, reactions and feelings. Advertising can be especially powerful to the extent that it might resonate with these often unsaid (but frequently implicit) assumptions, fears, rituals and anxieties which make us both who we are and what we believe. Applied to the concept of a generic ‘gun culture,’ memetic analysis can provide a handle on those shared (but seldom precisely articulated) values and beliefs that speak to wider values and affiliations, their nuance and variety even across a range of otherwise significant social difference (class, race, age and gender, region, political affiliation): for example – ‘when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away’ and ‘I don’t dial 911’ (Carlson, 2012).

Present arms An overwhelming majority of the U.S. magazine ‘cover’ advertisements8 featured only the gun itself. On the front magazine cover, guns are presented, typically larger than life (except where ‘compact semi-automatics are shown “actual size”’), and angled upwards, downwards, or across the page with the point of aim always forwards of the page. Human hands gripping the weapon are evident in only four of the front cover images, although they appear slightly

Semi-automatics for the people? 39 more often in the other locations. In one of these four a ‘subcompact’ Glock 27 pistol is pictured simply lying on a hand, in order to demonstrate the size (‘small in a very big way,’ GWLE July 1996), and therefore the concealability, of the weapon. A number of the semi-automatics are shown to be firing, yellow flame and residues issuing from the barrel. On three occasions a bullet is pictured actually leaving the barrel. Somewhat surprisingly, this firing appears to happen whether or not there is a hand holding the gun. As Haag has noted (2016, pp. xxii-xxv; 62), however, this would not be the only occasion on which hidden hands have pulled triggers in the establishment of the U.S. gun market. When pistols are featured with other items, or pictured resting upon or alongside other identifiable items, these are most frequently bullets (spare ammunition) or additional ammunition clips; sometimes weapons are resting upon leather holsters, the U.S. flag or hard rock or marble surfaces. Smith & Wesson’s Sigma pistol is pictured in its ‘trademark’ purchase box, whereas the Brolin Arms ‘Patriot Series’ semi-automatic is presented as if physically hewn from a block of solid steel by a craftsman with a hammer and a chisel (both of which are pictured). ‘At Brolin Arms we believe “a pistol is not just a firearm but a piece of fine art.’’’ (CH, December 1995) This harking back to the age of the personalised craftsman, in an era of mass production, is undoubtedly one of the enduring myths of the modern firearms market, foregrounding the skill commitment and dedication of the craftsman (human values) as well as the strength, legacy (carved from nature), durability and essential foundational status (cultural values) of the weapon. The very name of the pistol, ‘The Patriot,’ completes this cultural endorsement. A Glock pistol, reputedly America’s favourite gun (Barrett, 2012), is pictured in front of a blue-and-white image of the earth, photographed from space, and an array of 34 national flags, the strapline reads ‘Glock: The Global symbol for Protection’ (CH, November 1997). Another relatively occasional presentation of a Glock pistol features the weapon, in this case a Glock 21, pictured in the foreground with representative members of the tough-looking, no-nonsense, police SWAT team that had recently adopted the firearm, lined up behind it. This kind of loss-leader marketing has been a successful feature of Glock’s attempt to capture greater market share in the much bigger civilian market (Diaz, 1999). Police departments and military agencies purchase guns only occasionally, civilians buy them all the time. Elite unit endorsement can be an effective marketing strategy. Accordingly, on Guns and Weapons for Law Enforcement front covers, semi-automatics are frequently shown resting upon other law enforcement equipment such as departmental badges, or handcuffs.

Words and pictures Turning to the text that accompanies the advertising images, a number of dominant themes emerge. In their analysis of firearm advertising in 27 magazines which accepted firearm advertisements. Sixty-three manufacturers ran 185 advertisements (Saylor, Vittes and Sorenson, 2004) spending almost $2

40 Peter Squires million during the month in which the survey ran. Contrary to expectations, they found relatively little direct emphasis upon the purposes to which guns might be put, for instance, only 3% mentioned self-protection and 15% ‘patriotism.’ Rather, they found that the majority of the marketing text primarily featured various attributes of the gun in question. Attributes included quality, accuracy, reliability, novelty, uniqueness and ease of use, appearance, value and power, and light weight (2004, p. 427). In the analysis which follows, similar themes reappear, but also significantly ergonomics, speed of use and what is termed ‘rapid target acquisition.’ From a marketing perspective, Saylor et al., remark, ‘focusing on the technological attributes of a particular gun,’ makes sense, it represents an attempt ‘to differentiate the performance of one gun from another, [thereby] attempting to convince consumers that they need multiple guns’ (2004, p. 430). Gun ownership is a concentrated phenomenon, it may be better business to convince gun owners to buy another gun perhaps something newer and more powerful) than to try to get non-owners to purchase their first. To the extent that this strategy is working, commentators have noted that the average number of firearms owned by gun owners is increasing (Azreal, Hepburn, Hemenway and Miller, 2016; Beckett, 2016). From a customer perspective, buying a newer, more powerful/more accurate (perhaps potentially more lethal) firearm with greater ‘stopping power,’ could give them the ‘edge’ over a rival and as we shall see, the gun advertisements of the mid-1990s reviewed below, typically emphasize the various advantages of the advertised firearm versus others currently available. Contrary to Saylor et al.’s observation that firearm advertisements seldom mention self-defence, the current analysis suggests they do not need to. As we shall see, the semi-automatics being offered to customers in the mid-1990s advertisements are light to carry, concealable, easy to use, accurate and fast to target, quick to shoot and powerful – shot after shot, if need be. These are precisely the attributes of a self-defence, combat ready firearm; the customer hardly needs to know what it is for, any more than the purchaser of hollowpoint ammunition needs a precise description of its terminal ballistic qualities. To reiterate the core argument of this paper, the semi-automatics advertising of the mid-1990s both reflected and further underpinned the handgun upgrade occurring at this time, sustaining and legitimating the emergent self-defence discourse and galvanising a further round of gun advocacy politics. If the argument of this paper is correct regarding the production of a distinct market for semi-automatics, these – sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt – advertising claims literally produce the discourse through which this new market is constituted, the language and expectations with which it is populated, in the early to mid-1990s. This market making, or demand creation, operates on several levels, some of these are explicitly asserted, others more implicit and understated. Some of the former types of claims might be characterised as ‘hard’ or factual assertions, others play to valued or symbolic associations, some stress cherished values and cultural norms. Still others refer

Semi-automatics for the people? 41 to conceptions of need or desire, thereby envisioning a world in which such needs or desires have become normalised and unquestioned, in this sense they also play to the emotions, fears and aspirations of potential customers; anticipating, perhaps, the contexts in which these weapons might be called upon. In some cases it is just the mundane detail which conveys an edge of ‘realism’ for the ‘citizen seeking a handgun for personal security or the law enforcement officer opting for a lightweight backup.’ In either case, ‘the S&W Sigma 380 meets the challenge. [There are] no sharp edges to snag on loose clothing or other gear’ (CH, September 1995). Here ‘the challenge’ is a world of potentially fatal confrontations and of earlier, apparently less well-designed firearms which ‘snagged’ at just the wrong moment. Amongst the harder or more factual claims, are those emphasising ‘accuracy’ and ‘reliability,’ implying the capacity to unerringly send a bullet spinning towards a potential assailant (not a fellow ‘citizen’ this time) and to keep doing it until the threat is eliminated. Thus, ‘the personal sized Sig Sauer P239 in 9 mm offers all the accuracy and reliability in the Sig Sauer family. . . the perfect pistol; for maximum protection in a size that permits easy concealment. . . engineered reliability’ (CH June 97). Furthermore, the Sig Sauer pistol comes embedded within ‘family’ values, purchasing this firearm is much more than a financial transaction rather, one joins the family. Similarly, ‘scientific’ appeals have stressed the ‘superior ergonomic’ design of certain pistols. In these terms, both Sig Sauer and Smith & Wesson represented the virtues of their own pistols: The SS P230 .380 ACP combines superb functional dependability and handling safety features. . . an ergonomically ideal grip angle featuring equally fast handling and field stripping. This is the ideal personal protection handgun: safe, compact and concealable (CH November 1997). Here, safety is conceived in a strictly individualist, context dependent and volitional ‘consumer sovereignty’ (Carlson, 2014) sense as you effectively grip your firearm, deploying it rapidly against potential assailants. What we might term a ‘zero-sum’ or perhaps ‘one-dimensional’ (Marcuse, 1963) conception of liberal safety – my personal safety achieved at your expense – rather than a more cohesive and inclusive sense of public safety. Here, effective ergonomic design gives one an edge in the personal safety stakes, although what is entirely overlooked in this personalist construction of safety is the cumulative evidence of firearms as aggregate risk enhancers (Kellermann and Reay, 1986; Wiebe, 2003; Dahlberg, Ikeda and Kresnow, 2004). Smith & Wesson went to exceptional lengths to underscore the ergonomic credentials of their new Sigma range of semi-automatics: ‘clean lines, premium performance, superior ergonomics. . . puts you on target and keeps you there, a sleek ergonomic design that makes aiming as natural as pointing a finger’ (CH June 97).9 We will come on to this ‘pointing a finger’ aspect later, for the

42 Peter Squires moment the central ‘scientific’ claim of S&W is to have produced ‘the most ergonomically correct pistol in history.’ To this end, human factors experts, ergonomics engineers, medical sensors and computer analyses were all brought together to perfect Sigma’s state-of-the-art 18 degree grip design. Web angle, angle of grasp and trigger reach were all refined to create the most ergonomically correct pistol in history. (GWLE, May 1996) These pistol design developments were said to be associated with award of 12 new firearm design patents (GWLE, May 1996). The point of all this re-engineering and ergonomic refinement was to produce the ultimate, instant readiness, self-defence pistol. By the same token, by insisting that the responsible citizen needed to acquire such a simple, concealable, easy-to-operate, point-and-shoot semi-automatic, the advertisers were simultaneously conjuring up the dangerous world in which it would be necessary. Consider Wilson Combat’s promise to satisfy these needs in September 1995: ‘experts worldwide agree that the 1911 style .45 auto is the “ultimate” defensive weapon. . . [we] take this one step further by turning the 1911 .45 auto into the “ultimate” in reliability and precision handling. . .. Defensive pistol perfection. . . from our entry level basic defensive pistol to our Tactical Elite, Wilson Combat can provide the “ultimate” defensive pistol for your needs’ (CH September 1995). Your needs: the self-defence semi-automatic pistol market is no different to any other in the context of 20th-century consumerism and, consistent with advertising practice everywhere, effective marketing generates the particular needs (including emotional and psychological attachments) that products come to satisfy. Another endorsement in a Wilson Combat advertisement seems to give the game away, ‘equipment is constantly changing and it seems as if Wilson always has what we need. . . sometimes before we know we need it’ (CH August 95). And it is but a short step from the construction of needs to the attribution of responsibilities, for, ‘once you’ve made the decision to own a handgun for self-defense, you owe it to your loved ones to [obtain] professional assistance. . .. Learning new defensive handgun techniques is now made easier. . . in the privacy of your own home’ (CH November 97). These wider themes of responsibilisation and protection associated with firearm concealed carry are a familiar aspect of contemporary handgun marketing (Carlson, 2015); the strapline to a Ruger advertisement claims ‘arms makers for responsible citizens’ (CH, June 1995). Purchasing a firearm is a ‘duty to loved ones,’ handgun marketing resonates with deep emotions, owning a gun becomes an act of love. But it is an act of love in a dangerous context for the adverts seldom travel far from the essential requirements of a self-protection handgun, all that science and ergonomics tells its own kind of story. While the various ‘sciences’ of contemporary semi-automatic design and marketing appeared, in some respects, to entail a ‘de-skilling’ of the modern firearm user, in fact this

Semi-automatics for the people? 43 merely continued a firearms market narrative identified by Haag during a much earlier period ‘the more mechanically ingenious the gun became, the less skilled, gun smart or ingenious the shooter needed to be,’ the modern firearm simply ‘did more’ (Haag, 2016, p. 181). In this sense the modern mass-market semi-automatic did not need to appeal to a specialist shooter or even the committed hobbyist, the crucial features were concealability and low weight, but reliable when called upon; a gun that would be carried around a lot but rarely fired. Low-maintenance reliability was the key; reliability was frequently referred to in the advertising, for example, one advertisement promised: ‘now you can have a winning state-of-the-art technology and all American craftsmanship [with] unmatched performance, reliability and service’ (G&A June 94), another offered ‘a range of pistols that perform reliably and accurately’ (CH February 97). And a third promised, ‘full size power in a personal size handgun. . .. A lightweight powerhouse that packs a punch. . . a rugged lightweight frame. . . uncompromising reliability, round after round’ (CH November 1997). Smith & Wesson likewise promised a concealable semi-automatic pistol ‘featuring the same precision and attention to detail given all S&W handguns, the models. . . don’t sacrifice accuracy or compromise performance for price. . . both lightweight and durable’ (CH August 1995). Reliability, clearly, has something to do with ‘packing a punch,’ and accuracy, round after round. Despite such singularly ringing endorsements, and for Smith and Wesson, ‘an unequalled commitment to each and every customer’ (CH June 1995), these pistols, apparently, come in price grades to suit all budgets. Thus, ‘lightweight, easy to operate and highly reliable. . . whatever your need or your budget, there’s a Sigma Series pistol for you’ (CH February 1997). Nevertheless, such mass market firearms, like other mass commodity products, are not to be cherished in themselves, they are not the objects upon which devotees of shooting will lavish their care and attention. One gun is specifically advertised as ‘reliable, accurate and easily maintained’ (G&A May 1996), undoubtedly a low maintenance gun raises several issues. As we have suggested, such firearms do excite emotions but only at one remove, as if vicariously. Like any technology (Squires, 2017), they have primary value for what they do, what they enable and how they empower. This has two kinds of consequence, on the one hand owning a mass market firearm (albeit an ‘act of love’) entails not a love for the weapon itself, but rather for the values and relations embodied within in it, attributed to it, sustained by it and the capabilities attained by it. In this respect the pistol itself is more symbolic (though symbolic in a cultural context). In the second place, these ‘mechanically ingenious’ firearms, although framed as necessary within a franchised discourse of commodified responsibilisation, rendering shooting as so ‘secondnature,’ go some distance towards exonerating owners and shooters from the consequences of their actions, so simply instinctive is pointing and shooting. Although frequently encouraging would-be purchasers to check all local and state laws before they acquire a firearm (the limited liability small print of a public interest), firearm advertising text is more generally part of an amoral

44 Peter Squires discourse of irresponsibilisation, so easy is it to do what you are primed and ready to do, what your purchase implies you believe it necessary to do, what the wave of ‘Castle Doctrine’ and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws (enacted during the mid1990s) allow you to do and what the firearm enables you to do: point and shoot. Sig Sauer even promised ‘instinctive shooting’ in their 1995 P230: ‘inherent accuracy. . . rapid target acquisition and comfortable instinctive shooting, increasing first shot potential’ (G&A Annual 1995). Developing a critique along such lines is to recognise that the ‘armed and dangerous’ context makes a real difference, that firearm possession presents options in social situations, that firearm advertising (and even more so the magazine articles and true-life stories of self-defence shooters) scripts the scenarios which can rush headlong towards ‘point and shoot.’ Ergonomically, mechanically, guns make it easy – even ‘comfortable’; whilst socially, the gun culture, crime, conflict and racialized antagonisms make it possible. In the interests of speedy target acquisition, for Smith and Wesson, ‘the three dot low profile sight system brings the shooter on target quickly, shot after shot’ (CH August 1995). Elsewhere, the advertising copy promises ‘instant first shot capability’ (CH, March, 2008). Similarly, a Firestar semiautomatic is credited with ‘a hand filling grip for real control [with] a fast lineup triple dot sight system’ (CH June 1995). According to Glock, when speed counts as much as accuracy. . . nothing keeps you on target like Glock’s range of compensated pistols. . .. This innovative integral compensation system not only reduces muzzle flip and felt recoil it also aids in quicker second shot acquisition. . .. From the first shot to the last get improved shot speed and minimum muzzle rise with little or no loss of velocity. (CH March 1999) Smith and Wesson, returning to their notion of instinctive ‘pointability,’ promised ‘remarkable pointability and great control, a smooth consistent trigger pull. And a unique sighting system brings you on every time. . .. A winning state-of-the-art technology’ (G&A, June 1994).10 The language is compelling, but layered with euphemism; all this speed, accuracy, rapid target acquisition and first to last shot capability: What are we winning? The answer is terminally simple, if we can speedily grasp our weapon, rapidly ‘acquire’ the target, and shoot first (and then, maybe, again and again) with reasonable combat accuracy, then perhaps we get to live. Smith and Wesson even go so far as to call this the S&W ‘advantage.’ Of course, such an advantage might be lost if one’s attacker is carrying a similar firearm, we have already seen that offenders appear to favour the same kinds of firearms as law-abiding gun owners – and for very much the same reasons. The contrasting guidance of the handgun advertising copy presents some potentially difficult dilemmas in an armed confrontation. As has been noted, everything about the marketing of the S&W seems designed to get the shooter rapidly to the target and the trigger pull. The most important edge in a gun

Semi-automatics for the people? 45 fight entails the irresponsible and (legally and morally) unsustainable option of shooting first, asking questions later. The mechanical ingenuity of S&W technology entails an extraordinary elevation of combat readiness, nothing less than combat life. As Haag has noted (2016, p. 396) the implied contextual and psychological shift from simple self-defence to combat capability has already been made, ushered forth by the necessities of contemporary firearm advertising. And if police units have them, citizens want them; both have to survive in this dangerous world. As the advertising emphasizes, ‘you want the best gun you can carry, one that holds 14 rounds of .45 ACP. There is no margin for error. . . you want the security of a hammer-down carry with instant first shot capability’ (CH March 2008). As we have argued, however, this sense of security is very directly a product of the advertising hype itself, not a quality inherent in the firearm. While contemporary advertisers claim that the essential quality of any mass-produced commodity is the way it makes you feel, the advertising is contrived to show and encourage you in what to expect to feel, and how to feel it. An advertising feature article in Combat Handguns captured this sense of anticipation as a customer described unpacking his recent purchase: As I opened the box that the guns came in my wife sat down next to me to see what I was doing. As I examined the guns she looked over at me and said, ‘The way you handle those things you would think you were examining a piece of priceless art.’ You know I did kind of feel that way. (CH August 1995) Whereas Haag has made the point that, even relatively early on in the 20thcentury, firearm industry marketing sought to cultivate a sense of feeling and desire, by inspiring ‘a sentimental attachment in the customer’ (2016, p. 336), by the end of the century, the advertisers were putting as much emphasis into designing their customer, encouraging potential customers to experience the emotional power of their products – the thrill of holding a gun, the ‘inherent desires’ it satisfied, the ‘human nature’ it engaged and the ‘shooting instinct’ it cultivated. Reflecting this, marketing the .45 calibre Sig Sauer P220, the manufacturers claimed, ‘when [we] designed the P220, we started with the shooter, not the gun.’ The advertising copy went on to extol the virtues of the pistol, confident that the customer will be able to feel the quality and precision ‘the first time you pick it up.’ The advertising copy concludes with the claim: ‘Take a P220 in your hand today and quickly discover we had you in mind when we designed it’ (GWLE May 95.)

Conclusion This paper has sought to argue, and to evidence, the role of the ‘gun media’ and firearm advertising in promoting and validating the purchase – and, ultimately, the use – of personal protection firearms. It has done so by drawing upon Haag’s

46 Peter Squires important analysis in The Gunning of America (2016) which convincingly demonstrated how firearm entrepreneurs first invented the gun market and cultivated the modern gun consumer before they were able to establish the gun culture. The gun culture is, therefore, a creation of modernity, backfilled into America’s past. In a related fashion, this chapter has sought to show how, between the 1980s and mid1990s, following changes in police and military weapon procurement, firearms industry publishing and gun advertising helped reconstruct and re-energise that market by fostering a significant upgrade in the civilian firearms inventory, putting more powerful semi-automatic weapons in the hands of civilians premised largely upon a discourse of ‘responsible’ self-defence in the face of widespread perceptions of the risk of crime and disorder. This firepower upgrade had major consequences in terms of rates of firearm involved violence and homicide. In turn it triggered a largely self-fulfilling consequence in the form of a firearm advocacy politics, which has championed various ‘concealed-carry’/‛open carry’ firearms movements, firearms deregulation initiatives (Guns on Campus) and the introduction, state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, of ‘Castle Doctrine’ and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws. The gun industry advertising of the semi-automatic went a long way towards producing and disseminating the concealed carry culture and with it a new kind of urban gun owner. Judging from more recent gun magazine covers, many now featuring assault weapons and semi-automatic rifles, the gun industry is continuing to construct a combat-ready world while fashioning dangerous new markets, for its increasingly powerful new weaponry.

Appendix 1: Firearms magazines used in the survey Guns and Ammo (G&A): February 1994; June 94; October 94; January 95; February 95; March 95; April 95; June 95; October 95; 1995 Annual; March 96; April 96; May 96; July 96; November 96; December 96; February 97; May 97. Combat Handguns (CH): June 95; August 95; September 95; December 95; August 96; December 96; February 97; March 97; June 97; September 97; November 97; March 99. Guns and Weapons for Law Enforcement (GWLE): May 96; July 96. Guns and Shooting (UK): June 94; September 94; October 94; August 94; December 94; January 95; February 95; June 95; May 96; September 96. Guns Review (UK): June 94; October 94; January 95; February 95; September 95; October 95; June 96. Handgunner (UK): May/June 94; October/November 94; June/July 95; August/September 95; May/June 96.

Notes 1 We consider some of these arguments later in the paper. An interesting irony has been that gun advocacy researchers have tended to dispute the claimed lethality effects of the new semi-automatics, just as firearm industry marketing has been promoting them for these very same lethality/’stopping power’ related reasons.

Semi-automatics for the people? 47 2 In this respect, while acknowledging that aspects of fear, or at least a discourse about fear, and racialized fears of crime and disorder, fear alone fails to capture the full range of psycho-social antecedents of the turn to guns, concepts of duty, responsibility, culture, context and right also play their part (Carlson, 2012, 2015) 3 Haag, (2016: 186) details the paradox of how ‘a mass produced, mass-marketed object was to become an enduring idiom of American individualism.’ 4 And as Caroline Light convincingly points out ‘righteousness’ is almost always constructed in terms of the white property owner (Light, 2017). 5 Haag quotes from a 1907 Smith and Wesson advertisement: ‘Any woman can learn how to use a Smith & Wesson in a few hours. . . and she will no longer feel a sense of helplessness when male members of the family are absent.’ 6 Despite these observations, however, Ruddell & Mays (2003: 248) concluded ‘Scholars who study trends in firearms use suggest that expensive semi-automatic handguns that chamber larger cartridges are becoming more widely manufactured and distributed (Wachtel, 1998; Wintemute, 2000). These firearms commonly are depicted in movies and television programs, and they may be very desirable to youths as well. Regardless of their popularity, however, this study finds that these types of weapons were no more likely to be confiscated by the police in 1999 than they were in 1992, at least in St. Louis, Missouri.’ 7 The full analysis undertaken compared the differences in the marketing of firearms in the United States and United Kingdom (prior to the latter’s 1998 handgun prohibition following the Dunblane School shooting in March 1996). In this Chapter I confine the discussion to the U.S. market. 8 Referring here only to the selection of semi-automatic only advertisements already discussed, appearing on the front and rear, and inside front and rear, magazine covers. 9 Evidently, to reiterate an earlier point, ‘sleekness’ is clearly recognised as a desirable firearm characteristic. 10 For S&W superior ‘pointability’ is said to be ‘the result of sophisticated research into how the human hand, wrist and arm operate while grasping and firing a pistol.’ They propose that would-be purchasers undertake their own test. ‘Pick up any pistol, close your eyes and point. Now open your eyes. If you’re pointing a Sigma, your aim will be straight. If it’s any other pistol, your aim may be off. On the range you have the luxury of time, but in a critical situation you don’t! Aiming a Sigma is a natural as pointing your finger.’ The advertisement closes with a familiar refrain ‘For pointability. For accuracy. For reliability. For durability. Choose the best pistol in America. Even with your eyes closed’ (CH Dec 1995). Despite the reassurances offered, suggestions about pointing your finger and shooting with your eyes closed remains in about equal parts a disturbing and beguiling metaphor.

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3

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ Laura Browder

Introduction It is easy to become numb to the seemingly endless series of child deaths involving firearms – or, rather, deaths resulting from the interaction of children and guns. In 2012, it was a terrible accident involving a nine-yearold girl and an Uzi, resulting in the death of her shooting instructor. (Berman, 2014). In 2013 it was a five-year-old boy in Texas who shot himself to death with his babysitter’s gun while she was napping (Read, 2013). The same year, five-year-old Kristian Sparks, a Kentucky boy, accidentally shot his two-yearold sister, Caroline Sparks, while his mother had briefly stepped outside their trailer home. Tragically, such deaths are not particularly unusual. Nearly 1,300 children die each year in the United States as the result of firearms (and almost 6,000 are treated for gunshot wounds), making gun deaths more common for kids than deaths from asthma or flu (Bakalar, 2017). Although 38% of these deaths are child suicides, 6% of yearly firearms deaths involving children are unintentional, involving accidents that usually take place at home, and often (or usually) at the hands of another child. According to another study, among the world’s 23 richest countries, the U.S. accounts for 91% of all the firearms-related deaths of children under 14. (Healy, 2017). To anyone like me, who tracks the debates around American gun laws and gun culture, these statistics, while appalling, are not surprising. However, one detail about the accidental shooting death of Caroline Sparks stuck out to me: the weapon in question, manufactured by Keystone Sporting Arms, belonged to Caroline’s five-year-old brother Kristian, and had been marketed as ‘My first rifle.’ What are the implications of the gun industry’s current appeal to children, both as consumers and as the innocent face of the industry? What are the family values of firearms companies, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the firearms industry trade association (the National Shooting Sports Foundation [NSSF])? Beginning in the 1980s, the firearms industry began to appeal to women, both as consumers and as visual aids to soften the image of guns and disassociate them from their violent potential. However, over the past decade the focus of the NRA, the NSSF, and a few firearms manufacturers has shifted

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 53 from featuring women in magazines and promotional materials to emphasizing firearms ownership as a family value, a way to pass down traditions and bring parents and children closer together. Today, the industry focuses not just on families but children as firearms consumers. While the number of child-sized guns sold may be relatively small, the powerful visuals of happy children holding guns, as well as their (ostensibly) first-person narratives in the online magazine Junior Shooter, produced by the NSSF, serve to delink guns from danger and violence. Yet accidental shootings by children, as well as deliberate shootings by teenagers at their schools, trouble this narrative, making it increasingly difficult to sustain.

Marketing innocence: Children and guns According to the company website, Keystone began producing children’s rifles in 1996. In its first year, the company had four employees and produced 4,000 rifles. By 2008 it employed 70 people and produced 60,000 children’s rifles each year. (Keystonesportingarmsllc.com, 2018). The harmless-sounding Crickett, a children’s rifle developed by Keystone, has been one of the company’s mainstays; in addition, the company sells the more traditional-looking and equally cute-sounding ‘Chipmunk,’ a brand bought by Keystone in 2007 from Rogue Rifle Company, which had produced it since 1982. The Chipmunk looks like any other rifle, only smaller, and with its acquisition, Keystone, according to its website, ‘moved to the forefront in becoming the leading rifle supplier in the youth market,’ despite competition from such competitors as the Browning T-Bolt, the Henry Lever Action Youth, the Rossi Trifecta, the Mossberg 500 Super Bantam Combo, and the Winchester M70 Featherweight Compact. Although youth rifles are the core of its business, Keystone also sells a range of accessories aimed at young people, such as padded gun cases in pink camo; Little Jake Adventures illustrated books for children, such as My First Rifle, and even a Davey Crickett Beanie Baby, a cute creature with its own padded rifle (http://www.keystonesportingarmsllc.com/). The company faced a torrent of adverse publicity in the wake of Caroline Sparks’s death, ranging from ‘an uncharacteristically fired-up MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who delivered a diatribe “Standing before a hunting graphic emblazoned with the words ‘The Sickness,’”’ to unfavourable stories on NPR, CBS and other outlets. An ABC news story titled ‘Maker of Youth Rifle Gains Notoriety After Death’ reported that, ‘the owner who would not go on camera says the company received threats by email. The doors were locked but employees – about 100 in all – kept working.’ (Christopher, 2013; Hammill, 2013). Despite this, Keystone has continued to thrive. Its sales have remained stable–in 2015, the most recent year for which sales figures are available, it was among the top 25 gun manufacturers in the U.S. with total sales of 62,764 firearms. As a recent piece in Ammoland Shooting Sports News noted, Keystone has ‘a capability to increase production to meet the growing demand for

54 Laura Browder firearms in the youth market; one of the fastest growing markets in the industry’1 (Johnson, 2017; Moldae, 2017). Unsurprisingly, the fatal shooting of Caroline Sparks by her brother sparked a media firestorm, with news outlets from the Huffington Post to the BBC reporting on it. Many reports took note of the ‘kids’ corner,’ since taken down, on the Keystone website, featuring pictures of very young children posing with their rifles. News also highlighted the fact that the rifles were available in bubblegum pink, turquoise, and other colors to make the weapons more ‘kid-friendly.’ To many, it was incomprehensible that a young child would be entrusted with a rifle – and that there existed a company whose focus was providing firearms for the children’s market. Yet in Burkesville, Kentucky, where Kristian Sparks lived with his family, many of the town’s 1,800 residents did not blame Caroline’s parents for her death: ‘Pointing fingers doesn’t really accomplish anything,’ said one retiree, Ann Beall, interviewed by The New York Times. ‘Terrible mistakes happen, and I think that’s what happened here.’ Rather, the townspeople seemed deeply upset by the negative attention the Sparks family was getting in the media. A teenage girl interviewed by the reporter said ‘strangers from around the country had written scathing comments online blaming the parents, deepening the town’s pain and anger.’ As the article noted, Kentucky is one of 25 states that does not hold adults liable when a child gets hold of a firearm and causes an injury or death; in fact, no charges were filed against Kristian’s parents. The townspeople quoted in the story, with much justification, felt that their way of life – in which it was not uncommon to introduce children to firearms before first grade – was under attack. ‘This town, there’s nothing like it. They pull together,’ said Beall as she left the funeral home2 (Gabriel, 2013). Kristian Sparks’ shooting of his little sister took place at a time of heightened public awareness – and, often, anger – around gun issues. Just six months previously, on December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother with weapons from her collection–a .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle and a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, and then drove to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School where he killed 20 children and 6 adults before turning the gun on himself. Even though school shootings have become common since the first high-profile mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, Sandy Hook was the site of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at a high school or elementary school–a story profoundly shocking even to a public inured to school shootings. Although President Obama – who broke down in tears at a news conference about the shooting – had pushed hard for new gun control laws in the wake of Sandy Hook, his efforts failed, leaving an American public bitterly divided on gun issues, and a media with renewed sensitivities to stories about guns. The Kristian Sparks story quickly led the media to investigate the world of youth gun culture. In 2008, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s major trade group, launched an initiative called TaskForce 20/20, designed to increase the number of hunters and target shooters by 20% in five

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 55 years. The plan sought to ensure that youth were initiated into the shooting sports. According to journalist Nick Wing, who wrote a 2013 Huffington Post article reporting on the industry’s heightened appeals to young people, the gun industry was reaching out to children as consumers because ‘the percentage of American households that reported owning guns dropped more than 40% between 1977 and 2010, according to surveys by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’3 (Wing, 2013). The industry needed to expand its base of consumers and reaching out to children was the best way to do so. Sometimes this has involved particularly innovative strategies: as one example, Sig Sauer has begun marketing a .22 version of its AR-15 for kids4 (Harkinson, 2016). While companies like Keystone Sporting Arms may be thriving, the gun industry on the whole is struggling, especially with the end of the Obama presidency. The decline in sales has continued; during the first six months following Trump’s election, gun sales fell 10% nationwide.5 (Zornick, 2017). As Jade Moldae of Shooting Industry explained, Following a high-octane, record-breaking 2016, sales have cooled across most of the industry during the first half of 2017. Today’s contracted market can largely be attributed to the results of the 2016 election season – which has removed the fear-induced environment as a sales driver among consumers6 (Moldae, 2017). However, executives in the gun industry have continued to believe that the children are the future – although the future that they envision may look a lot like an imagined version of the past – a Norman Rockwell painting that includes firearms. Wing was not alone in noticing the phenomenon of the gun industry targeting young consumers. A few months earlier, Slate published a piece titled ‘The Gun Industry Wants to Sell Your Kid an AR-15.’7 (Marcotte, 2013). This article was prompted by the publication of a New York Times article titled, slightly less sensationalistically, ‘Selling a New Generation on Guns.’ The strategies for this effort by the gun industry included, the Times noted, giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable militarystyle rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers8 (McIntire, 2013). The New York Times article was newsworthy enough that it was shared by organizations ranging from Catholic Answers Forums to the AARP, and referenced in a book entitled Sociopathic Society: A People’s Sociology of the United States9 (Derber, 2013).

56 Laura Browder This news, while revelatory to many, was not new: journalists were simply late to the party in recognizing the phenomenon. Children’s gun culture has been thriving right under the noses of the general, non-gun-owning population. When I take the students in my first-year seminar, ‘Guns in America,’ to a gun show, the thing they most often comment on are the families who come to the show together – parents wheeling toddlers in strollers or little girls walking around with their bright pink rifles. What seems even more shocking to them is the Girl Scouts selling cookies just across from the AK-47 booth; the juxtaposition, in my students’ minds, between the innocence of childhood and the violent potential of firearms makes them extremely uneasy. Children’s gun culture is part of a larger move by gun manufacturers and, perhaps most of all, by the NRA to promote gun ownership as a family affair – in much the same way that the NRA created a range of publications and courses specifically targeted towards women starting in 1993, when the organization developed its ‘Refuse to Be a Victim’ course, which has thus far given 100,000 women firearms training.10 (www.nrawomen.tv/refuse-to-bea-victim). The NRA subsequently embarked on a series of journals and websites targeting women – but especially mothers. As Lisa Parsons wrote in a 1997 article in Shooting Industry, ‘There are 12.2 million female heads of households in the United States. If those female heads of households never introduce their children to the shooting sports, our industry will suffer greatly.’11 (Parsons, 2012). In this vision, the role of women is primarily to transmit culture – gun culture – to children, thus helping replace aging marksmen with young ones. Yet there is a larger political goal as well: to provide cover for the violence caused by guns, and to promote a firearms culture that is more closely associated with family fun and wholesomeness. A 2003 article in the NRA’s Woman’s Outlook, tellingly titled ‘The Gateway Gun,’ plays on mothers’ anxieties about their children’s development and achievements and suggests gun ownership as a way of insuring a well-adjusted and successful child. This article presents children’s participation in the shooting sports as a ‘popular and potential lifelong activity, one that can help them develop self-discipline, personal responsibility, new relationships and in some cases, lead to competitive success or even a college scholarship.’ Most of all, NRA Women, the website that replaced Woman’s Outlook, and NRA Family offer its readers the chance to join in an imagined community of gunowners. In fact, this imagined community is elaborated in many sections of the NRA’s website; such as an article in American Hunter on ‘choosing your child’s first gun,’ whose subtitle notes that ‘your child’s first gun can influence whether he becomes a lifelong hunter or walks away altogether.’ This particular piece was published on March 8, 2013, less than three weeks before Kristian Sparks killed his sister Caroline with the .22-caliber rifle he had gotten as a gift.12 The NRA has long touted gun safety instruction for children, through school visits from Eddie Eagle, a cartoon mascot who looks like a more

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 57 patriotic version of Big Bird – a friendly, human-size bald eagle who appears in videos screened at elementary schools, instructing children on what to do if they encounter a gun in their home. While a recent NRA press release notes that Eddie Eagle has now reached 30 million children, the Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program has come under fire since 2004, when the American Academy of Pediatrics ran a study and concluded that although young children were capable of memorizing Eddie Eagle’s message, the bird’s advice went unheeded: kids forgot the message as soon as they were in the same room as a gun.13 In 2014, ABC’s 20/20 produced an extremely critical segment on it; using hidden cameras, the segment featured children left alone in a room with a real, albeit unloaded gun. It turned out that it took some young children only six seconds to touch the gun, and even those who initially danced around the table on which the gun was placed, chanting ‘Stop! Don’t touch! Run away!’ took only a few minutes to pick up and handle the weapon.14 Equally striking is the tension between the NRA’s promotion of gun culture for children and Eddie Eagle’s message: Stop! Don’t Touch: A firearm that is not touched or disturbed is unlikely to be fired and otherwise endanger your child or other people. Run Away: This removes the temptation to touch the firearm as well as the danger that another person may negligently cause it to fire. Tell a Grown-up: Children should seek a trustworthy adult, neighbor, relative or teacher – if a parent or guardian is not available15 In fact, the NRA has situated itself in a seemingly impossible position, taking on the role of protecting children against gun accidents through its Eddie Eagle program, while simultaneously using children in its marketing in order to present an image of guns as inherently safe, fun, and family-friendly. Moreover, the Eddie Eagle program, introduced by the NRA in 1988, has been used by the organization as an alternative to the gun-safety laws (including trigger locks) fought by the organization. This has represented a distinct shift by the NRA – away from working towards child safety, and towards using the issue of child safety as a means of fighting gun safety laws. Following a rash of much-publicized child shooting deaths in the state, Florida NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer, who later became the organization’s first female president, worked with state legislators in 1989 to help craft a law that would hold gun owners responsible for deaths caused by them leaving loaded weapons accessible to children. Yet by 1998 the NRA’s stance had hardened – although the Florida law had resulted in a 51% drop in child shooting deaths in the state in the eight years after passage (Spies, 2016). Eddie the Eagle – whose message was that children, not adults, were responsible for gun safety – was born. As the NRA’s online magazine NRA Family noted, the NRA Youth Education Summit – or ‘YES,’ as the organization likes to refer to it – took

58 Laura Browder place this past August at the National Marine Corps Museum, where ‘the Class of 2017 feasted their eyes and minds on the history on display’ before talking about their own goals, which ranged from one day participating in international skeet shooting competitions to attending ‘Virginia Tech or Virginia Military Institute with high hopes of serving his country.’ Some of these participants already had favorite guns, but one, Denise Shaffer of Houston, had her ‘first shooting experience. . . during the 2017 Texas YES Summit. During this adventure she has been able to learn, in detail, what the Second Amendment truly stands for.’16 It is clear that the NRA is hoping that YES will cultivate not only lifelong shooters, but also kids who will subscribe to the current NRA philosophy, in which every restriction on firearms usage is to be fought tooth and nail. In some ways, even more interesting than the spin the NRA puts on its youth outreach efforts is the magazine Junior Shooters, published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s major trade group. 60% of the articles published in the magazine are (supposedly) authored by juniors – although reading some accounts it is hard to imagine that this is entirely true. Recent posts include one by Ashley Rumble, 14, describing her volunteer experience: Three years ago I was able to participate in The Scooters Youth Hunting camp held each May in Emmett, Idaho. Scooters is a camp set up so that young kids can learn and experience firearms, survival, archery, knife sharpening, and gun cleaning. It was a lot of fun and to pay back the camp in some way I decided to volunteer to help out. Although the work she does is not glamorous, ‘it is fun watching kids shoot, and seeing their faces when they succeed.’ As she concludes, I feel honored to be a part of this camp. I see it is for a good cause, and is a lot of fun. I get to watch all sorts of kids try their hands at new things. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, scooters is a great place to be. In the end, we hope the kids take what they learned and go outside on their own to use the new knowledge with their love of the outdoors17 For Ashley, guns are associated with a love of nature, with community, and with childhood joy and pride in accomplishment (with a few key brand names thrown in, as when she references the great raffle drawing that includes ‘a fully loaded Cabela’s camping set’). For these children, learning to shoot is something that is eagerly anticipated as a rite of passage. In a recent post, Grace Masa, whose Single Action Shooting Society name is ‘Rainbow Renegade,’ tells her readers that

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 59 My dad and my sister had been a part of the Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) since before I could talk. So ever since I can remember, cowboy shooting is just something that we did. I waited and waited for the day I was allowed to start competing with my dad and my sister. It is not just the act of shooting that is important to her, but being able to belong to a kind, caring community. Reflecting on the camaraderie she found doing cowboy shooting, when she was finally allowed to as a 10-year-old, she writes that ‘no matter how slow, no matter how shy I was, my fellow shooters were always so supportive. And that’s what I love about this sport.’18 Grace found an amazing community of kind, responsible people – both adults and children – in SASS: Everyone, including people that I just met are always willing to lend a helping hand. They always have your best interests at heart. If there is something that you’re doing that is remotely unsafe, they are going to let you know. That’s another thing. The value on safety is held above anything else. However, she too is careful to mention brand names: ‘I am patiently waiting for a beautiful brand new pair of 38 Cimarron/Pietta pistols. And I have also received a whole rig from Mernickle Holsters.’ For Grace and the other children writing for Junior Shooters, the shooting community represents a kind of utopia, one well-stocked with brand-name gear and populated by people who are unfailingly kind, patient and welcoming. As she competes in SASS competitions, Grace becomes proficient and relishes the opportunity she has to educate a misguided public: when she is named a Cimarron Young Gun for the year of 2017. I was super excited about this because, for one, I got to tell all of my friends. This is also a great way for me to help clear up some of the bad rep that guns and shooting get. In the news, all you hear is shooting this, and shooting that. I do my best to educate others about how firearms can be used for fun. It is hard to imagine a better ambassador for the culture of firearms, or one who more instinctually works to promote the message of the gun industry. Hard to imagine, that is, until one reads a coming-of-age story by a very young shooter, detailing his initiation into SASS by his grandparents, ‘Mustang Ann’ and grandpa ‘Tucson,’ who begin taking him to their shooting matches when he is seven. ‘My name is Colby Furniss (AKA Kid Rango). I am eight years old. I live in Boise Idaho, and I am a professional gunfighter.’ His bildungsroman includes all the features of a classic Western, minus the violence and with the addition of birthday cake. We meet the man who initiates him into his life as a gunfighter: Curley Calhoon.

60 Laura Browder When I first saw him, I thought he was a very tall man that wore cool clothes. I was so shy when I met him, but after he met me, he walked right up to me, got on one knee, and shook my hand and introduced himself to me. He asked me what my name was and asked if I wanted to be a professional gunfighter. I told him in a quiet voice, “Yes.” Curley told me he could not hear me. I then mustarded up a little more voice and said “Yes!” Curley told me he was going to teach me how to be a professional gunfighter, but I had to promise him one thing. He made me promise that my schoolwork and grades came first. He also told me that I had to promise that I would always have fun while I’m shooting. After Curley approves his choice of name (‘Kid Rango.’ Curley said, ‘That is a fine cowboy name,’) Colby is ready to start his training. His grandparents begin teaching him the names of all of the parts of the gun. There are suspenseful passages, such as when he shoots for the first time: My heart was beating so loud it was hard for me to hear what he was saying over the thumping of my heart. Curley handed me a few bullets. My hands were shaking, but I was trying my best to not show how nervous I was. I just took a breath and took my time and loaded each bullet into my .45 pistol. I put my gun into my holster and waited for the commands to fire. Young Colby, in addition to being an avid devotee of cowboy shooting, clearly is also a gifted writer, well versed in constructing suspense, developing characters, and creating powerful story arcs. Over time, the shy Colby, who speaks so inaudibly that Curley cannot hear him, transforms into the self-confident Rango: when he participates in his first match, he is able to answer the questions of well-wishers: ‘I was trying to be very polite and answered in my best cowboy voice.’ And when asked if he was ready to go shooting, ‘I stayed calm and respectful and told them I was ready.’ In a familybonding moment, he asks his grandmother to be his hand judge, and she agrees. I was the happiest kid in the world. I then walked over to my grandpa, and he was so excited he did not have words for me winning. He gave me a great big hug and gave me a pat on the back and was able to get the words ‘Great job, Rango’ out. The narrative ends with Colby saving enough money to buy his first gun – and with him stepping into maturity: I am not the same shy gunfighter who started a few years ago. I am one of the club members and family and do my part to ensure that everyone is staying safe and always reminding people that they need to have fun19

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 61

Figure 3.1 Colby Furniss ‘Kid Rango.’ ‘I’m a Professional Gunfighter.’ Posted August 24, 2015. Junior Shooters Magazine

Shooting becomes a character-building experience – literally, in that Colby constructs an entirely new character, Rango, to participate. The community of cowboy action shooters becomes an expanded family in which young Rango has an important role to play. In this vision, the firearm can be the glue that binds a family together, insuring that knowledge will be passed down through the generations and that 21st-century children will be able to participate in a life that is, in the case of cowboy shooters, a reenactment of an imagined 19th-century existence. Since its founding in 1987, the Single Action Shooting Society, or SASS, according to the organization’s website, ‘promotes marksmanship and seeks to protect its members’ Second Amendment rights. SASS members share a common interest in preserving the history of the Old West and competitive shooting.’ Cowboy action shooting strongly emphasizes imaginative roleplaying. One of the unique aspects of SASS approved Cowboy Action Shooting™ is the requirement placed on costuming. Each participant is required to adopt a shooting alias appropriate to a character or profession of the late 19th century, a Hollywood western star, or an appropriate character from fiction. Their costume is then developed accordingly20

62 Laura Browder SASS shooters even write ‘memoirs’ in the guise of their newly chosen identities. As the NRA website explains, Whether or not you are interested in a 3-gun match from the old west or meeting like-minded people, you can relive your childhood playing “Cowboys and Indians” in this sport, and include the entire family. Cowboy Action Shooting helps 21st century people relate to the American west in the 1800s, since actual events from history may dictate the course-of-fire21 Cowboy action shooting allows its participants to remake themselves and renew themselves through the construction of fictional identities – it is extremely popular among women, who are able to insert themselves into many scenarios from which they would have been barred during the late 19th century, as well as children, who might not actually have gotten a chance to serve as five-year-old gunslingers. Thus, even for adult participants, cowboy action shooting is promoted as a return to childhood games – and to a vision of the Wild West that has its roots in the TV and filmic Westerns many of its older members may remember with fondness. This is clearly not the West of revisionist historians like Patricia Limerick and the many who have followed in her wake, a landscape full of complex interactions between African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian and European immigrants. Rather, it is a world of cowboy and Indians; the images one sees on SASS are almost exclusively of white shooters, nostalgically reenacting a world that never was. According to one cowboy action shooter interviewed for NRA Family, a section of the NRA website devoted to family-friendly articles, ‘“A lot of young people are getting involved with it. That’s our goal, to get young people here. It’s a family thing. Some people are in it strictly for competition. Some are in it for dress. Most are in it for the historical end of it. A lot of people in my age group came up watching Westerns.. . .” Even better, McCabe says, are the friendships that result from the competition. Some people drive out to the ranch in RVs and stay for the entire competition, which spans eight days. Being out here in the lonesome high desert, people bond. “You see people on the range display excellent manners,” he says. “A lot of ‘yes sir’s’ from the young people, and personal conflicts are not permitted. It’s a hobby, a game, and it just happens to involve firearms.’ In this vision, firearms are completely distanced from violence – they are simply the accessories for a nostalgic hobby, that is also romanticizing place, the “lonesome high desert.”’ Most compelling are the (ostensibly) first-person narratives of child shooters, in that they are presenting a child’s-eye view of their firearms experience – and thus seem to offer authenticity beyond packaged public-relations stories. For other children submitting their narratives to Junior Shooters, shooting not only connects them to nature, but makes them admire and appreciate their parents

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 63 and grandparents even more, whether they are participating in cowboy action shooting, like Colby/Rango, or going hunting. In ‘First Time Deer Hunting With Grandpa!!’ 11-year-old Abigail Taylor details how ‘my sweet, awesome, wonderful mom loaded my two sisters and me in the car and we headed for [the campsite].’ Although they do not bag a deer, As we entered camp, we were welcomed by the smell of my grandma’s wonderful cooking. We filled our bellies and packed our bags to go home because we had school the next day. I had so much fun spending the three days with my grandpa hunting. Even though I didn’t get a deer, it was a great opportunity and I had a great time. My dad always talked about going hunting with his dad as a child, a tradition that my grandpa and dad will continue with me and my younger sisters22 What parent or grandparent would not envy a scenario like that, when a child would willingly jettison a friend’s birthday party in order to spend three days of uninterrupted, electronics-free, family time together in the wilderness? This is a vision of family life that most parents and children can only dream of. Similarly, NRA Family focuses on shooting as a character-building activity and an escape from modern life. A September 18, 2017 article by Brandi Drapal, entitled ‘Hunting as a Family: It Isn’t About the Harvest’ tells the story of taking her 13- and 5-year-old sons hunting. After she and her older son spend the hour-long car ride talking about safety rules, they arrive at their destination. She writes: Once we set the blind in the “perfect” location, of course it was snack time! Strawberry toaster pastries it is! There were still a few more questions that couldn’t be left unanswered if you want to be the best 5-year-old hunter in south Florida, so we discussed the “hows” and “whys,” then set up for a long stretch of “silent” watching and waiting. As I sat back in my EZ chair I began to enjoy the serenity and tranquility of being in the middle of exactly nowhere. As, I looked at my child, sitting up tall in his camouflage doing his best to be quiet and still, I took a moment to thank my Lord and Savior for this amazing place we call home. Through hunting as a family, Drapal is able to teach her son patience, spend time in the outdoors with him, and fill him with pride in his accomplishments. Although her 5-year-old ultimately ends up scaring away the wild boar, leaving them empty-handed, Drapal realizes that her activities with her son have a deeper meaning: It became very clear that each moment leading up to, and the actual hunt in itself, were to be appreciated in a much deeper way. It was so much more than that hog! So much more than the kill! So much more than bag limits! So much more than keeping score!

64 Laura Browder As she concluded, ‘Few words were exchanged, and only few were needed to put a smile on our faces, memories in our hearts and a lesson taught that will last a lifetime. . .’23 As this selection of articles might indicate, NRA Family and Junior Shooters are full of stories intended to be inspiring in similar ways – revealing a universe of self-confident, hard-working children, cowboy action shooters, Olympic competitors, and hunters – all of whom are white. This is, perhaps, because participants, who are often politically conservative, might associate images of children of color with insurrection: think of images of Latin American revolutionary mothers from the 1970s, AK-47 balanced on one hip, baby on the other, or the popular posters by Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, which featured such images as a black mother seen from the rear, her baby resting comfortably on her shoulder, handgun grasped in its chubby fist. It is a vision of an America that is viewed through the golden light of nostalgia, in which guns are nothing more than tools to teach the virtues of patience, self-discipline, and hard work, while carrying on family traditions and strengthening family bonds. And it is a world largely unknown to those outside the community of gun enthusiasts. The general public first glimpsed this world after December 14, 2012, the date of the Sandy Hook massacre. The articles published in the New York Times, Slate, Huffington Post and other venues were all published in the weeks and months afterward. And although, of course, the NRA did not applaud Adam Lanza as a member of the youth shooting community, but instead focused on his severe mental illness, he and his mother had, in fact, followed the organization’s script of promoting family togetherness through the shooting sports. More than one journalist commented on the fact that Lanza had practiced at the shooting range with the mother whom he later killed. Nancy Lanza, a gun enthusiast, had started taking her sons shooting at local firing ranges. The gun that killed her, as well as the guns that killed the other victims, belonged to her.24 In fact, as a friend of Nancy Lanza told NBC news, ‘She told me she had wanted to introduce them to the guns to teach, especially Adam, a sense of responsibility.’ Apparently, it worked, at least within the limited framework of shooting at the range: ‘Guns require a lot of respect and she really tried to instill that. And he took to it. He loved being careful with them. He made it a source of pride.’25 In other words, the relationship that Adam Lanza and his mother had around guns was exactly what the NRA and the gun industry had been promoting: she had used their shooting experiences together as a means of bonding with her son, who had emotional difficulties and was considered perhaps to have Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. He had thrived under her tutelage and had developed exactly the relationship with guns that the industry advocated – one of pride and responsibility. And then he had used those guns to kill her, twenty children, and six other adults, including himself.

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 65

‘Refuse to be a victim’: The NRA’s outreach to women By the time the media discovered the story, of course, the gun industry’s focus on cultivating young gun enthusiasts had been going on for some time. In fact, as I dug deeper into my exploration of the industry’s outreach to youth – and the media firestorm that flared up once journalists discovered it – I could not help be reminded of the news focus that began in the 1980s (and still occasionally reappears) on the gun industry’s outreach to women. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, journalists discovered the novel topic of women and guns. It turned out, they discovered, that women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping were running advertisements for handguns, that it was possible for women to buy special bras in which to conceal their weapons, and even that in 1989 Smith and Wesson began manufacturing a special handgun, branded the LadySmith, designed especially for women. In 1990, the NRA created a women’s division, and began placing ads geared towards women in magazines such as People, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook. These ads did not focus on the role of guns in helping mothers and children bond. Rather, they presented a dystopian world in which single women were always in danger of encountering violence, and where police were incapable of protecting them. Single mothers, in order to be responsible, needed to arm themselves on order to ensure the safety of their families: one Beretta ad from the early 1990s featured a nightstand with a portrait of a smiling mom and her two daughters and a handgun; the text encouraged readers to ‘Tip the odds in your favor.’ Many stories noted the growing popularity of Women & Guns magazine, founded in 1989, as it hit the newsstands in 1991, with advertisers such as Feminine Protection, a Dallas-based purveyor of concealed-carry handbags and other accessories, and the American Huntress Bang Bang Boutique in Fort Lauderdale. (Paynter, 1991). The founding editor of Women & Guns, Sonny Jones, had an edgy style, which came out in such pieces as her editorial criticizing ‘Take Back the Night’ rallies. As she wrote, The whole thing reminds me of a funeral procession rather than a protest march. . .These people ask for help: form [sic] the legal system; from the police; and from society. They want help from everyone but themselves.. . .By apologetically asking for the violence to end, these women are missing the mark completely. Jones ended by saying, ‘Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for women taking back the night. . .at gun-point.’ (Jones, 1989). Jones’ article on the film Thelma and Louise, which ran in Women & Guns first newsstand issue, is purely celebratory: ‘Thelma and Louise take action on their rage against a male-dominated, corrupt social system. . .What is the problem here, anyway?’ (Jones, 1991). Under Jones, the magazine seemed a

66 Laura Browder pure expression of what came to be branded ‘armed feminism.’ Even bestselling progressive feminist author, Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, weighed in with praise for the magazine. (Browder, 2006). The NRA followed suit in 2002, launching a magazine called Woman’s Outlook. Woman’s Outlook was, unlike its harder-edge counterpart, Women & Guns, focused on a traditional vision of womanhood – and family. Woman’s Outlook, by contrast, featured game recipes, profiles of women going to the range for the first time, and décor for the hunting lodge. It lacked the edge of Women & Guns, and seemed, rather, to be aiming for a more upscale demographic: ‘When we don our formal gowns or fancy party dresses for those holiday socials, we need to be ever creative when it comes to our concealed carry methods.’ (Mehall, 2003). In the ‘Industry Spotlight’ section, an article entitled ‘The Makeup of a Huntress’ focuses on half of a husbandwife team of entrepreneurs: ‘Both a hunter and a lady, Carman Forbes has used her feminine side to help create one of Hunters’ Specialties’ most-popularselling products – the Camo-Compac.’26 (Phillips, 2004). Who could fail to enjoy reading about special lipstick pockets in hunting camouflage? Needless to say, journalists had a field day writing about concealed-carry purses and chapters of the Pink Pistols (a women’s shooting group). They delighted in pointing out that the gun industry was trying to target women since handgun sales had gone flat and hunters, as a group, seemed to be gradually dying out. Without exception, they trumpeted women and guns as a brand-new phenomenon. Woman’s Outlook only lasted four years. Eventually, it was replaced by the ‘educational website’ NRA Women, presented by Smith & Wesson, and by NRA Family. Programs on the NRA channel are available through Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast, and include Armed and Fabulous, the series Love at First Shot, and a series of videos in which female instructors teach ‘Tips and Tactics.’ As the home page for NRA Women exhorts its viewers, ‘NRA Women is designed for female gun enthusiasts. It’s a resource for news, education, events and more. And we’re telling more stories of empowered women like you. Come explore, connect, celebrate and unite with the women of NRA.’27 Glossier than ever, the website features the same kind of white, trim, suburban-looking women as did the print magazine which preceded it. Journalists writing about women and guns had often included quotations from gun-control leaders questioning the wisdom of women arming themselves (leading, inevitably, to the backlash by gun industry spokeswomen who attacked such remarks as demeaning – and even to something called ‘armed feminism.’) Pitting the Million Moms against the Second Amendment Sisters could be a fascinating exercise in cultural analysis. But then came Sandy Hook, and journalists discovered that, in fact, women were not the only demographic the gun industry was focusing on as a way of propping up sagging sales. Journalists taking a closer look at Woman’s Outlook may have noticed its focus on the importance of mothers in transmitting gun

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 67 culture through the generations. As the caption on the cover of the May 2003 issue of the magazine, depicting a smiling mom, her two young kids, and their guns, read: ‘Thanks, Mom!’ The Mother’s Day feature inside focused on the important bond mothers and daughters could develop through a shared interest in firearms. The cover of the December 2003 issue advertised ‘the perfect present – Choosing Your Child’s 1st Gun.’ The March 2004 cover featured a piece on ‘Family tradition: Passing on the Love of Hunting.’ Despite the articles on the perfect recipe for sweet and sour dove, as well as the best concealed carry holsters for holiday wear, the real focus on the magazine was, arguably, on recruiting children. The stories on women and guns had often had an amusing, or amused, tone. But the journalists and a large swath of the public were still haunted by images of the surviving Sandy Hook children walking out of the school, eyes shut tight on the orders of the rescue workers so that they would not see the dead bodies of their friends. The ‘new’ phenomenon of children and guns seemed much less entertaining.

Conclusion: The long history of children and guns in the United States Just as guns and gun-related merchandise and advertisements for women were hardly a new phenomenon in the 1980s when discovered by journalists, so too is there a long history of gun ads featuring children. And over a century ago, as today, children were used by firearms manufacturers as a way of disassociating their products from the possibility of violent death. During the first heyday of women’s gun culture, in the final two decades of the 19th century, when countless ads featured women hunting alone or with other women, or trapshooting (as a way of attracting men), ads featuring children and guns were popular as well. In these ads, guns were presented as being so unthreatening that they were safe for young girls, as well as for women. An 1891 calendar for the Union Metallic Cartridge Co. shows a girl who cannot be more than four or five years old, surrounded by eight hunting dogs and carrying a rifle.28 Sometimes girls were used in even more provocative images. A 1903 ad for Iver Johnson safety hammer automatic revolvers, for example, shows a little girl in a nightgown holding a revolver which she has pointed right at her face. The caption, written in childish script across her picture, reads ‘“Papa says it won’t hurt me.”’ The main text advises readers that ‘an Iver Johnson revolver can lie around the house.’29 Was there really an expectation on the part of the gun industry that little girls would cuddle up at night with their father’s handguns, or that adorable post-toddlers would take enormous rifles out to hunt with? Not necessarily. Rather, the children were window dressing – a way of disassociating these weapons with danger or violence.

68 Laura Browder These ads appeared at roughly the same time that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, seen by millions of Americans and Europeans from the 1880s well into the 20th century, packaged the conquest of the American frontier as entertainment rather than violence. It was therefore fitting that the most famous two shooters in the Wild West were children – or at the very least, portrayed as child-like. Lillian Smith was actually a child. She joined the show as a thirteen-yearold, but had, according to the show program, begun shooting at seven. The petite Annie Oakley, known as ‘Little Miss Sure Shot,’ worked hard to appear childlike; she skipped into the ring like a little girl, pouted, and wore her hair long, rather than up, as most grown women did. She wore girlish clothes long after her age-mates had graduated to more mature-looking dresses, and claimed in her autobiography that she had been fifteen when she met her husband and manager, Frank Butler (she was actually 22 at the time). And, as the program notes related, she had helped support her family as a young girl by hunting and selling game. Likewise, the Western-themed dime novels whose popularity was closely linked to the Wild West shows featured very young girls – like fourteen-yearold Wild Jeannette, the Maid of the Gold Hills – who were nonetheless great shots. Sometimes, shooting – and killing – was a family affair: In ‘Merciless Ben the Hair-Lifter. A Story of the Far South-West,’ Ben’s daughter Anna joins him in killing Indians: ‘with a whisper to his girl to begin on the right, he would take the left, the Hair-Lifter fired, and at the flash of his gun Anna’s Winchester spoke out with its sharp voice of death.’30 Anna and other dime novel heroines were not afraid to use their weapons to deal death to their enemies. However, they were more clearly fantasy figures than were the young shooting stars in the Wild West shows (Buffalo Bill, within a year of opening his Wild West, had over fifty rival shows to contend with). One can draw a direct line from the Wild West shows through movie and television Westerns and end up today at the cowboy action quick-draw shooting events hosted by SASS. Yet by the turn of the century, guns were also marketed to children – as wholesome family fun. In an 1897 Daisy Air Rifle ad, parents, children and even grandparents are all gathered in front of the rifle range – in their family parlor. Daisy was a name that evoked innocence, much as the Crickett and Chipmunk rifles would a century later. In a King air rifle ad from the same period, a boy and a girl, who both appear to be five or six, are shooting together. A girl of perhaps 10 or so, in a Plymouth breech loading air rifle ad, shoots at a target affixed to a tree in front of her house, while her two younger brothers and parents all look on. Two chubby girls of four or five years old target-shoot with their single shot Daisy in a 1905 ad.31 The new century ushered in a spate of advertisements for somewhat real guns (BB guns and air rifles) as well as toy guns for children that has continued unabated to this day. Even though toy guns surged in popularity after both world wars, and had sales boosts from the production of gangster movies and Westerns, they have declined in popularity since the 1980s – and police departments

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 69 have grown increasingly uneasy about guns that too closely resemble the real things. Although federal law mandates that realistic-looking Airsoft guns have an orange tip to distinguish them from real guns, many of my students remembered coloring the tips black to make the guns appear more real. It’s unclear just how helpful those orange tips are anyway in helping police officers distinguish the Airsofts from actual weapons; a federally funded 1989 experiment found that cops confused even orange-tipped guns with real weapons 96% of the time. After the 2014 shooting death of Tamir Rice at the hands of a cop who mistook his toy gun for the real thing, more and more vicinities are banning realistic-looking weapons32 (Fisher, 2014). However, the gun industry continues to work hard to interest children in real weapons – and, more to the point, to use their innocence by association to divorce these weapons from bloodshed: it is telling that, in the glowing narratives of family hunting trips ostensibly written by mothers and their children on NRA and NSSF websites, animals are rarely killed. There is never a moment of reckoning with the bloody realities of hunting – the gun is merely a prop whose presence makes family closeness possible. There are, however, signs that this narrative may be endangered. A month after the February 14, 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida shootings, its teenaged survivors, along with high school students across the nation, walked out of their schools in one of the biggest student demonstrations in U.S. history, and the largest American gun control demonstration ever (Six Victories, 2018). In impassioned tones, a diverse coalition of youths across the nation gave voice to their demand to stop gun violence and prevent easy access to weapons. Ten days later they were joined by hundreds of thousands around the world in the March for Our Lives, whose focus was a demand for stricter gun laws in the United States. Although it remains to be seen whether momentum will continue to build for the gun-control movement, early indications are that the real voices of youth – urgent in their pleas to limit access to the weapons that have made school shootings in the United States a shockingly predictable feature of American life – will prove more effective than the manufactured nostalgia of the Junior Shooters.

Notes 1 Jade Moldae. “U.S. Firearms Industry 2017: Facing A Softened Market, Industry Has Case For Optimism.” Shooting Industry. www.shootingindustry.com/u-s-fire arms-industry-2017/. “American Built Arms Company and Keystone Sporting Arms, LLC Announce OEM Partnership.” April 7, 2017. www.ammoland.com/ 2017/04/american-built-arms-company-keystone-sporting-arms-llc-announceoem-partnership/#ixzz4tdzQqAka www.ammoland.com/2017/04/americanbuilt-arms-company-keystone-sporting-arms-llc-announce-oem-partnership/ #axzz4tdySOCBX. Retrieved September 24, 2017.

70 Laura Browder 2 Trip Gabriel. “Girl’s Death by Gunshot Is Rejected as Symbol” New York Times, May 5, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/us/kentucky-town-rejects-girlsgun-death-as-a-symbol.html?mcubz=0. Retrieved September 18, 2017 “Child Access Prevention.” Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. http://smartgunlaws. org/gun-laws/policy-areas/child-consumer-safety/child-access-prevention/#state. “No charges to be filed in Ky. Child’s shooting death.” WLWT5, July 8, 2013. Downloaded September 18, 2017. 3 Nick Wing, “This Is What Happens When the Gun Industry Sees Kids as Customers.” Huffington Post, May 14, 2013, Retrieved August 8, 2017. www. huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/gun-industry-kids_n_3248127.html 4 Josh Harkinson. “Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers.” Mother Jones, June 14, 2016. www.motherjones.com/poli tics/2016/06/fully-loaded-ten-biggest-gun-manufacturers-america/. Retrieved September 24, 2016. 5 George Zornick. “Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.” The Nation, June 29, 2017. www.thenation.com/article/gun-sales-are-plummetingand-trump-wants-to-help/. Retrieved September 24, 2017. 6 Jade Moldae. “U.S. Firearms Industry 2017: Facing A Softened Market, Industry Has Case For Optimism.” Shooting Industry. www.shootingindustry.com/u-s-fire arms-industry-2017/. Retrieved September 24, 2017. 7 www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/28/the_gun_industry_wants_to_sel l_your_kid_an_ar_15_the_new_york_times_investigates.html. Retrieved September 15, 2017. 8 “Selling a New Generation on Guns.” Mike McIntire. New York Times, January 26, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/selling-a-new-generation-onguns.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&smid=tw-share. Retrieved September 14, 2017. 9 Charles Derber. Sociopathic Society: A People’s Sociology of the United States. New York: Routledge, 2013. 10 www.nrawomen.tv/refuse-to-be-a-victim. Retrieved September 30, 2013. 11 Lisa Parsons. “Get the Inside Track on the Fastest Growing Market!” (Women in the Shooting Sports. Shooting Industry, April 1, 2012, p. 20. 12 Doug Howlett. “Choosing Your Child’s First Gun.” November 16, 2012. NRA American Hunter. www.americanhunter.org/articles/2012/11/16/choosing-yourchilds-first-gun/. Retrieved September 30, 2013. 13 www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2017/09/daniel-zimmerman/nras-eddie-eaglechild-safety-program-has-now-reached-30-million-children/. Retrieved September 24, 2017. Michael B. Himle, MS; Raymond G. Miltenberger, PhD; Brian J. Gatheridge, MS; and Christopher A. Flessner, MS. “An evaluation of two procedures for training skills to prevent gun play in children.” Pediatrics, 113(1), January 2004. Downloaded from pediatrics.aappublications.org/ on September 18, 2017. 14 ABC News 20/20’s Young Guns: A Diane Sawyer Special. January 31, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jmAnRIIpv8. Retrieved September 30, 2017. 15 https://eddieeagle.nra.org/. Retrieved September 25, 2017. 16 www.nrafamily.org/articles/2017/8/3/nra-youth-education-summit-2017-lead ing-the-legacy/. Retrieved September 14, 2017. 17 Ashley Rumble. “Volunteering for Scooters Youth Hunting Camp.” Posted May 25, 2017. www.juniorshooters.net/2017/05/25/volunteering-for-scooters-youthhunting-camp/ Retrieved September 18, 2017. 18 Grace Masa. “Why I Love Cowboy Action Shooting.” Posted September 5, 2017, Junior Shooter. www.juniorshooters.net/2017/09/05/why-i-love-cowboy-actionshooting/. Retrieved September 18, 2017.

‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 71 19 Colby Furniss “Kid Rango.” “I’m a Professional Gunfighter.” Posted August 24, 2015. www.juniorshooters.net/2015/08/24/im-a-professional-gunfighter/. Retrieved September 18, 2017. 20 www.sassnet.com/About-What-is-SASS-001A.php. Retrieved September 29, 2017. 21 www.ssusa.org/articles/2017/6/21/all-about-cowboy-action-shooting/. Retrieved September 29, 2017. 22 Abigail Taylor. “First Time Deer Hunting With Grandpa!!” Junior Shooter, February 3, 2016. www.juniorshooters.net/2016/02/03/first-time-deer-huntingwith-grandpa/. Retrieved September 20, 2017. 23 Brandi Drapal. “Hunting as a Family: It Isn’t About the Harvest.” www.nrafamily. org/articles/2017/9/18/hunting-as-a-family-it-isnt-about-the-harvest/. Retrieved September 29, 2017. 24 “A Mother, a Gun Enthusiast, and the First Victim.” Matt Flegenheimer and Ravi Somaiya. New York Times, December 15, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2012/12/ 16/nyregion/friends-of-gunmans-mother-his-first-victim-recall-her-as-generous. html?mcubz=0. Retrieved September 14, 2017. 25 “Connecticut school shooting: Adam Lanza’s mother thought guns ‘would teach him responsibility.’” Philip Sherwill. The Telegraph, December 17, 2012. www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9751240/Connecticutschool-shooting-Adam-Lanzas-mother-thought-guns-would-teach-him-responsibil ity.html. Retrieved September 14, 2017. 26 John E. Phillips. “Industry Spotlight.” Woman’s Outlook, vol. 2, number 3. March 2004, 22. 27 http://www.nrawomen.tv/home. Retrieved September 16, 2017. 28 Union Metallic Cartridge Co., 1891. In Strauss, American Sporting Advertising, vol. 1. 29 Iver Johnson ad, McClure’s Magazine, July 1903. 30 Laura Browder. Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006, pp. 89, 90, 80. 31 http://www.womenandguns.vcu.edu/. Retrieved September 16, 2017. 32 Marc Fisher. “Bang: The troubled legacy of toy guns.” Washington Post, December 22, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bang-the-troubledlegacy-of-toy-guns/2014/12/22/96494ea8-86f8-11e4-9534-f79a23c40e6c_story. html?utm_term=.e1acfa372a32. Retrieved September 18, 2017.

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‘The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15’ 73 Marcotte, A. (2013) “The gun industry wants to sell your kid an AR-15.” Slate. Available at: www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/28/the_gun_industry_wants_to_sell_your_ki d_an_ar_15_the_new_york_times_investigates.html (Accessed: 1 October 2017). Masa, G. (2017) “Why i love cowboy action shooting.” Junior Shooter. Available at: www.juniorshooters.net/2017/09/05/why-i-love-cowboy-action-shooting/ (Accessed: 18 September 2017). McIntire, M. (2013) “Selling a new generation on guns.” The New York Times. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/us/selling-a-new-generation-on-guns.html?page wanted=1&_r=0&smid=tw-share (Accessed: 14 September 2017). Mehall, K. (2003) “Tis the season.” Woman’s Outlook, 1(12), p. 6. Moldae, J. (2017) “U.S. firearms industry 2017: facing a softened market, industry has case for optimism.” Shooting Industry. Available at: www.shootingindustry.com/u-sfirearms-industry-2017/. Parsons, L. (2012) “Get the inside track on the fastest growing market! (Women in the shooting sports).” Shooting Industry, April 1, p. 20. Paynter, S. (1991) “Magazine shoots for equality.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, p. B1. Phillips, J. (2004) “Industry spotlight.” Woman’s Outlook, 2(3), p. 22. Read, J. (2013) “5-year-old, fatally shot self with babysitter Melissa Ann Ringhardt’s gun: police.” Huffington Post. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2013/10/23/john-read-melissa-ann-ringhardt_n_4149408.html (Accessed: 18 September 2017). www.nrawomen.tv/refuse-to-be-a-victim (Accessed: 13 September 2017). Rumble, A. (2017) “Volunteering for scooters youth hunting camp.” Available at: www. juniorshooters.net/2017/05/25/volunteering-for-scooters-youth-hunting-camp/ (Accessed: 18 September 2017). Sherwill, P. (2012) “Connecticut school shooting: Adam Lanza’s mother thought guns ‘would teach him responsibility’.” The Telegraph. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9751240/Connecticut-school-shooting-AdamLanzas-mother-thought-guns-would-teach-him-responsibility.html (Accessed: 14 September 2017). www.ssusa.org/articles/2017/6/21/all-about-cowboy-action-shooting/ (Accessed: 29 September 2017). www.sassnet.com/About-What-is-SASS-001A.php (Accessed: 29 September 2017). “Six victories for the gun control movement since the Parkland massacre.” (2018). The Guardian. (U.S. edition). Available at: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/ 26/gun-control-movement-march-for-our-lives-stoneman-douglas-parkland-buildsmomentum (Accessed: 2 June 2018). Spies, M. (2016) “When children pull the trigger, who is responsible? Not gun owners, the NRA says.” Newsweek. Available at: www.newsweek.com/2016/10/21/whenkids-pull-trigger-who-responsible-507656.html (Accessed: 28 May 2018). Strauss, B. (1987) American Sporting Advertising. Vol. 1. unpaginated. Taylor, A. (2016) “First time deer hunting with grandpa!!” Junior Shooter. www. juniorshooters.net/2016/02/03/first-time-deer-hunting-with-grandpa/ (Accessed: 20 September 2017). Wing, N. (2013) “This is what happens when the gun industry sees kids as customers.” Huffington Post. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/gun-industrykids_n_3248127.html (Accessed: 8 August 2017).

74 Laura Browder WLWT5 (2013). “No charges to be filed in Ky. Child’s shooting death. Available at: www.wlwt.com/article/no-charges-to-be-filed-in-ky-child-s-shooting-death/ 3533091 (Accessed: 18 September 2017). Zornick, G. (2017) “Gun sales are plummeting and Trump wants to help.” The Nation. Available at: www.thenation.com/article/gun-sales-are-plummeting-and-trumpwants-to-help/ (Accessed: 24 September 2017).

4

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles A review of the empirical evidence George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan

Introduction Regulating access to firearms is a contentious issue among policy makers, but that does not mean common ground is impossible. There is general acceptance, for example, that certain classes of individuals should not have access to firearms for fear they will be used for self-harm or in the commission of a violent act. However, this consensus breaks down when it comes to deciding how best to achieve the desired result of keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ Historically, Congress has worked to keep guns from potentially dangerous individuals by banning firearm ownership for felons (1968) and by mandating a background check process that screens for such prohibited possessors (1994). States have also increasingly enacted legislation that extends background checks to private sales and transfers (LCPGV, 2018). Recent estimates suggest that these types of regulatory measures are generally effective. For instance, a 2015 national survey of firearm owners found that 22% of respondents acquired their most recent firearm (i.e., within two years or less) without a background check, down from an estimated 40% in 1994 when the Brady Act was first passed (Miller, Hepburn and Azrael, 2017). Analyses also suggest that the federal background check system has helped to prevent the purchase of more than 3 million firearms to persons legally prohibited from possessing a gun (Karberg et al., 2017). However, despite existing regulations, studies have found that prohibited possessors are still able to obtain guns with relative ease, primarily through the secondary and/or illegal market. Studies show that in some jurisdictions, crime guns – or recovered guns associated with violent or firearm-related crimes – are disproportionately bought at a very small number of lawful dealers (Wintemute, Cook and Wright, 2005; Braga et al., 2012; Braga, 2017). Though it is not entirely clear from these studies whether licensed dealers are knowingly engaging in illicit sale practices, findings suggest that there is some combination of less-than-careful screening of purchasers and/or intentional off-the-books transactions. Given that illicit gun markets are highly localized phenomena, it is critical that scholars continue to engage in diverse analyses of how guns are illegally

76 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan sourced. The present essay focuses specifically on Los Angeles – a region in California that has long been a driver of gun violence in the local area and the state more broadly (Pear et al., 2018). In the remaining chapter, we provide a review of the extant research on the illicit firearm market in Los Angeles, including both a trace study we conducted with Ridgeway and colleagues from 2008 – the first of its kind – and a more recent jail survey of detained gun offenders that we conducted in concert with the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab (see Cook, Parker and Pollack, 2015). After presenting an overview of each study, including methods and findings, we provide examples of policy prescriptions and recommendations that leverage the results from each respective study. Overall, while the RAND work concluded that straw purchases were an important source of illegally procured guns, the more recent jail survey does not find strong support for this claim. Consistent with findings from other inmate surveys (see Cook, Parker and Pollack, 2015; Cook, 2018b), less than 3% of reported guns (n=2) were directly obtained through theft and less than 7% (n=5) were acquired through a straw purchase –a legal purchase of a firearm that is illegally transferred to a prohibited person. Despite these seemingly contradictory findings, many of the illicit gun transactions detailed by our jail respondents suggest that home and vehicle burglaries might serve as the intermediary source that feeds the local market. We conclude with a plan for a mixed-methods replication of the prior research that might help reconcile whether different data sources lead to different conclusions, or if there has been a change in Los Angeles’ illegal firearms market.

Using trace data to examine Los Angeles’ illegal gun market The National Institute of Justice funded a group of interdisciplinary scholars to conduct a study of the illegal gun market in Los Angeles in the early 2000s in light of the unacceptably high rates of gun violence that plagued the region in the 1990s (Ridgeway et al., 2008). The primary goal was to design and implement interventions that employed a ‘problem-solving approach’ to gun violence reduction –one that designs initatives using the expertise of different local stakeholders and that reflects the current problems and conditions facing a target community (Kennedy, Piehl and Braga, 1996; McGarrell et al., 2006; Braga and Weisburd, 2012; Braga, Weisburd and Turchan, 2018). Given prior work suggesting that most crime guns are obtained illegally, the project team hypothesized that by learning about the inner workings of the illicit market we could better develop supply side interventions that might better disrupt the cycle of violence affecting certain communities in the city. As a result, the 2008 RAND study was a dual empirical and program design/implementation project. Below we detail the elements of each component: a trace data analysis of crime guns in one specific LA community, and the implementation and evaluation of a letter campaign to dissuade straw purchasing. Also, before delving into our review, it should be noted that Los Angeles was a much more violent region during the study period when compared to

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 77 other metro areas then, and when compared to itself today. For example, while it turned out to be temporary, homicide had spiked by 27% in 2000 and then just over 10% in 2001. Only New York City had a higher overall violent crime rate at the time, but Los Angeles’ homicide rate of 9.3 murders/100,000 residents far outpaced New York’s rate of 7.3 murders/100,000 residents (FBI, 2018a, 2018b). Though LA’s homicide rate is now the lowest among comparable large cities in the United States (LAPD, 2018), guns and gangs continue to play a key role driving city homicide rates. During the early 2000s, 64% of homicides involved a gun (MacDonald, Wilson and Tita, 2005) and gang involvement was an estimated component of approximately 50% of those homicides (Tita and Abrahamse, 2004). The most current numbers reported by the LAPD report that 69% of homicides involve a firearm and 63% involve gang members (LAPD, 2018).

Trace analysis Methodological overview

The original 2008 analysis of LA’s illegal firearm market was conducted by the lead author and a group of other researchers from the RAND Corporation and used two data sources: 1)ATF trace data on recovered guns and 2) Dealer Record of Sale (DROS) data from the California Department of Justice. ATF trace data includes information about a gun’s ‘first point of sale,’ or when an FFL first legally sells a gun to a purchaser. DROS data is unique to California in that the state mandates that all private sales be conducted through a licensed FFL and that these transactions undergo the same scrutiny and oversight as initial purchases, including a background check and a 10-day waiting period. The data used spanned a period of over 16 months (Jan 2002–April 2003) and focused on one particularly violent policing area of the LAPD – the 77th Street policing division. In addition to containing information on the type of firearm and when/where the last legal transaction took place (including the place of residence of the buyer and seller), the data included measures identified as important potential indicators of illicit trafficking. These measures include: overrepresentation of particular FFLs; differences between the sex of the last known legal purchaser and last known possessor; wide difference in ages of purchaser and possessor; and a short time-frame between when the last legal transaction occurred and when the gun was used in a crime. LAPD submitted 1,477 firearms for tracing, but because of incomplete data (obliterated serial number, or gun sale prior to to records collection), only 67% (n=989) of recovered guns were successfully traced. Findings

Consistent with the problem-solving model, stakeholders from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies along with local community groups

78 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan provided their expertise and insight into the nature of the city’s illicit firearm market. Before looking at the actual data, the conventional wisdom was that that many of the ‘crime guns’ were last legally purchased in states with less stringent oversight, such as Arizona and Nevada. Gun shows (especially those in neighboring states) we are also implicated. However, our data told a different story: not only were the majority of legal purchases made in California, they were made within Los Angeles County. Consistent with other studies (ATF, 2008, 2017), we found that 67.8% of firearms in our sample (670/989) were purchased in California, and that in one-third of all cases, the last legal purchaser and the last known possessor (who was not the documented purchaser) of the recovered crime gun lived within 4.5 miles of one another. As noted in the final report, ‘Though we are unable to determine how the firearm came into the possession of the illegal possessor (e.g., stolen, unreported transaction, straw purchase), this clearly demonstrates that much of the illegal firearm market is ‘local’ (Ridgeway et al., 2008, p. 340). Some local community stakeholders in the working group believed that the local market was sourced by a small number of illicit dealers that would come into the area and sell large quantities of firearms out of the trunk of their car. Because we focused on an area impacted by urban street gangs, we examined whether certain gangs were potentially driving this flow of firearms to the illicit market. If this were the case, we surmised that the recoveries occurring within a gang’s turf would be traced back to a specific source. We found no evidence to support either claim. First, the spatial distribution of recovered crime guns did not cluster by the originating FFLs in any part of the community, regardless of whether or not a gang claimed it as their turf. Also, more than 80% of successful traces returned a dealer that only showed up once or twice as a source for guns, refuting the notion that a single (or even a few) local FFLs were the source of local crime guns. Among the 24 dealers identified as having sold between 4 and 19 of the recovered crime guns, there were few surprises. That is, the number of traces they generated was generally in line with the overall volume of sales. Additionally, 2 of the 24 dealers were already under investigation for the possibility that they were involved in the trafficking of firearms. Finally, though rates were elevated for cases in which the last known legal purchaser was a female but that last known possessor was male (indicator of a ‘straw purchase’), it was no different than the proportion of female to male legal transfers recorded in the DROS data. Age differences did not emerge as a key finding in the report either. Discussion

The main takeaway message from the 2008 analysis was that crime guns in Los Angeles are sourced locally. We did not find evidence that guns were trafficked into the target community by direct purchases from outside sources or by rouge retailers/FFLs. Again, this conclusion was based upon the fact that

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 79 many of the last known legal purchasers of the recovered crime guns lived in close proximity to where the gun was used/confiscated. Though this finding is not inconsistent with the narrative that crime guns are primarily stolen and then sold in the extralegal market, the working group decided to treat ‘straw purchasers’ as an important source of guns because of the strong geographic relationship between last known legal purchase and recovery. Below we summarize the policy response developed by the researchers and their working group partners.

Policy response: Letter campaign Design overview

If local residents were indeed initiating straw purchases on behalf of prohibited possessors in the target area, the RAND team concluded that dissuading such purchases might have an important impact on the local illegal market. Drawing upon specific deterrence theory (Nagin, 1998), we hypothesized that because straw purchasers are technically not ‘criminals’ (i.e., they can still legally purchase a firearm), increasing the (perceived) risk for legal action may be more effective with this group. Using this logic, a letter campaign was launched to dissuade straw purchases and potential straw purchasers. We provide only a brief overview of the effort below.The full details of the intervention are covered in detail both in the final report (Ridgeway et al., 2008) and in a subsequent evaluation of the effort (Ridgeway et al., 2011). A direct-mail campaign involved sending a letter to new gun buyers within the 10-day waiting period between purchasing and taking possession of a gun. In addition to reminding the new owner of the importance of securely storing the firearm and reporting incidents of theft of the weapon, the letter stated that the firearm purchase had been documented and that, should it be used in a crime, the gun can and would be traced back to them as the first legal purchaser. Importantly, the letter noted that the purchaser could be held to answer for the gun should it be used in the commission of a crime. It is important to note that while the city of Los Angeles did have such laws on the books at the time of the intervention, it was rarely, if ever, enforced. As of July 1, 2017, however, California Penal Code now makes it illegal to falsely report or fail to report a gun stolen in the entire state of California. Future research into the application of the new law and whether or not it has a measurable impact on reporting would provide useful insight for other jurisdictions considering such options. Findings

The letter campaign was implemented in three intervals between August 2005 and December 2006. Sale records were obtained for all individuals that received and didn’t receive letters until July 2007. Evaluation results indicate

80 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan that those who received the letter reported their guns stolen at a significantly higher rate (Ridgeway et al., 2011. Specifically, the treatment group (received a letter) were more than twice as likely to report gun theft as the control group (no letter sent.) On average, stolen guns were reported 6 months after purchase, yet those receiving the letter reported their gun stolen 20 days sooner than the control group. Unfortunately, there were not enough stolen guns in our sample for the difference to be statistically significant. It was posited that the guns purchased by the owners targeted with the letter would be less likely to become crime guns, but the rates at which they became crime guns were statistically indistinguishable: 17 per 1,000 guns per year for letter recipients and 16 per 1,000 guns per year for those not receiving the letter. During the relatively short study period (22 months beginning in May 2007 through September 2008), a total of 2,120 guns were purchased in the two target neighborhoods. Of these, about 1% were recovered as crime guns. Given that 87% of all crime guns are recovered more than two years after the first retail purchase, the ability to draw definitive conclusions on whether the intervention was able to disrupt the illegal firearms market is limited. Discussion

It must be noted again that the RAND study never ruled out theft as an important intermediate source for guns recovered in crimes or in the possession of prohibited possessors. In fact, it was noted that some individuals might report their guns stolen when they were actually illegally trafficked to other individuals. However, the group felt confident that the interpretation of the data, which our discussions with our working group partners only served to verify, painted a clear picture that ‘straw purchases’ were an important avenue for intervention. The RAND study suggests that legal gun purchasers are susceptible to market-based interventions. The letter increased the likelihood that new gun owners reported thefts of recently purchased firearms. The available data does not permit one to conclude, however, whether individual traffickers were able to thwart the system by reporting their recently purchased guns as stolen when, as some in the working group suggested, they were not stolen at all. Instead, it was argued that the straw purchaser falsely reported the gun as stolen to abdicate any responsibility should the gun be recovered in a future crime. The City of Los Angeles revisited the letter campaign after pilot project ended in 2008 and expanded it citywide from January 1, 2013–September 1, 2015. Although subsequent research by Hunt, Parast and Weinberger (2017) failed to find a measureable impact on gun crime, they argued that because the letter campaign required relatively little financial investment (about $55,000 per year), even a very small decrease in gun crime or violence would far out weight the costs.

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 81

Beyond trace data: Examining local, illicit gun markets with arresstees in LA county jails The other method that is often used to examine illegal firearm sources is surveys with incarcerated populations. Wright and Rossi (1994) pioneered this practice with their study of nearly 1,900 felons in 10 different states. Among respondents with a prior gun history, they found that 44% acquired their most recent gun from either family or friends, and another quarter acquired their firearm ‘on the street’ (e.g., through drug dealers). Additionally, while the most common means for acquiring a firearm was through a purchase or trade (50%), theft accounted for over one third of respondents’ gun transactions. Three decades later, findings remain relatively consistent. In their study of incarcerated youth, Sheley and Wright (1993) found that nearly one-third their sample obtained their most recent firearm through a friend or family member, and 43% were obtained through street sources, including drug dealers and users. Youth also commonly characterized theft as a likely source, yet only 12% acquired their most recent firearm in this way. The most recent 2004 Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities reports similar trends: nearly 70% of gun transactions were conducted through social connections or ‘street’ sources; 50% of respondents obtained their firearm through cash or trade; and theft, again, was rarely cited as a direct method of procurement. Figures are also relatively consistent in the parallel federal and jail survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice (see Cook, 2018a for a comparative review). While these national and multi-state studies have certainly informed our present knowledge of illegal gun sources and acquisition, these studies – because of their broad focus – cannot account for the nuances of locale, or how market dynamics vary by geographical location. Understanding this substantive gap in the literature, and the obvious temporal gap in empirical work on the issue, the Chicago Crime Lab launched a multi-city study of illegal gun markets to purposefully examine how illicit gun markets work and how they may look differently across geographical contexts. The overall goals for the project were to not only develop a more up-to-date knowledge base around illicit gun markets, but also to leverage such information to identify local and state strategies that can better disrupt illegal gun activity and, by extension, patterns of gun violence. The cities included in the study were Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Baltimore. While each city developed their own research plan, they all explicitly recruited individuals that were either a) serving time for a current gun-related offense, b) had some type of gun-related criminal history, or c) were at high-risk for gun offending and victimization (e.g., gang members). Given this chapter’s focus on Los Angeles, the remainder of this section will discuss the LA project in further detail and place the study’s findings in conversation with those found in other cities.

82 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan

Methodological overview In coordination with the Chicago Crime Lab, the Los Angeles team developed an interview protocol that would be administered to individuals presently detained for gun-related offenses within the LA County jail system. The LA County Sheriff provided the team with bi-weekly rosters of all individuals detained on at least one of 18 eligible offenses, including felon in possession of a firearm, assault with a firearm, and robbery with a firearm. During the 10month study period, 1,549 inmates satisfied screening criteria to be eligible for the study. However, per our agreement with the jails, individuals requiring special handling because of mental health issues or disruptive behavior were excluded (N=242 or 15.6%). From the remaining population (N=1307), 384 inmates were randomly sampled and 215 were contacted for participation. In total, 140 inmates agreed to participate in an interview, yielding a refusal rate of 34.9% (75/215). Similar to the general Los Angeles jail population, the final sample was predominantly men of color. 92% of the sample was male, and 81.4% of participants were people of color (45.7% Black and 35.7% Latino/a). The median age was 26 and 71.4% had attained a high school diploma/equivalent or less. Seventy percent report having been shot or shot at, and 46.4% of respondents reported gang membership at some point in their lives. See Table 4.1 for all sample demographics. With respect to local geography, all but four of our respondents lived within LA County prior to their incarceration. Specifically, 57% lived within LA City limits and 40% lived within other areas of the county. While respondents did not consistently provide the exact neighborhood they came from, either because they did not feel comfortable or refused, we were able to determine that respondents represent 14 of the 16 different geographic regions within LA County. The single region with the highest representation in our sample is South Los Angeles (30%), followed by the San Fernando Valley area of the city (13%), and then the Harbor area of both the city and county (10%). Interviews were conducted by a team of trained doctoral students, were audio recorded, and lasted between 45 and 120 minutes. Given respondents’ legal vulnerability as an (often pre-trial) incarcerated population, all interviews were anonymous. As a result, respondents were not directly asked to disclose any information about their current case, nor did we receive explicit information about individual charges from the LA County Sheriff. However, from the information volunteered by respondents, we know that 82.9% were prohibited possessors, either because of a prior felony or other legal restrictions. About 7% of the sample reported they were able to legally possess a gun, and another 10% provided no or unclear information. To put these figures in perspective, approximately 96% of total sampled population (N=315) were detained on at least one violation related to their prohibited possessor status. That being said, the vast majority of our respondents were indeed obtaining their guns illegally.

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 83 Table 4.1 Demographics of Respondents Male (n=129) Frequency Age (years) ≤ 20 21–30 31–40 41–50 ≥ 51 Missing Range Median age Mean age Race/Ethnicity Black/African-American Hispanic or Latino/a White Multiracial Other No response Education Not complete HS HS diploma/ GED Some college College degree Missing Gang affiliated? Yes Have been shot/shot at? Yes Know someone shot at? Yes

Percent

Female (n=11) Frequency

Percent

Total (n=140) Frequency

Percent

12 69 33 9 4 2

9.30% 53.49% 25.58% 6.98% 3.10% 1.55% 19 – 66 26 29.21

3 4 2 1 – 1

27.27% 36.36% 18.18% 9.09% – 9.09% 18 – 44 27.5 28

15 73 35 10 4 3

10.95% 52.14% 25.00% 7.14% 2.86% 2.14% 18 – 66 27 29.12

62 44 4 7 6 6

48.06% 34.11% 3.10% 5.43% 4.65% 4.65%

2 6 1 1 – 1

18.18% 54.55% 9.09% 9.09% – 9.09%

64 50 5 8 6 7

45.71% 35.71% 3.57% 5.71% 4.29% 5.00%

42 49 35 1 2

32.56% 37.98% 27.13% 0.78% 1.55%

3 6 1 – 1

27.27% 54.55% 9.09% – 9.09%

45 55 36 1 3

32.14% 39.29% 25.71% 0.71% 2.14%

61

47.49%

4

36.36%

65

46.43%

93

73.09%

5

45.50%

98

70.00%

68

52.71%

7

63.64%

75

53.57%

Source: Author’s calculations

The interview instrument contained both closed and open-ended questions that addressed the following thematic areas: knowledge of the illicit gun market in their community; personal experiences with gun acquisition, possession, carry, and use; perceptions of policing and community safety; and knowledge of gun laws and policies. Examples of specific questions that relate

84 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan to gun sources and the acquisition process included: ‘How might someone go about getting a gun in your community? Is there a process someone has to go through to get a gun on the street? Where do these guns come from? How did you get your most recent gun? Who and where did you get it from? Did you buy it, borrow or get it in some other way?’ Similar interview questions were fielded in the Chicago study as well. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with TAMS Analyzer Software. The team assumed a modified grounded theory approach to analysis whereby we engaged in several rounds of coding to identify emergent themes in the data. The first round of pilot coding included a review of 50 transcripts and resulted in 22 broad codes and 98 sub-codes, including ‘Market Access,’ ‘Market Source,’ ‘Market Transaction,’ ‘Gun Motivation,’ and ‘Gun Practices,’ among many others. The team applied this coding scheme to all transcripts in subsequent rounds, and added or modified codes when appropriate. Team members engaged in in-depth coding of specific codes depending on the deliverable. To date, the team has published three different articles using data from the study: Barragan et al. (2016), Chesnut et al. (2016) and Barragan et al. (2017). The following section summarizes some of the findings, focusing specifically on findings that relate to illegal market sources and forms of acquisition by respondents.

Findings Similar to Illinois, the State of California is fully surrounded by states with relatively lax gun laws. According the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s 2017 Annual Score Card, which grades states according to the strength of their respective gun laws and overall gun death rates, all three states bordering California have grades of ‘C’ or lower. California, on the other hand, has a solid ‘A’ rating, and is the only state in the country to possess that rank. Moreover, similar to Chicago, the City of Los Angeles has enacted more municipal codes that regulate the sale and purchase of firearms than any other city in both the county and state (Barragan et al., 2017). Los Angeles firearm retailers, for example, must take a fingerprint from every customer that purchases a gun or ammunition within their stores. Individuals are also required to report the theft of their firearm within 48 hours or face a misdemeanor charge. Given this legal context and research on illicit gun markets in other cities and states, one would assume that Los Angeles’ illicit gun market would be heavily sourced with out-of-state guns (Cook et al., 2015; Smith, 2016; Collins et al., 2017). As noted in the prior section, trace analyses suggest the opposite – nearly 70% of guns recovered in California were first sold within the state (ATF, 2008, 2017). Local trace analyses within Los Angeles also confirm this trend (Ridgeway et al., 2008). However, despite this consistency in findings, trace studies tell us little about the overall supply chain of illegal firearms. As Cook (2018b) points out, ‘Of the transactions in the supply chain that arm violent criminals, the best documented is the final transaction’; and

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 85 the best data on this final transaction tends to come from inmate or offender surveys (Cook, 2018a). Gun sources: Where and from whom did offenders get their guns from?

Most respondents interviewed for the Los Angeles jail survey perceived guns as ubiquitous within their immediate community, suggesting that there is little to no need for inter-state channels to supply their local market (Chesnut et al., 2016). As the following quotes suggest, regardless of where you are from in the region, guns are relatively easy to come by: We flip-flop them, we switch them, we trade them or [we] get go get more. . .it’s so easy I could call someone right now and get everything I needed. (R.104, Lancaster) A lot of people got guns more than they shooting them. . .it’s easy access. . .you just ask somebody for a gun, you feel me? (R. 90, South Bay) Twelve year olds could get a hold of a gun easy, especially if they part of a gang. (R.11, West LA) As the last respondent suggests, gangs do in some circumstances facilitate gun access. Indeed, most respondents suggested that access to guns among gang members is a given. Interestingly, though, of the 77 guns identified by respondents, only 7 different guns (or 10% total) were identified as being sourced by a fellow or external gang member, despite the fact that 46.4% of our sample admitted to gang membership at some point in their life. Though it is certainly plausible that the ‘friends’ that our gangaffiliated respondents noted as their immediate source were indeed gang members, we cannot assume that this was the case. What all of the above respondents do ultimately point to, however, is the importance of social connections. Consistent with inmate and arrestee surveys in Chicago (Cook et al., 2015) and Prince George County in Maryland (Collins et al., 2017), respondents rarely identified specific point sources – like gun shows, traffickers, or storefront retailers – as the direct source for their illegal firearm. In fact, only 5 of the 77 (7%) guns that respondents provided detailed information on were obtained from a retail store, including 3 legitimate dealers, one unregulated pawnshop owner in Arizona, and one outside gun trafficker ‘from Vegas’ (R.83, South LA). Instead, most respondents cited known social connections as the primary source for their most recent firearm. Specifically, 66.2% (51/77) were acquired from a family

86 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan Table 4.2 Gun Sources Total #

%

Known Social Connection Friend Mutual Friend Aquaintance Gang member (fellow or outside/enemy) Affective Family Straw Purchase (Illegal transfer)

51 15 6 10 7 2 5 6

66.20%

“Street Sources” Street: Drug Street: Stranger Police Street: Found

15 3 5 1 6

19.40%

Retailers or Traffickers Regulated Unregulated Trafficker

5 3 1 1

6.50%

Missing social tie or source

6

7.80%

77

100%

Total *Authors Calculations

member, fellow or rival gang member, romantic partner, friend, mutual friend, or acquaintance (See Table 4.2). For instance, Respondent 95 from Southeast LA purchased his most recent gun from ‘a guy he knew from being in the streets: He just said “What’s up, man. . .I got this gun, want to buy it?” I said, “Well let me check it out?” Sure enough, I liked it, I had cash on me, so I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna buy it.”’ Other respondents received, traded or bought their guns from closer social connections like family and fellow gang members: I gave the other gun I bought to one of my nephews, and in return, I got the 9-millimeter from him. (R.97, South LA) I spent a lot of my time in jail, so like at home, it’s like “Oh man, [he’s] back! Let’s see how he’s doing.” I started talking to [my friend] like, “No, I don’t really carry anything dirty. I’m straight.” [He said], “Look, I got something just for you. I got a surprise for you. . .Here you go.’ I’m like,

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 87 ‘Wow, are you serious?” “Go ahead. It’s going to protect you.” Of course I’m going to take it. (R.60, San Fernando Valley) All of the six straw purchases identified by respondents also leveraged their close social connections, including cousins, girlfriends, and acquaintances. The remaining 14 guns (18.2%) were obtained ‘on the street.’ Six of these guns (or 8%) were literally found on the street by respondents: ‘I just went into an abandoned house. . .and I went to try to go sleep and then I feel something next to me, I bumped into it and it was a gun’ (Respondent 111, South LA). The additional eight guns (10.2%) were sourced either by drug users, drug dealers, or other unfamiliar individuals. For example, Respondent 26 from West LA said that someone randomly approached him and asked if he ‘was looking to get this [gun]. They showed it to me and one thing led to another.’ Respondent 99 from Central LA bought his most recent gun through a similar chance encounter while he was hanging out in another neighborhood: Somebody asked me do I want to buy it, I told them no, then they said, “What do you do? Do you gangbang?” I said no. They said, “So you walk around here?” I’m like, yeah. They like,”‘So you walk around here, [and] you don’t gangbang?” I’m like, no. He was like, “So what do you do for a living?” I’m like “Well, I do rap. I be in the studios and stuff.” And he’s like, “So you’re a rapper and you be having jewelry and everything, [and] you don’t have no gun to protect yourself?” Pretty much persuaded me, [I] bought it, then I end up going to jail for it. Compared to other local studies, our ‘off the street’ figure is rather low, but this is likely due to differences in operationalization. Collins’ (2017) comparative study of gun sources in New Orleans, Chicago, and Prince George County uses respondent’s general knowledge of illicit gun sources in their area or ‘how respondents think guns are acquired in their jurisdiction’ (p. 117). Through this type of information is certainly valuable in developing broader understandings of local gun markets, our study focuses specifically on those that have admittedly participated in the illicit market. Thus, when we compare our findings to other similar studies, like the jail survey conducted in Chicago, we find that our street figures are rather consistent with other cities. Specifically, the Chicago team found that 15.6% of their sample obtained their gun on the street (Cook, Parker and Pollack, 2015). Nonetheless, regardless of definitional and proportional differences, what our findings ultimately highlight is that known social connections within the respondent’s immediate community play the most important role in the acquisition of firearms among offenders in Los Angeles, and that the connection need not be entirely close for that person to successfully obtain a firearm.

88 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan Gun acquisition: How do offenders acquire their firearms?

According to prior studies, offenders can acquire a firearm through various methods: they can buy a gun, trade goods for a gun, borrow a gun, steal a gun, or be gifted a gun (see Cook, 2018a for a review). Since most illicit guns are bought legally at some point, theft is often pointed to as the underlying culprit sourcing the black market (Cook, 2018b). When examining the raw figures on gun theft in America, this hypothesis is entirely reasonable. According to a recent national survey in 2015, researchers estimate that some 380,000 guns are stolen every year (Azrael et al., 2017). Another analysis also suggests that gun theft has been on the rise since 2005 (Freskos, 2017). On the other hand, while stealing a gun is inherently a crime, there is very little empirical evidence that these stolen guns end up being used in the commission of another crime (see Cook, 2018b for a recent analysis in Chicago). It was not entirely surprising then that we did not find theft to be a direct method for gun acquisition among our Los Angeles sample. Of all 77 reported guns, only 2 were directly stolen by respondents (See Table 4.3). Instead, respondents by and large acquired their firearm though a two-, or in some cases, three-party transaction. Of the 71 guns that we have transaction information for, 69% were purchased, and 73.5% (36/49) of those purchases were done through known social connections. Most respondents provided vague information about the seller, detailing only that it was ‘someone I knew’ or ‘someone I trusted.’ On occasion, others, like Respondent 101 from South LA, offered more detail: It just like randomly happened, you know. . .I was having little issues with people shooting at me and stuff like that, because of where I live. So, I knew this black dude that – I used to sell marijuana to this guy, he was a older guy – and one day he just came up to me and said, “Hey, I got this gun for sale man, Won’t you give me some weed for it?” And I didn’t want to but, “I was like, nah, I ain’t giving you no weed for this.” So I ended up giving him like $150 bucks for it.

Table 4.3 Transcation Type Total #

%

Purchase Trade Gift Steal

49 6 14 2

69.00% 8.50% 19.70% 2.80%

Total

71

100.00%

*Authors Calculations **Does not include 6 guns found on street

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 89 For other respondents, the process was much more proactive, where they would seek out the seller, like Respondent 39 did: I rolled up on these fools at 2:00 in the morning, and I went to go look for them, I went to go look for that person, you know, like, “I wonder if he’s out?” He’s from some other gang, though. . .him and two or three homeys came out the cut, and I was like, you know, “I need some heat,” so we started kicking and shit, and then we went to eat and he pulled out his burner, because I seen they all had guns, but then when I saw him, “Hey, what do you have right there? I’m curious. I like guns, you know? So, the other ones, I wasn’t tripping, you know what I’m saying, like, “I want to see what you have. It’s kind of chunky. I like it, that’s nice.” I said, “What do you want for it?” (From Harbor Area of LA) Respondent 39’s second gun (or at least the second gun he provided detailed information on) was gifted to him, as was the case for about 19.7% of reported guns in our sample (14/71). Not surprisingly, these types of transactions primarily involved family members or fellow gang members. Five of the gifted guns in our sample were from family (4) or a significant other (1). Two guns were gifted from ‘a friend,’ 2 gifted sources were unclear, and the remaining guns (5/15) were gifts from fellow gang members. Only 2 of the 7 guns acquired from gang members were actually purchased – and these were both from rival or outside gang members, as demonstrated by Respondent 39. The last six guns reported by respondents were acquired through trade, often for drugs or to pay off a debt. Interestingly, these types of transactions were primarily conducted between known social connections (5/6). For example, Respondent 91 (South LA) obtained his most recent gun, a 9 mm, from a mutual acquaintance ‘“for an eight-ball of meth and $200”; his second gun, a .45 was traded for about the “$100 worth of meth.”’ Respondent 121 traded his used .44 caliber for another, presumably clean gun from an acquaintance. However, just as he did not tell the receiving party that his gun was dirty, he did not know for certain if the new gun he received was dirty either. In sum, firearms in LA’s illicit market are predominantly acquired for payment and through a formal transaction. This pattern is closely aligned with what researchers found in the Chicago jail survey (61.5% of their sample). Two of the primary differences between the two studies are with gifted guns and borrowed guns. Fewer guns in their sample were gifted (8.9%) and about 10.4% of the reported guns in their sample were borrowed or on loan. Despite being commonly discussed as a potential practice, none of the guns that respondents provided detailed information on were guns they had borrowed.

Policy implications Given that most respondents acquired their recent firearm from their immediate social networks and not from rogue FFLS, straw purchases, or local

90 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan traffickers, findings suggest that demand-side interventions may be particularly fruitful. As we have note elsewhere, nearly 70% of our sample reported experiences with direct gun victimization (i.e., shot or shot at), and another 53% said they have family and/or friends that have been directly victimized as well (Chesnut et al., 2016). Some respondents reported acquiring their first illegal gun after such experiences, while others noted more generally that constant threats of violence from gangs and police within their community motivated them to illegally acquire a gun (see Barragan et al., 2016). Understanding this broader context for illegal gun possession, some cities have implemented behavior-based interventions that try to teach youth how to properly navigate fear and conflict without violence. Chicago’s Becoming a Man (BAM) program, for example, was able to reduce violent crime arrests among youth in the target neighborhoods by nearly 44% (Heller et al., 2013). Chicago and other cities have also implemented programs that try to both improve police-community relations and gang-initiated violence by providing opportunities for dialogue between both groups, and by providing intensive services to those that wish to leave their criminal lifestyle. Though models vary across cities, many have proven reduce gun violence at the neighborhood level, as well as gun offending at the individual level (e.g., Papachristos and Kirk, 2015). Such preventative programs are not only more cost-effective than strict law enforcement practices, like incarceration, they can also help create a culture shift among the target populations that resists, rather than supports, the use of firearms to handle disputes or threats to one’s personal safety. Moreover, because most respondents perceived guns as readily available, it is clear that interventions must also address both the existing and new supply of illegal firearms in Los Angeles. Though few respondents directly stole their most recent firearm, theft is still presumptively the main mode of entry for guns into the illicit market. Some policy responses that can potential reduce the supply of guns that make their way into LA’s illicit gun market include community gun-buy backs and regulatory efforts that promote, and even subsidize, safe storage, particularly within high gun-theft communities (Chesnut et al., 2016).

Concluding thoughts Does methodology matter?

As we demonstrate above, there are considerable differences in the kinds of information that can be gleaned from trace data versus inmate surveys. Trace studies can tell us where recovered crimes gun originally come from (e.g., location and original owner – and in the case of DROS, last legal possessor), and how long it takes for a legal gun to become a crime gun (e.g., ‘time to crime’). Jail surveys, on the other hand, can provide more detailed (and firsthand) transactional information and general knowledge regarding the local accessibility of firearms, the role of trust in entering a transaction, the value

Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 91 placed on newer or ‘clean’ firearms, and perceptions on how guns enter the illicit market. Within Los Angeles, the RAND study tells us that recovered crime guns are sourced not only within the state, but also within the illegal possessor’s immediate community. Findings also suggest that contrary to law enforcement perceptions, gangs did not appear to be trafficking guns from any one or few retailers in the local region or state. There was slightly more evidence, however, to support the notion that straw purchases may play a greater role in the illicit market, which is what led the team develop a policy intervention aimed at straw purchasers. The more recent Los Angeles Jail Survey in many ways echoes these findings. A small, though not negligible percentage of guns (14.3%) were obtained either through a straw purchaser, retailer, or trafficker. Given respondents’ heavy reliance on known social connections, it is also reasonable to conclude that most of the reported guns were sourced locally, consistent with the RAND report. Unfortunately, neither trace data nor inmate surveys provide key information on the nature of upstream transactions that precede the final procurement of a firearm. Though the California DROS data does provide some information to follow the chain of legal transfers that occur after the firearm exits the dealer until final recovery, it does not provide precise information on how that gun became available in the illegal market except for the rare cases when the owner reported a legitimate case of theft. Similarly, as with the jail survey, inmates can draw upon personal experience to explain in great detail transactions that they have partaken in, but unless they stole the gun from a business, home, or car, they often lack any knowledge on how the firearm came into the possession of the person selling/trading the firearm in the first place. A plan forward

Though insightful, most of what is known about the illicit gun market relies on studies from a handful of cities, including Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Los Angles (e.g., Cook et al., 2015; Cook, Parker and Pollack, 2015; Braga, 2017; Collins et al., 2017). Due to federal constraints on funding gun-related research and data access barriers, it is no surprise that there has been little replication of these studies to examine market changes over time. Moving forward, we would like to re-examine Los Angeles’ illegal gun market using a mixed methods approach that would simultaneously replicate the ATF trace data and jail inmate projects. Such a study would permit a more complete look at transactions and enable one to reconcile any apparent differences in the findings. A more ambitious project would be to carry the research out of the jails and into the community. Respondent driven sampling or RDS (Heckathorn, 1997) has proven to be an effective methodology for recruiting subjects from ‘hard to reach’ populations, like gun offenders. Not unlike the qualitative data collected by Venkatesh in Chicago (see Cook et al., 2005) or Hureau and Braga in Boston (2018), RDS can be used to recruit participants that are actively

92 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan participating in local illicit gun markets. In doing so, researchers can more accurately gain transactional information in ‘real time’ – asking respondents who recently acquired their guns to detail where they got them from, and from whom. Respondent trust permitting, the researcher would then follow the supply chain to identify the first point of illegal sale. A study of this type would provide the information on the ‘missing link’ regarding how firearms first enter the illegal market, be it by theft, straw purchasers, large scale trafficking by organized crime syndicates, or scofflaw FFLs.

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Understanding the illicit gun market in Los Angeles 93 Cook, P.J., Harris, R.J., Ludwig, J. and Pollack, H. (2015) “Some sources of crime guns in Chicago: Dirty dealers, straw purchases and traffickers.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 104(4), pp. 17–59. Cook, P.J., Parker, S.T. and Pollack, H.A. (2015) “Sources of guns to dangerous people: What we learn by asking them.” Preventive Medicine, 79, pp. 28–36. FBI. (2018a) Uniform Crime Report, New York City Police Department, Number and Rate of Violent Crimes, 2000–2010. Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI. (2018b) Uniform Crime Report, Los Angeles Police Department, Number and Rate of Violent Crimes, 2000–2014. Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Freskos, B. (2017). “Missing pieces.” The Trace. [Online]. Available at: www.thetrace. org/missing-pieces/ Heckathorn, D.D. (1997) “Respondent-driven sampling: A new approach to the study of hidden Populations.” Social Problems, 44, pp. 174–199. Heller, S., Pollack, H.A. and Ander, R. et al. (2013) Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A Randomized Field Experiment. NBER Working Paper No. 19014. 2013. Hunt, P., Parast, L. and Weinberger, G. (2017) Can an Informative Letter Reduce Gun Crime and Be Cost-Effective? A Study of Los Angeles. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Hureau, D.M. and Braga, A.A. (2018) “The trade in tools: The market for illicit guns in high risk networks.” Criminology 56, pp. 510–545. Karberg, J.C., Frandsen, R.J., Durso, J.M., Buskirk, T. and Lee, A.D. (2017) Background Checks for Firearm Transfers, 2015. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Kennedy, D.M., Piehl, A.M. and Braga, A.A. (1996) “Youth violence in Boston: Gun markets, serious youth offenders, and a use-reduction strategy.” Law and Contemporary Problems, 59(1), pp. 147–196. LAPD. (2018) Homicide Report, 2017. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Police Department. Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. (2018) 2017 Annual Gun Law Score Card. San Francisco, CA: Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. MacDonald, J.M., Wilson, J.M. and Tita, G.E. (2005) Data-Driven Homicide Prevention: An Examination of Five Project Safe Neighborhood Target Areas. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. McGarrell, E.F., Chermak, S., Wilson, J.M. and Cosaro, N. (2006) “Reducing homicide through a ‘lever-pulling’ strategy.” Justice Quarterly, 23(2), pp. 214–231. Miller, M., Hepburn, L. and Azrael, D. (2017) “‘Firearm acquisition without background checks. Results of a national survey.’” Annals of Internal Medicine, 166, pp. 233–239. Nagin, D.S. (1998) “Criminal deterrence research at the outset of the twenty-first century.” Crime and Justice, 23, pp. 1–42. Papachristos, A.V. and Kirk, D.S. (2015) “Changing the street dynamic: Evaluating Chicago’s group violence reduction strategy.” Criminology & Public Policy, 14(3), pp. 525–558. Pear, V.A., Castillo-Carniglia, A., Kagawa, R.M., Cerda, M. and Wintemute, G.J. (2018) “Firearm mortality in California, 2000–2015: The epidemiologic importance of within state variation.” Annals of Epidemiology, 28, pp. 309–315. Ridgeway, G., Braga, A.A., Tita, G. and Pierce, G.L. (2011) “Intervening in gun markets: An experiment to assess the impact of targeted gun-law messaging.” Journal of Experimental Criminology, 7, pp. 103–109.

94 George E. Tita and Melissa Barragan Ridgeway, G., Pierce, G.L., Braga, A.A., Tita, G., Wintemute, G. and Roberts, W. (2008) Strategies for Disrupting Illegal Firearm Markets: A Case Study of Los Angeles. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Sheley, J.F. and Wright, J.D. (1993) Gun Acquisition and Possession in Selected Juvenile Samples: Research Brief. Washington, DC: National Insititute of Justice. Smith A. (2016). “How the iron pipeline funnels guns into cities with tough gun laws.” CNN. January 19. [Online]. Available at: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/19/news/ iron-pipeline-gun-control/index.html Tita, G.E. and Abrahamse, A. (2004) Gang Homicide in LA, 1981–2001. Sacramento: California Attorney General’s Office. Wintemute, G.J., Cook, P.J. and Wright, M.A. (2005) “Risk factors among handgun retailers for frequent and disproportionate sales of guns used in violent and firearm related crimes.” Injury Prevention, 11(6), pp. 357–363. Wright, J.D. and Rossi, P.H. (1994) Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and their Firearms. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.

5

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy Integrating marketing research and firearms studies Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart

Introduction The United States is home to the largest consumer market for firearms among developed countries, and this market has grown significantly in recent years. Excluding firearms for military use, American manufacturers produced over 9 million firearms each year from 2013–2015 – more than double the average annual rate from 1997–2007 (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 2017). The firearms industry trade association reports that the industry has an overall economic impact of $51.4 billion, and that consumer interest in hunting, shooting sports, and defensive firearms training has been increasing (National Shooting Sports Foundation, 2018). As the firearms market has grown, so have markets for many peripheral products and services. For instance, approximately 60% of gun range operators report increases in range visits (average reported gain of 20%), including by first-time shooters (15–20% increase) and by both new and experienced shooters receiving instruction in concealed carry (Southwick Associates, 2016). Firearm consumption trends shape and are shaped by producers’ marketing efforts, which entail strategic decisions about products, pricing, placement, and promotion. Manufacturers produce traditional and technologically innovative firearms and accessories at a wide range of price points, manufacturers and retailers promote their products in newspapers and specialty magazines (First Research, 2018), and retailers and gun shows throughout the country provide consumers with an array of choices for where and what to purchase. Similar to businesses in other industries, manufacturers and retailers of firearms work closely with industry lobby groups to understand the diverse wants and needs of customers and shape policy that supports the industry’s ability to profitably satisfy current and potential customers (Southwick Associates, 2017). The market’s complex, dynamic interactions between manufacturers, retailers, consumers, non-consumers, media, and policy—all within the context of a highly politicized, culturally embedded, socially contested, and deliberately deadly product—provide scholars of gun-related phenomena an important and fascinating domain of study. However, despite its size, ubiquity, and contentious nature, the firearms market has been largely ignored by marketing

96 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart researchers. Scholars of history, criminology, law, and public policy have contributed the bulk of research on the market, purchase, use, and consumer opinions. These disciplines have made essential contributions to our understanding of the firearms market by, for example, tracing its evolution and relationship with American culture over time (Haag, 2016), illuminating various interpretations of the constitutionality of regulating the sale and possession of firearms (Winkler, 2011), and identifying the complexities of policy and justice related to firearms (Cook and Goss, 2014). Other fields have made equally important contributions to understanding of societal and psychological aspects of firearms use. Public health scholars have identified links between firearm purchases and firearm-related deaths (Cummings et al., 1997), psychology researchers have revealed that the mere presence of a firearm can increase aggression (Bushman, 2017), and sociologists have mapped ways in which some American men construct identity through the use of firearms for self-defense (Carlson, 2015a). Marketing research, owing to its conventional focus on acquiring and retaining customers, may appear to offer limited insight into questions and problems related to firearms. Questions related to how firearms firms – such as manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers – can increase sales, profits, customer satisfaction, loyalty, or brand equity are not pressing matters for the public, and may even seem to run counter to the aims of those attempting to decrease rates of death and injury. However, questions such as these represent only a small subset of marketing scholarship.

Connecting marketing research and firearms research In this chapter, we demonstrate that the field of marketing research has much to offer those interested in understanding phenomena involving firearms – products which, despite their deadly capacity, are in many ways regarded as simply another consumer product in the United States. Marketing researchers are well equipped to investigate a wide variety of questions related to the manufacture, distribution, promotion, purchase, use, disposition, and meaning of these deadly consumer products, such as: How do consumers make decisions about whether to purchase a firearm, which type of gun to purchase, and how and where to use a gun? How do firearms ownership and use become more or less culturally normative among various groups over time? How does the pervasiveness of firearms impact feelings of safety and security for those who choose not to own them? What are the dynamics of the market system which make firearms accessible to those with malicious intent as well as those with good intent? And, how can groups aiming to decrease rates of gun violence effectively influence firearms owners, gun markets, and the broader culture? Answers to questions such as these would provide significant contributions to the growing body of knowledge about firearms-related phenomena developed by scholars of law, public policy, criminology, and other fields, and would provide valuable insights to those attempting to develop

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 97 interventions to address America’s wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973) of high rates of injury and death by firearm. In addition, we use this chapter to establish two points of connection between marketing scholarship and research on firearms conducted in other fields. First, we highlight that marketing concepts and activities that can be applied to enhance firm performance can also be applied to shift individual attitudes, opinions, and behavior in ways that alleviate a social problem. For instance, some gun violence prevention groups engage in marketing activities to influence gun owners to adopt safe storage practices (Huff et al., 2017). The wide body of research into this application of marketing, called social marketing (Kotler and Zaltman, 1971), can inform policy makers, regulators, consumer interest groups, and community leaders aiming to reduce rates of death and injury. Second, we demonstrate how subfields of marketing research that may be unfamiliar to those outside the field can contribute to understanding of firearms-related phenomena. Marketing scholarship is multidisciplinary and examines a wide range of topics from diverse perspectives that complement, and often overlap with, research in other disciplines. Scholarship in other fields has focused on firearms in the United States as a contentious political issue (Winkler, 2011), as objects imbued with historical and cultural meaning (Haag, 2016), and as uniquely effective tools for killing and injuring (Miller and Hemenway, 2008). Marketing scholarship complements such work by theoretically foregrounding firearms as consumer products; offering insights into when, why, where, how, and among whom these interactions occur; and identifying avenues for positive change in how firearms are regulated, marketed, purchased, and used.

An overview of marketing research Marketing scholars draw from a host of diverse fields, including economics, finance, management, political science, law, history, geography, public health, education, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, and psychology (Macinnis and Folkes, 2010). For the purposes of this chapter, we divide marketing research into four subfields: strategy, consumer behavior, consumer culture, and market system dynamics (MSD).1 We distinguish these subfields by their predominant focus on either markets/firms or consumers, and by the diversity of ontological approaches they use (see Table 5.1). Research on marketing strategy and consumer behavior is characterized by a ‘dominant ontology [that] privileges microeconomic assumptions and psychological process explanations and [a] dominant epistemology [that] remains wedded to a logical empiricist idealization of the scientific research enterprise’ (Thompson, Arnould and Giesler, 2013, p. 160). Conversely, MSD and consumer culture research are concerned with the complex dynamics of market systems and sociohistorical patterning of consumption, respectively, and adopt a broad range of ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiomatic perspectives (Thompson, Arnould and Giesler, 2013). Table 5.1 and the categories within it are intended to guide a reader unfamiliar with marketing research.

98 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart Table 5.1 Orientation of Marketing Research Subfields

Ontologically Consistent (Positivist)

Ontologically Diverse

Firm/Market Focus

Consumer Focus

Marketing Strategy Topics: how managers can improve efficiency or effectiveness of marketing investments, or generate value for the organization through marketing activities Market System Dynamics Topics: how complex market systems emerge, evolve, transform over time

Consumer Behavior Topics: how/why individual consumers make decisions; how attitudes, emotions, cognition influence behavior and behavioral intentions Consumer Culture Topics: how consumers, groups of consumers, and consumer culture influence and are influenced by ideology, power relations, social structures, and sociohistoric patterns

While these subfields are distinct, studies may overlap two or more subfields (Macinnis and Folkes, 2010).

Existing marketing scholarship on firearms Preeminent academic marketing journals (Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology) have given little attention to firearms-related topics. To date, none have published an article whose title includes ‘gun’ or ‘firearm.’ A broader search reveals that on the whole, marketing scholars have published relatively few studies on firearms; the number of marketing papers that contain the words ‘gun’ and ‘firearm’ pales in comparison to the number of papers featuring words related to other consumption topics that political leaders and others have raised as matters of social concern, such as cigarette consumption, obesity, consumer debt, or alcohol addiction. A Google Scholar search for articles in all journals containing ‘marketing’ or ‘consumer’ in their titles (with no time period imposed), shows that only 40 scholarly marketing papers contain ‘firearm’ and ‘gun.’2 As a point of comparison, in the same set of journals, 1,343 articles contain ‘tobacco’ and ‘cigarettes,’ and 3,260 contain ‘obesity’ and ‘health.’ A few studies on firearms have been published in the area of marketing strategy, including analyses of firearms advertising (Hirschman, 2003) and branding (Henning and Witkowski, 2013). In addition, Bradford and colleagues found that demarketing or countermarketing – strategies to reduce illegal demand – are effective in reducing diversion of firearms from legal to illegal channels, but that few companies engage in these strategies (Bradford, Gundlach and Wilkie, 2005; Gundlach, Bradford and Wilkie, 2010). More recently, an

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 99 ethnographic study of gun violence prevention groups by Huff et al. (2017) revealed the ways these consumer interest groups target their messaging to a variety of actors, including legislators, businesses, and consumers. Consumer behavior studies include Blair and Hyatt’s (1995) exploration of the relationship between gender, attitudes toward guns, and gun ownership, which asserted that advertising regulators and policy makers should direct more attention to firearms advertising. Bhattacharya and Elsbach (2002) examined consumers’ feelings of identification with the NRA (National Rifle Association), finding that individual experiences and values have differential effects on (dis)identification with the organization, and that individuals who identify with the NRA are more likely to take action on the group’s initiatives. In addition, Shepherd and Kay (2018) found that American consumers’ opinions about whether guns create order or disorder are linked to their political ideology. Consumer culture studies include Littlefield and Ozanne’s (2011) study of the process by which men become socialized as hunters, Witkowski’s (2013) visual analysis of American gun culture and politics, and a study by Barnhart et al. (2018) showing how American consumers who keep and carry guns for selfdefense engage in routines to reduce associated risks. Given the paucity of marketing scholarship related to firearms, tremendous opportunity exists for marketing research on this important and timely topic, and we hope this chapter will reveal to those both inside and outside the field some of the many ways that marketing research can contribute to understanding of firearms-related phenomena. In addition, we demonstrate some of the ways that extant marketing research conducted in contexts other than firearms can inform understanding of firearms markets, marketing, and consumption. This chapter is not intended to serve as a comprehensive review of insights from marketing research that can be applied to firearms. Rather, we provide pertinent examples with the intent of initiating a conversation among researchers in disciplines with a history of firearms research and marketing researchers who have an interest in firearms-related phenomena. The chapter is organized around the four subfields of marketing we have identified. We provide a concise overview of each, identify examples of how extant work can provide insight into firearms-related phenomena, and suggest questions that marketing researchers in each subfield are well positioned to address. Our intention is for the chapter to be useful to a range of stakeholders, including gun scholars outside of marketing, policy makers, regulators, lobby groups, managers, consumers, and marketing researchers.

Marketing strategy The subfield of marketing strategy foregrounds the work of firms and other organizations interested in influencing consumers. Marketing strategy is concerned with whether and how different factors, conditions, and managerial decisions impact variables such as sales revenue, brand reputation, or rates of product adoption among members of a target market. We include in this

100 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart subfield quantitative marketing models which use large databases of measurements of consumer behavior or marketing activities – such as pricing, promotion, distribution, or product management – for the purpose of identifying the most efficient and effective uses of marketing resources and contributing positively to the value of the firm (Kumar, 2015). Topics such as these are likely what come to mind when those outside the field think about marketing research, and they may not immediately seem useful in contributing to firearms research. However, as we reveal below, this subfield has much to offer those interested in firearms studies.

Marketing strategy research relevant to firearms studies We now provide examples of existing research in two domains of this subfield – branding and social marketing – that are especially pertinent to research on firearms-related phenomena. First, a large stream of research on branding provides insights for those interested in working with gun manufacturers to develop, or garner their support for, public policy aimed at reducing death and injury caused by firearms, as well as for gun manufacturers interested in making the possession and use of their products safer. Historian Pamela Haag’s (2016) account of the struggles of American firearms manufacturers as they attempted to diversify to other types of products when demand for firearms evaporated after the Civil War raises the question of how contemporary gun manufacturers could adapt to decreased demand driven by changing public opinion or regulation. Marketing research on the limits and perils of lifestyle branding (Chernev, Hamilton and Gal, 2011) provides insights that could help gun manufacturers and dealers to maintain profitability by selling alternative products consistent with the lifestyle that the company represents. Further, work on consumers’ willingness to pay for premium brands (Steenkamp, Van Heerde and Geyskens, 2010) and the relationship between brand affect, brand trust, brand loyalty, and brand performance (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001) suggests that gun manufacturers could enhance profitability while decreasing misuse of their firearms by selling gun safes or other safety products under the umbrella of a premium or trusted brand. Second, scholars, activists, and program administrators interested in ways to change individuals’ behaviors and attitudes related to guns in order to reduce death and injury will likely find research in the domain of social marketing useful. Some studies in this domain provide insights into how social marketers can design packaging and advertising campaigns that are effective at changing individual behavior. For instance, Gallopel-Morvan and colleagues (2011) found that visual images are more effective than text in deterring smoking. Other work reveals the limits of certain types of advertising. Hastings, Stead and Webb (2004) explored ethical concerns and negative consequences of using fear-based appeals in messaging, and proposed alternative types of appeals that may be more effective and less ethically dubious. Social marketing research also considers structural influences on individual behavior change, which is relevant to scholars and practitioners interested in

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 101 the ways public policy can influence gun purchase and use. Wang, Lewis and Singh (2015) analyzed the relative effectiveness of various strategies to discourage smoking – excise taxes, anti-smoking advertising, and restrictions on where one can smoke. They found excise taxes to be the most effective at reducing cigarette sales, but that levying the tax on a per pack basis, rather than in accordance with nicotine levels, led to smokers switching to more dangerous products. Their work has implications for those considering developing public policy that would tax firearms or ammunition, or place restrictions on where they can be used. Other marketing scholars have emphasized the limits of attempting to change individuals’ behaviors without changing structural and environmental factors. These researchers have encouraged social marketers to target their efforts to upstream actors, such as legislators and policy makers, in order to change the environment in ways that will promote desired individual behaviors (Kennedy, 2016), and have investigated ways that social marketers do so more or less effectively.3 Given social marketers’ increasing reliance on social media (see Huff et al., 2017 for examples from gun violence prevention groups), research on the ways that marketers can effectively use online marketing and influence consumer to consumer communications is relevant to those interested in social marketing. For example, marketers can determine which users in social networks are the most influential (Trusov, Bodapati and Bucklin, 2010) and strategically vary their online marketing strategies and communications according to the characteristics of their target audience (Zhu and Zhang, 2010; Berger and Milkman, 2012). Moving forward

Among a wealth of opportunity for marketing strategy research in the context of firearms, we see the greatest opportunity in complementing, and possibly overlapping, research in the fields of public policy, public health, and law. For example, future marketing strategy studies might include empirical models of the effectiveness of various social marketing efforts in decreasing rates of accidental shootings or changing firearms-related consumer behaviors, public opinion, or legislation; and studies of how changes in public policy would affect the profitability of firearms firms and steps those firms could take to maintain profitability. Additionally, scholars in this subfield could investigate ways that firearms firms could maintain profitability while working to decrease levels of gun violence, or demonstrate how trade organizations can develop effective initiatives for decreasing consumer misuse or theft through strategic use of marketing strategies and tactics. We refer persons interested in this domain of research to publications such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and Journal of Macromarketing. We suggest a search for terms such as marketing strategy, sales, value, customer satisfaction, product innovation, brands, or social marketing.

102 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart

Consumer behavior Research in the subfield of consumer behavior foregrounds the consumer and focuses on factors that influence various aspects of an individual’s consumption; including consumer attitudes, emotions, behavioral intentions, or behavior. This subfield includes information processing and behavioral decision theory, and integrates consumer research with cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience to examine questions related to consumer attitudes, emotions, memory, judgment, and decision-making (Macinnis and Folkes, 2010). Accordingly, consumer behavior research generally adopts a logical empiricist epistemology and concerns itself with individuals’ psychological processes (Thompson, Arnould and Giesler, 2013). While consumption is conventionally understood as the point when an individual exchanges money for a product or service, consumer behavior researchers understand it as a host of behaviors ranging from non-conscious to deliberative, as well as experiences and interactions with others that influence those behaviors and experiences. That is, consumption entails much more than purchase. The subfield of consumer behavior ‘is distinguished from other fields by the study of the acquisition, consumption, and disposal of marketplace products, services, and experiences by people operating in a consumer role’ (Macinnis and Folkes, 2010). Of particular interest to policy makers and public health practitioners may be studies that determine what types of messaging are most (in)effective in changing attitudes and opinions about certain behaviors in specific segments of consumers.

Consumer behavior research relevant to firearms studies We now identify some areas of consumer behavior research whose findings are applicable to firearms research. First, consumer behavior research contains a rich literature examining how and why individuals make decisions that are inconsistent with an objectively optimal, ‘rational’ outcome (Ariely, 2008). Such research can shed light on why individuals choose to purchase, keep, or use firearms in ways that put them at increased risk of death or injury even in the face of credible statistical evidence of this risk, or in other ways that are not objectively rational. Research on the influence of emotions on decision-making indicates emotion as one potential cause. Studies have examined the influence of emotion on memory, categorization and evaluation of stimuli, information processing, and goal-directed behavior (Bagozzi, Gopinath and Nyer, 1999); have revealed that making a consumption decision requires engaging in trade-offs between alternatives; and have shown that the difficulty of these trade-offs impacts consumers’ decision strategies, choices, and emotional responses to the choices (Luce, Bettman and Payne, 2001). Further research has pointed to individual differences in how consumers’ decisions are influenced by emotion. For example, an individual’s tendency to use reason versus feelings when making decisions impacts the likelihood of being influenced by emotion-laden messaging (Hsee et al., 2015).

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 103 Studies of consumer choice have shown that willingness and ability to process information about product options has implications for behavioral intentions, indicating that some firearms consumers may make irrational decisions because they cannot or are unwilling to process available information. In the context of food choices, individuals’ use of nutrition information is influenced by both individual factors – such as their motivation and knowledge – and product factors – such as the inclusion of negative or positive nutrition attributes (Balasubramanian and Cole, 2002). Further, consumers’ preferences and choices are influenced by a variety of factors which they use as information in decision making, including their early life experiences with brands and products (BraunLaTour, LaTour and Zinkhan, 2007). Research suggesting that adults consume in patterns that are shaped by childhood memories and parents’ behavior (Fournier, 1998) may provide insight into how childhood experiences influence adults’ purchase and use of firearms. Other consumer behavior research carries implications for how gun owners may be influenced by social phenomena to develop preferences for specific types or brands of firearms, and how gun owners may be influenced by interactions with members of a shooting club or other groups of gun enthusiasts to which they belong. One area of research has examined why and how consumption choices are impacted by individual differences in social needs, such as need to belong or need for status. These individual differences can influence consumer preferences for products, especially when combined with demographic variables, such as income (Han, Nunes and Drèze, 2010). Further, individual differences in consumption tendencies can change when consumers make decisions together. For example, consumers who are high in self-control make less indulgent decisions when paired with another high self-control consumer, but not when paired with a low self-control consumer (Dzhogleva and Lamberton, 2014). These findings provide insight on the social nature of firearms purchase and use. A second stream of research on social phenomena has examined consumers’ use of products as signals of identity and group membership (Escalas and Bettman, 2005). Some categories of products are more useful for communicating identity, and individual consumers are more likely to have divergent preferences in product categories that others use to infer a specific identity (Berger and Heath, 2007). This may help to explain gun owners’ preferences for particular styles of firearms, as well as carrying position and accessories, as communicative of social identities, both to other gun owners and to nonowners. In general, individuals have a need to be socially connected, and they can reorient their consumption patterns when threatened with social exclusion. Socially excluded individuals are more likely to purchase products that are personally unappealing, but favored by others, and products symbolic of group membership (Mead et al., 2011). To the extent that firearms are regarded as favorable symbols of a social community, consumers may be inclined to purchase or use firearms to feel more socially connected. Further, a consumer who engages in nonconforming behaviors (i.e., conspicuously using or wearing a product in an atypical way) can be interpreted

104 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart by others as having status and competence (Bellezza, Gino and Keinan, 2014). This offers some insight into why some consumers (e.g., white males) carrying handguns may be perceived as competent and having social status. Questions remain, however, about where and why social boundaries exist in relation to nonconforming behaviors and different segments of consumers. Additionally, this research highlights a particular conundrum: non-gun owners lack the opportunity to signal their identity, group membership, or status in the ways that gun owners do. Excepting an explanatory tee shirt, there is no product that a non-gun owner can wear or use to signal her identity as a non-owner, or that a hunter who does not support use of handguns for self-defense can wear to signal his. Moving forward

Future consumer behavior studies in the context of firearms could explore a wide variety of questions, including: how consumer attitudes, opinions, and behavioral intentions shift or become reinforced through exposure to promotional communications from gun manufacturers, retailers, consumer or industry interest groups, or policy makers; how handling or wearing a firearm influences feelings of empowerment and intentions towards others; and the relationship between implicit bias and identification of threats that warrant an armed response. We refer persons interested in this domain of research to publications such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management,and Journal of Consumer Affairs. We suggest a search for terms such as: consumer emotions, attitudes, decision-making, choice, judgment, purchase, preference, behavioral intention, information processing, or memory.

Consumer culture Consumer culture research (also known as ‘consumer culture theory’) examines the intersection of consumers, markets, and culture (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). This domain examines consumption phenomena in ways that highlight consumers’ embeddedness in complex systems and account for power relations, social structures, and socio-historic influences (Thompson, Arnould and Giesler, 2013). This subfield is philosophically heterogeneous, using postmodern, post-structuralist approaches that incorporate a range of social theory, including critical theory, actor-network theory, and practice theory (Thompson, Arnould and Giesler, 2013). This subfield incorporates work from a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and psychology, to theorize phenomena related to consumer experience with products, services, brands, firms, and each other.

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 105

Consumer culture research relevant to firearms research While consumer culture research can provide insights into a wide variety of topics in firearms research, here we highlight work relevant to three broad areas that may be of interest to firearms researchers: how and why some individuals develop strong attachments to their guns; the ways in which ideology, morality, mythology, and community membership relate to gun ownership, use, avoidance, or condemnation; and the ways firearms owners experience and navigate risk. First, consumer culture scholarship includes a broad array of work relevant to questions of why and how consumers develop deep attachments to possessions. Research has articulated the ways that consumption is shaped by desire, passion, and fantasy (Belk and Costa, 1998; Belk, Ger and Askegaard, 2003); and have revealed the depth and nature of consumers’ relationships with their material possessions (Fournier, 1998), including the emotional challenges associated with disposing of possessions (Price, Arnould and Curasi, 2000). This body of work challenges assumptions of consumers as rational, agentic decision-makers, and illuminates the powerful and deeply personal ways that possessions acquire sacred status (Muñiz and Schau, 2005) and are intertwined with a sense of self (Belk, 1988). Indeed, material objects enable consumers to engage in identity work (Schau, Gilly and Wolfinbarger, 2009), manage family identity (Epp and Price, 2010), and feel connected to others (Ferreira and Scaraboto, 2016). This body of work complements extant studies of firearms as identity and lifestyle resources (e.g., Carlson, 2015b; Shapira and Simon, 2018). Second, work on ideology, morality, mythology, and community membership can help to address questions of how these factors relate to both the attachment gun owners may have to their firearms and the ways they use them. Scholars have traced links between ideology and consumption, demonstrating the complex interplay between cultural ideals and individual experience. Studies have illuminated ways that normative political ideology is intertwined with consumption patterns as an expression of social and political relations (Crockett and Wallendorf, 2004), and ways that American men of varying social class and status use consumption to pursue an idealized notion of ‘heroic masculinity’ (Holt and Thompson, 2004). In addition, Arsel and Thompson (2011) found that as consumers make investments in their identity via consumption, they are inclined to protect their interests by perpetuating or altering marketplace myths. Ideology, identity work, and moral conflict can also be implicated in consumption of branded products (Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler, 2010). These studies offer consumption-focused nuance to extant work on norms, myths, meanings, and ideologies implicated in ‘gun culture’ (e.g., Slotkin, 1992; Kohn, 2004; Light, 2017) Relevant to questions of how community membership relates to firearms ownership, use, avoidance, or condemnation; consumer culture researchers have illuminated the attraction and cohesion of consumer groups that form around particular brands (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001), subcultures (Schouten

106 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart and McAlexander, 1995), and consumption experiences (Thomas, Price and Schau, 2013). This work overlaps with ethnographic work in sociology, for example, showing that socioeconomic conditions can influence gender performativity and consumption behaviors related to handguns (Carlson, 2015a). Related studies of consumers’ adversarial behavior have shown how consumers can mobilize into groups opposed to specific marketing practices, brands, or firms (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004); and examined identity crises experienced when leaving a religious community (McAlexander et al., 2014). We note that work on consumption communities also provides substantial methodological contributions useful to some firearms researchers. Consumer culture scholars have developed and refined methodologies for applying ethnographic methods to online communities centered around consumption (see Kozinets, 2015; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013; Parmentier and Fischer, 2015), and more recent work has blended online and traditional ethnographic work to study consumer networks (Figueiredo and Scaraboto, 2016). These studies may provide useful templates for further research on beliefs, behaviors, and experiences of different groups of firearms consumers. Finally, consumer culture scholarship on risky consumption, including Barnhart et al.’s (2018) study of risk mitigation by consumers of handguns for self-defense, provides insights useful to those interested in the ways firearms owners experience and navigate risk. Thompson (2005) illuminated the ways that risk is socially constructed in consumption communities. Other studies of risky consumption behavior, such as mountain-climbing or sky diving, reveal that consumers develop strategies for minimizing their risk by hiring expert guides (Tumbat and Belk, 2011) and enacting careful routines with their equipment to facilitate a thrilling, positive experience (Celsi, Rose and Leigh, 1993). Indeed, everyday consumption routines serve as an important way for consumers to develop a sense of security (Phipps and Ozanne, 2017). Such work has implications for how gun owners can feel safe and secure even when keeping, carrying, and firing deadly weapons, and it dovetails recent sociological work on the mental and physical practices associated with gun ownership (i.e., Shapira and Simon, 2018). Moving forward

Consumer culture scholars are well poised to address questions about the ways that firearms relate to identity, social structures, culture, lived experience, and meaning. Future studies could include examinations of the role of family identity, family members, and family heirlooms in shaping experiences and consumption of firearms; what it means to be a ‘gun consumer,’ and how that concept differs across different groups; where, how, and why firearms owners dispose of their guns; how individuals and groups navigate political, ideological, or interpersonal tensions related to firearms; consumer experience and beliefs related to whether and how firearms laws should be followed and modified; the lived experience of survivors of gun violence as it relates to their

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 107 future gun purchase, use, or disposition; and the relationships between social inequality and firearms. We refer persons interested in this domain of research to publications such as Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Consumer Culture and Consumption, Markets & Culture. We suggest a search for terms such as consumer experience, ideology, meaning, symbolism, community, identity, culture, or subculture.

Market system dynamics Market system dynamics (MSD) is a nascent subfield that examines the market as a complex, ever-evolving system of actors, including but not limited to firms, consumers, journalists, policy makers, and scientists. Within MSD, researchers explore ‘questions about markets, how they are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them,’ (Giesler and Fischer, 2017, p. 3). Like consumer culture research, MSD generally adopts a broad, socio-cultural, postmodernist approach, but rather than focusing on consumers, producers, or the relations between them, MSD focuses on the complex, dynamic network of social actors that comprise a market (Rosa et al., 1999; Siebert and Thyroff, 2013). This subfield draws heavily on work in sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and economics, among other disciplines, to theorize the creation, formation, emergence, legitimation, evolution, and dissolution of markets.

Extending market system dynamics research to firearms research Next, we highlight several MSD studies relevant to understanding the role of gun owners in shaping the gun market, how firearms firms navigate tensions and conflict in the market, the ways that design elements and symbolism of specific firearms relate to cultural acceptance, and the inability of high-profile shootings in recent decades to galvanize changes in public policy. To start, several MSD studies highlight the agency of consumers in shaping markets, suggesting that gun owners can mobilize (or be mobilized) in ways that influence firms, regulations, and other consumers. Research has shown that consumers can influence manufacturers to create product offerings (Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013) and can create markets for new products designed and produced by consumers that coexist with those produced by manufacturers (Martin and Schouten, 2014). Further, groups of consumers can intentionally (Kjeldgaard et al., 2017) or unintentionally (Dolbec and Fischer, 2015) wield sufficient power to influence competitive dynamics in a consumer goods market, can facilitate the dissolution of an established brand (Parmentier and Fischer, 2015), or seek cultural change in relation to a social problem (Huff et al., 2017). This body of work provides support and nuance to studies of social movements and consumer debates around firearms (e.g., Goss, 2006; Winkler, 2011).

108 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart Other MSD research sheds light on how firms in the firearms industry might navigate tensions and conflict over questions of worth as they interact with other firms, regulators, consumer interest groups, and the public. Studies have traced the work of managers operating in dynamic markets, revealing how managerial strategy can facilitate brand legitimacy in markets characterized by multiple organizing principles and ideas (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli, 2015), how brands evolve through progressions in consumer interpretations of brand meanings (Giesler, 2008, 2012), and how strategic use of advertising frames can help to legitimize a stigmatized market (Humphreys, 2010). Together, this suggests that marketing managers must develop communication strategies and tactics based on a careful understanding of the cultural system in which consumers are embedded. Other scholars have examined the strategic industrial marketing efforts of producers operating in culturally sensitive markets, such as petroleum, revealing that managerial work entails systematic compromise in response to criticism (Finch, Geiger and Harkness, 2017). A related stream of MSD research has revealed that the material properties and symbolism of products themselves are implicated in broad shifts in market systems, and these shifts can be propagated by media and managers (Wilner and Huff, 2017) or by consumers (Sandıkcı and Ger, 2010). This has implications for firearms research because it underscores the importance of product design and meaning in making a product more or less legitimate. The AR-15 firearm, for example, has emerged as popular in recent years, owing, in part, to its visual similarity to military assault weapons and to its capacity to be customized (Feuer, 2016; NRA Blog Staff, 2016). Specific material elements of consumer products can contribute to their cultural acceptance by communicating usage behaviors and favorable meanings, or contribute to their stigmatization by communicating negative meanings (Huff, Humphreys and Wilner, 2016). In the context of firearms, managers and policy makers seeking changes in consumer use and cultural legitimacy could give more attention to specific design elements and the cultural meanings that those elements carry. Other MSD research has demonstrated the impact of mainstream and popular media in perpetuating cultural myths that reshape consumer memories (Thompson and Tian, 2007; Brunk, Giesler and Hartmann, 2018). For example, in the wake of a corporate disaster, mainstream media can restore consumer trust in an industry (Humphreys and Thompson, 2014). Studies such as these may offer insight into how and why high-profile shootings have typically failed to maintain public interest in cultural or legislative change, and also provide a conceptual starting point for studying any market system changes spurred by tragedies, such as the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Further, recent MSD work that illuminates market system conditions that allow firms to engage in regulatory arbitrage (Gloukhovtsev, Schouten and Mattila, 2018) provides insight into how non-regulatory elements of the gun market system must also change for any changes in local regulation to be effective. Finally, MSD work has theorized the links between rhetorical strategies of U.S. presidents and legitimation of a market institution (Coskuner-Balli and Tumbat, 2017), emphasizing that MSD research

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 109 can be applied to study market systems for ideology as well as for products and brands. Such research can provide insight into the ways that political rhetoric legitimates existing institutions in the firearms market. Moving forward

Researchers in this field could contribute to firearms research by examining relationships between the contemporary political climate and the market for firearms, ammunition, and accessories; by identifying mechanisms that contribute to the firearms market being construed as both more and less legitimate by market actors; or by tracing use of rhetoric, discourse, and narrative across mainstream media, political figures, industry, and consumer interest groups. While extant work outside of marketing has documented the role of consumer interest groups, such as the NRA, in influencing legislation, consumer demand, and consumer practices (e.g., Rodengen, 2002; Melzer, 2009), MSD research could be used to address questions related to the role of non-owners in firearms markets, the complexities associated with consumers’ support for both ownership and regulation within this product market, and the evolution of pervasive political tensions as they relate to consumption practices and beliefs in the market. We refer persons interested in this domain of research to publications such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Theory, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing,and Journal of Marketing Management. We suggest a search for terms such as: market systems, market dynamics, market emergence, market evolution, or legitimacy.

Conclusion This chapter provides examples of marketing research pertinent to scholars of firearms-related phenomena in other fields and articulates the important and complementary nature of marketing research to scholarship related to firearms. We argue that as an interdisciplinary field, marketing research is well positioned to contribute to the growing body of knowledge related to firearms. Further, we suggest avenues for future research focused on firearms in each subfield of marketing research. In conclusion, we make research suggestions that traverse the boundaries of the four subfields. Market segmentation – grouping customers based on selected criteria – is a central concept in marketing. We observe that many researchers, policy makers, and activist organizations use crude criteria, such as ‘gun ownership,’ that are not necessarily related to other individual attitudes or behavior. Firearms industry analysts have developed more nuanced customer segments for manufacturers and retailers (Southwick Associates, 2017), and we urge researchers in marketing and other fields who are interested in firearms-related phenomena to similarly identify new segmentation criteria and processes that are meaningful and actionable for researchers, policy makers, consumer movements and interest groups, and other interested practitioners.

110 Aimee Dinnin Huff and Michelle Barnhart We see an opportunity for marketing researchers in strategy or MSD to initiate empirical study of how producers strategically navigate the regulatory, market-level, and normative aspects of American culture in their marketing practices. Firearms manufacturers and retailers must navigate a complex and dynamic regulatory system, foster favorable and enduring relationships with customers, and build goodwill in the public eye. This is increasingly difficult to accomplish given the current regulatory climate, specialized and mainstream media discourse, and polarization of public opinion around issues related to firearms. The NSSF, the firearm industry trade association, has recently announced the first CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Summit to address current trends, challenges, and opportunities in the firearms industry (see www.nssf.org/cmosummit/). We see such gatherings as opportunities for interesting and impactful research related to the evolving role of firearms in American culture. Further, marketing researchers are well positioned to examine questions related to the apparent emergence of a gun control movement (Cassidy, 2018). Building on related work in sociology (e.g., Snow et al., 1986; King and Pearce, 2010), public policy (e.g., Goss, 2006), and marketing (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004; Weijo, Martin and Arnould, 2018), scholars could examine how market actors and institutions respond to public reaction to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida (see Sorkin, 2018), as well as how related policy does or does not shift in ways that extant theory would predict. For example, we see opportunities to study how consumers’ practices with specific firearms, such as the AR-15, change as these weapons undergo increased cultural scrutiny, and how public discourse about how the market should be regulated evolves with political rhetoric and mainstream media narratives about ‘gun control’ and ‘gun rights’ movements and organizations. Finally, we underscore the appropriateness of multidisciplinary study of firearms-related phenomena, particularly as they relate to social problems. Gun violence, commonly defined as death and injury from gunshot, is a public health issue with far-reaching effects. Firearms, by nature of their status as deadly weapons and durable consumer products, and their inseparable relationship to consumer fear, threat, injury, and death, exist at the nexus of a wicked problem (Huff et al., 2017); that is, firearms are central to a complex, knotted, social problem in which social actors cannot agree on the definition or solution (Rittel and Webber, 1973). We urge marketing researchers to apply their expertise – through the lens of marketing strategy, consumer behavior, consumer culture, or MSD – and scholars in other fields to employ relevant marketing scholarship to address small sections of this fascinating knot.

Notes 1 Consumer culture and market system dynamics research are domains within the Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) subfield of marketing; see Arnould and Thompson (2005), Giesler and Fischer (2017).

Consumers, culture, market systems and strategy 111 2 Search criteria required articles to contain both words to ensure that the article included discussion of the topic rather than an incidental mention of it, or of agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. 3 Research in this domain applies the label ‘macro-social marketers’ to organizations that attempt to influence both individual behavior and the broader societal structures and conditions which facilitate the behavior (Kennedy, 2016).

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6

Fighting the Left and leading the Right NRA politics and power through the 2016 elections Scott Melzer

Introduction ‘[Donald Trump] has no more powerful ally than the NRA’ (Philips, 2017). With these words, which were accompanied by near apocalyptic images of rioting and protests in an ad meant to stir member support, National Rifle Association (NRA) Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre launched the organization’s ‘Counter Resistance’ to the ‘war,’ ‘insurrection,’ and ‘anarchy’ the NRA says President Donald Trump faces (Philips, 2017). Trump had taken the oath of office just weeks earlier, in January of 2017. He was met the next day with a massive wave of women’s marches and a commitment by the left to ‘#Resist.’ For more than two decades, the NRA has mobilized its activist base of members (and arguably many gun owners who aren’t members) by framing dire threats not only to gun rights, but also to all individual rights and freedoms. It has amplified its own role and the role of guns in the culture wars, or the battle to determine the meaning of America (Hunter, 1991). This strategy culminated in the NRA’s attacks on 2016 Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton for reasons far beyond her stance on gun control. The NRA’s culture war approach to defending what the organization labels as threats to gun rights has expanded and solidified its influence and status. The NRA isn’t simply the most powerful gun rights group; it is the leading social movement organization within the conservative movement. This iteration of the NRA is about two decades old. It emerged in response to pitched gun control battles with President Bill Clinton and in conjunction with the recruitment of Charlton Heston to serve as its president and culture war messenger. Today’s NRA is best understood as a form of collective action in response to perceived threats not only to guns, but also to conservative men’s status and identities. The NRA skillfully connects gun control to ‘big government,’ ‘nanny-state,’ ‘elites’ who want to strip Americans of their autonomy and independence (understood as masculine) and force them to depend on the government (understood as feminine) for basic needs, such as protection, food, and shelter. By constructing and amplifying such threats, the NRA generates and mobilizes significant dollars and a large base of diehard activist members.

118 Scott Melzer The 2016 election cycle was the NRA’s most expensive yet. It spent more than $30 million opposing Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump, and another $20 plus million on a handful of key U.S. Senate and House races (Spies and Balcerzak, 2016). The NRA’s millions of members did what gun control groups have not been able to do even when well funded: vote in numbers that influence politicians and impact elections. Candidate Trump’s culture war rhetoric around immigration, terrorism, and, yes, gun control dovetailed with longstanding NRA framing strategies. Both Trump’s and the NRA’s narratives appeal in particular to disaffected white voters who feel under siege. These voters think they have lost something, mostly to undeserving others, and are searching for someone or something to make them whole again. Appealing to people’s fears isn’t always an effective strategy for politicians and social movements, but it often is, and especially so when historical, economic, and political contexts make threats more resonant.

Leader of the (C)PAC: mobilizing resources Social movements and their organizations succeed or fail based in part on their ability to mobilize resources, namely people’s time and money (McCarthy and Zald, 1977). They provide organization and networking to coordinate activities among people with similar beliefs. The NRA offers a uniquely powerful political recipe that includes the coordination of millions of members, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, a potent lobbying wing, the ability to inform as well as consistently and quickly mobilize its members, nearly pure partisanship, and a comparatively weak opposing movement. This has been a recipe for success. The NRA dominates the gun debate and is the most powerful social movement organization supporting conservatives and Republicans. The NRA claims a membership of five million people, brought in over $430 million in revenue in 2016 (including over $160 million in membership dues and $170 million in contributions), employs a large professional staff, communicates regularly with its members (using official monthly magazines, social media, action alerts regarding impending legislation and hearings, and much more), lobbies legislators, and networks with other conservative groups (Terrill, 2017). During election seasons, especially presidential elections, the NRA deploys its significant resources to support and oppose candidates, leaving a heavy footprint. The NRA has increasingly supported Republican candidates at all levels of government over the last several decades, as gun politics has grown increasingly partisan. The 2016 election stands as the high-water mark of NRA partisanship and commitment. The organization endorsed Donald Trump at its annual meeting in May 2016, shortly before he had officially clinched enough delegates to win the GOP nomination. This was unprecedentedly early for the NRA. Trump attended the NRA event and spoke to the crowd upon receiving the endorsement. Parroting NRA rhetoric, he said, ‘The Second

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 119 Amendment is under threat like never before,’ and then added his preferred adjective for his opponent ‘Crooked Hillary Clinton is the most anti-gun, antiSecond Amendment candidate ever to run for office’ (Jaffe, 2016). A year later, as president, he returned to the NRA’s annual meeting to thank the organization for helping get him elected and to take a victory lap. Ronald Reagan was the only other sitting president to do so. Trump was received enthusiastically by the thousands of NRA members, likely largely due to his successful efforts to confirm his Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch. Gorsuch is expected to provide the same support for the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment as did his deceased predecessor, Antonin Scalia, who authored the majority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller confirming an individual right to bear arms. The 2016 cycle was the NRA’s most expensive yet at nearly $60 million in expenditures. The NRA spent several million dollars on lobbying during this period. Direct contributions mostly to candidates and party committees accounted for another million dollars in spending. Only about $10,000 of this went to Democratic Party candidates. Most of the NRA’s 2016 outlays – more than $54 million – went to outside spending, with nearly all of it for political advertisements. Of that $54 million, about $30 million went to opposing Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump. Nearly all of the remaining money was spent on six key Senate races. The NRA spent just $265 of this money in support of Democrats and $2,281 in opposition to Republicans. Nearly every dollar the organization spent in 2016 was in opposition to Democrats – which constituted well over half of this spending – or in support of Republicans. The NRA’s 2016 election cycle independent expenditures placed them eighth of all groups on this type of expenditure (Center for Responsive Politics, 2018). The other top spenders in this category are SuperPACs and political party-affiliated groups, not single-issue or active-member organizations. Let there be no doubt that the source of the NRA’s power is not simply its money, but its large and active membership. It is often labeled the ‘gun lobby,’ and is a powerful one at that. But that power is contingent upon its membership base. The organization’s most die-hard supporters include a critical mass of single-issue gun rights voters known to be deeply engaged in local, state, and federal gun politics and to vote at disproportionately high rates. However, even the less active and mostly politically inactive members can largely be counted on to take action when explicit gun control threats emerge or elections are held. The shared politics of NRA members extend to a proportion of the tens of millions of gun owners not formally affiliated with the organization, because of an increasingly important shared identity. ‘Gun owners are developing a powerful political identity that rivals other groups’ characteristics in its ability to predict voting behavior,’ including ‘an increased likelihood of engaging in a variety of political behaviors’ (Joslyn et al., 2017, p. 382).

120 Scott Melzer The NRA contributes to this phenomenon by underscoring the centrality of guns in the culture wars, which complements the decades-long trend of the gun debate being an increasingly partisan one. The NRA’s integration into the conservative movement reflects and strengthens its ability to appeal to its members and other gun owners, who are overwhelmingly conservative. The NRA’s Board of Directors and senior leadership have included many Republican politicians (members of the U.S. Congress, governors, and more) and leaders of many other conservative organizations, including Americans for Tax Reform and the American Conservative Union. The NRA is deeply involved in the latter’s annual gathering, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), including serving annually as one of a handful of presenting sponsors and delivering prominent speeches. The combination of the NRA’s resources and its ability to mobilize these resources gives the organization the ability repeatedly to defeat federal gun control proposals. Mass shooting after mass shooting has not resulted in any restrictive federal gun control legislation, arguably ever, but certainly since Bill Clinton left office. The NRA also wields enormous influence over state legislative bodies, highlighted by its many successes expanding gun rights by weakening or eliminating concealed-carry licensing laws and passing Stand Your Ground laws. It is predictably more effective in conservative-leaning states and less effective in liberal-leaning ones, but overall it is winning at the state level as well. Politicians who enjoy the NRA’s support have fared well, and those who explicitly opposed the NRA and gun rights face the organization’s substantial resources and millions more sympathetic gun owners.

The mobilizing effect of threat The NRA is able to mobilize resources because of broader political opportunities and threats, the latter of which in particular the organization effectively constructs and frames to generate support. The NRA attracts intensely committed and deeply conservative members by instilling fear in them that liberals have gun rights at death’s door. Gun rights are the final stand for the NRA. Without these, they argue, liberals will take away all individual rights and freedoms, forcing citizens to be dependent on the government for protection, food, health care. Guns equal freedom, the logic goes, so the NRA’s selfdescribed patriots and freedom fighters must defend gun rights, win the culture war, and save America. They are the Gun Crusaders (Melzer, 2009). By tapping into an emotion-fueled ideology that runs deeper and broader than simply gun rights, the NRA has deepened and broadened the number and commitment of its members and expanded its influence. It has been able to do so because it rode a wave of conservative reactionary movements (e.g., the Christian Right, anti-tax groups, militias) oppposing mid-20th century liberal group-rights movements. A window of opportunity opened in the 1980s, highlighted by Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency. In his first inaugural

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 121 address in 1981, in the context of a deep economic recession, President Reagan said: In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself [sic], then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price. (Reagan, 2018) Reagan communicated, and to a great extent implemented, a conservative vision of America that the federal government was impeding rather than facilitating equity; if only people were left to stand on their own merits and determine their own outcomes, we would not be in the mess we’re in. Former NRA President Charlton Heston’s politics evolved to align with Reagan’s. Heston emphasized that a gun is more than a physical object, it is a symbol; that is, its importance lies in its representation of a particular American ideology. He credited Reagan with advocating not only for the freedom of religion but also the religion of freedom (Melzer, 2009, p. 14). For the NRA and many conservatives, the religion of freedom can only be practiced when the government is not involved in people’s lives, when people are entirely selfreliant and independent and enjoy nearly unlimited individual rights and freedoms. Opposition to all forms of gun control constitutes the heart of the NRA’s religion of freedom philosophy. It fits with a broader conservative philosophy that opposes social welfare programs that help feed and house people or federal education policies that impose national standards on state and local governments. One former NRA leader incisively commented, ‘You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 15). An ousted Arizona Senator’s aide, whose boss lost his perfect NRA rating and his seat because of his support for a gun control bill, observed ‘It was a religious war. You’re either with them or against them’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 15). The NRA mobilizes its millions of members by appealing not only to their desire to protect gun rights, but also to their goal of defending their version of the religion of freedom. There is a uniquely American historical and political context that makes this ideology and pitch so appealing. The NRA reimagined itself as an uncompromising gun rights organization not only in the wake of 1960s political assassinations and accompanying gun control debates and legislation, but also following the liberal group-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Leaders and activists demanding civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights

122 Scott Melzer challenged conservative views that people succeed or fail based on individual merit. A broad conservative reactionary movement emerged in response to these liberal group-rights movements, congealing as a culture war oriented around ‘guns, gays, and God.’ The Christian Right and libertarian-leaning organizations like the NRA were joined by neoconservatives promoting an aggressive foreign policy agenda rooted in an earlier anti-Communist global agenda. What binds these seemingly disparate groups together is a desire to restore what they see as a truth and correctness that is threatened or has been lost. This includes a do-it-yourself frontier masculinity, so-called traditional family values, and opposition to government power, whether domestically or abroad. These views are disproportionately held by conservatives, whites, Southerners, rural dwellers, and men, all of whom felt and feel most threatened by the group-rights movements and subsequent changes to U.S. law and culture. The gains made by liberal group-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as 1980s-era movement conservatism, coincided with sweeping economic changes that produced uncertainty, stagnation, and recession after recession to this day. The U.S. decline in industrialization, beginning in the 1970s, resulted in the loss of millions of well-paying, blue-collar jobs. Family farms also declined, unable to compete with emerging corporate-owned farms. Working-class people faced a broken promise: the American ethos of hard work alone was no longer likely to be rewarded with the modest fruits of the American Dream. The rise of industrialization produced the men-as-breadwinner identity. Deindustrialization undermined it for many men. When their masculine statuses and identities are threatened, many men attempt to reassert them, whether individually or collectively.1 Among gun owners, this reassertion of masculinity might entail becoming a deeply committed gun rights activist, or, simply becoming a concealed or open carrier. Becoming a concealed carrier is one response to declining breadwinner opportunities along with the perceived threatened responsibility of protecting their families (Carlson, 2015). Even though few men face actual threats of violence in their daily lives – particularly those living in suburban, middle-class contexts – they often perceive a threat. Carrying guns can allay anxieties. ‘But what guns did protect against was a gendered threat: the threat of falling down the masculine hierarchy (represented by the threat of their own downward mobility), at the bottom of which lies the subjugated masculinities of lowerclass, racialized, and hypermasculine criminals (which they construe as threats to themselves and their families)’ (Carlson, 2015, p. 401). Many white men have attributed their declining incomes and declining power to the actual and perceived cultural and economic gains of people of color (Ingraham, 2016). Guns help symbolically restore what they feel they lost. The NRA has gained power and influence by tapping into conservative gun owners’ dueling feelings of feeling victimized by what they view as culture war attacks from the Left and wanting to fight back. Heston delivered a series of

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 123 culture war speeches capturing that sense of victimization as he became the public face of the NRA in the late 1990s. He wrote in 2000, The message from the cultural warlords is everywhere, delivered with the arrogant swagger of absolute confidence. Summarized, it is this: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant (or ever worse evangelical) Christian, the midwestern or southern (or even worse rural) hunter, apparently straight or admitted heterosexual gunowning (or ever worse NRA card-carrying) average working stiff, or even worse still male working stiff, because not only do you not count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as welcome and green as you hand them over, but your voice deserves no hearing, your opinion is not enlightened, your media access is virtually nil, and frankly mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something about your new America. And until you do, why don’t you just sit down and shut up! (Melzer, 2009, p. 45) Heston beckoned NRA members and conservatives to instead stand up and speak out: It’s time to say, ‘Enough!’ Are you a black Republican who speaks good English? . . . Are you a soldier who shudders at the thought that a woman may someday take a bayonet in the belly and die beside you on some distant battlefield? Are you a Christian who believes that Southern Baptist is not a synonym for redneck hillbilly? Do you wish that homosexuals would keep their lifestyle a matter of personal conviction, not constant controversy? Do you own a firearm and wish it were once again an honorable responsibility? Do you realize that each one of these demands courage to be truly free? (Melzer, 2009, p. 45) It takes courage to stand up and fight for the religion of freedom, Heston says, appealing to his target audience’s sense of patriotic duty. This strategy, along with Heston’s charisma and popularity, paid and continues to pay large dividends for the NRA. Gun violence, elections, and culture wars: political opportunities and threats

Social movement success is dependent in part on the political opportunity structure. For example, if politicians sympathetic to your cause hold positions of power, your group may benefit from a window of opportunity that offers the possibility of legislative gains. People like to be on winning teams. Social movement organizations (SMOs) may be able to mobilize more resources from current and potential supporters because they perceive an opportunity for

124 Scott Melzer progress. What one movement may experience as an opportunity, its countermovement is likely to experience as a threat. And threat can have just as much if not more of a mobilizing effect than opportunity (McAdam, 1999). Importantly, though, opportunities and threats do not necessarily or automatically exist as objective realities. They must be framed as such by SMOs and leaders, and perceived as such by target audiences. Gun violence and gun legislation have been the primary sources of organizing on both sides of the gun debate, offering windows of opportunity for or threats of rollbacks.2 The political assassinations of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. resulted in the Gun Control Act of 1968. The contentious debate around that legislation played out within the NRA, which was divided at the time as to how engaged the organization should be in gun politics. The die-hard anti-gun control wing eventually took control of the organization in 1977, and since then the NRA has been typically unwilling to compromise on gun control legislation, particularly in the wake of increasingly deadly mass shootings. The organization’s agenda benefits from sympathetic presidents, governors, and federal and state legislative bodies, but its resources expand when the NRA can point to an obvious source of threat. With greater resources comes greater power. The election of Barack Obama was just such an example. A Democratic president who supported (modest) gun control provided the NRA with a legitimate threat that they could amplify. Obama’s election resulted in a huge increase in gun purchases, in part due to the NRA’s framing him as an existential threat to gun rights. This message resonated so much among NRA members and gun owners that it spurred success at the state level, where gun rights legislation was expanded in legislative bodies that leaned conservative (Reich and Barth, 2017). The base was mobilized not just by the idea of Obama as a threat, but also by the NRA portrayals of the threat as broad and extreme. Since the 2008 Heller decision, which upheld an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-protection, the NRA has been able to frame presidents as even greater threats to gun rights because of their power to nominate Supreme Court justices. The nomination power was the central argument the NRA used to oppose Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy for president. The NRA effectively framed Clinton as a multi-generational threat to gun rights because of her ability to immediately nominate a replacement for the deceased Justice Scalia – likely immediately tipping the court to 5–4 in opposition to an individual right to keep and bear arms – as well as the potential to nominate multiple other justices if seats open up (or when they open up, per NRA framing). Of course, what distinguishes the contemporary NRA from its previous iterations is how it connects threats to gun control to broader threats to conservatism via culture war framing. Scholars debate the extent (even existence) of the culture wars. Most Americans, skeptics note, don’t really participate in anything approximating a culture war (Fiorina, 2005). However, many politicians and most executive staff in social movement organizations engaged in these contentious debates are

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 125 best described as culture war leaders. They have the power to define and frame the debates, including setting symbolic and legislative parameters (Hunter, 1991). It is not, after all, the average gun owner or even NRA member making television appearances opposite the average non-gun owner to debate and set the terms. Instead, key leadership and media spokespersons from the NRA and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, for example, enjoy media access and power. Key leaders also drive ballot initiatives and gun bills at the federal and state levels. The electorate is less polarized than culture war elites, but the former are largely confined to merely responding to the actions of the latter. The NRA’s culture war ideology has resulted in countless anecdotes of members critiquing and resigning from the organization, but no uprising has resulted or is impending – quite the opposite. For decades now, the NRA’s decisions to align itself with conservatives and Republicans, and then culture war politics, have been wise ones because they take advantage of the broader political context. This context has been particularly beneficial to Republicans and conservatives because their base has for several decades been hungrier for ideological red meat. Culture war ideologues are inclined to stoke its fires both because it reflects their politics and generates more support among the passionate base. Republicans and conservatives have moved further to the Right than Democrats and liberals have to the Left (in part because the Right has more effectively created an infrastructure that supports a unifying symbolic politics), so culture war language and politics resonate more for the Right (Grossman and Hopkins, 2016). The astonishing political success of Republicans is premised upon mobilizing high levels of anger within the electorate – one reason why conservatives tend so often to see themselves as victims of liberal elitists, even when liberals have relatively little political power. (Wolfe, 2006, p. 56)

Slippery slopes, culture war tyranny, and freedom fighters: Framing the gun debate NRA rhetoric on guns has shifted dramatically, most notably beginning in the late 1990s. As I have documented previously, with a few exceptions, the NRA mostly responded to gun control threats throughout the middle of the 20th century with language that arguably mirrored the severity of each threat (Melzer, 2009). By the early 1990s, the NRA began to more aggressively frame gun control threats as dire. Bill Clinton’s gun control agenda provided the NRA with a foil, and an objective threat to some gun rights. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre observed, ‘People respond when there’s a threat,’ and Clinton was helping them ‘[mobilize] members at record rates’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 85). Later that decade, the NRA’s current framing

126 Scott Melzer strategies would begin to take shape. The NRA began connecting the defense of gun rights to the defense of freedom against liberals, communists, and socialists (i.e., those who support government power over individual rights). A 1996 recruitment video starring Charlton Heston foreshadowed how the NRA would begin talking about gun control and gun rights. Heston warned that the loss of gun rights threatened American freedom. LaPierre concluded the video with a plea for supporters to ‘join or recommit yourself to our crusade to save the Second Amendment’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 73). When Heston officially joined the NRA leadership soon thereafter, he equated gun owners’ status during the Clinton era with that of Jews during the Holocaust: ‘I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith. The Nazis forced them to wear yellow stars as identity badges. So, what color star will they pin on gun owners’ chests?’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 73). The analogy is deplorable, but revealing. The NRA and its Gun Crusaders would no sooner abandon their religion of freedom than would a devout Jew in the face of a genocide. It is an understatement to describe Heston’s analogy as hyperbolic. Nonetheless, his idea and language resonate with many. Threats to group identities – even perceived ones arguably disconnected from objective threats – generate powerful responses. The NRA frames threats to gun rights in ways that resonate with gun owners who feel not only that their gun rights are threatened, and not only that their individual rights and freedoms are threatened, but also that their very existence is threatened. Linguistic frames are analogous to picture frames, guiding and limiting what the audience should focus on and what it should ignore. They are used by SMOs (and others) to generate support from politicians, the media, the public, in-group members, and other target audiences (Evans, 1997). Frames do not exist in a vacuum. They are affected by the political opportunity structure, the cultural environment, and their intended audiences. These factors influence the kinds of collective action frames – or ‘action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate [social movement] activities and campaigns’ that movement actors deploy (Benford and Snow, 2000, p. 614). Collective action frames (1) diagnose a problem as well as the source of the problem, often focusing on victims of some injustice; (2) offer a prognosis, or solutions, including strategies, tactics, and targets; and (3) and provide motivation in the form of an exceptional rationale or justification that moves people from thought to action (Benford and Snow, 2000). NRA frames are no exception. Charlton Heston’s oft-repeated, defiant assertion, ‘From my cold, dead hands!’ exemplifies collective action framing. Those five words convey a problem and its source (the threat of gun control, especially from the government), provide a solution (do not compromise on any form of gun control), and offer motivation (heroes are prepared to defend freedom by making the ultimate sacrifice). Since Heston’s emergence as the symbolic leader of the NRA and gun rights, the organization has framed virtually every gun control threat, no matter how modest, as an existential one,

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 127 claiming that any gun control is the slippery slope to registration and confiscation. Two other changes to NRA frames also stand out over the last two decades: as the gun debate became more partisan, the NRA framed the Left as the source of threats to gun rights and all individual rights and freedoms, accusing them of fighting a culture war; and paired with that, the NRA has framed itself and its members as heroes and patriots, modern-day freedom fighters who protect America from the tyrannical Left. Slippery slopes and hyperbolic warnings

The NRA of the new millennium identified numerous threats to gun rights: Democratic politicians, the media, gun control groups, the United Nations, the filmmaker Michael Moore, and countless others. Each were depicted as dangerous threats to gun rights, as were virtually any gun control proposals. Among these were waiting periods for people to purchase firearms. LaPierre argued, The anti-gunner’s formula for surrendering our Second Amendment freedoms is clear: first, enact a nationwide firearms waiting period; second, after the waiting period fails to reduce crime, enact a nationwide licensing and registration law; and the final step, confiscate all registered firearms. (LaPierre, 2003, p. 206) Waiting periods, by this argument, are two short steps from gun confiscation. In mailing after mailing I received as an NRA member, I observed how members were told ‘the Second Amendment and your NRA are under attack in the media like never before in our 130-year history,’ and, ‘this may be the toughest battle we have ever faced together’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 98). No threat was parsed as greater or lesser than any other. Nearly each and every one the NRA identified it described as the worst yet. The political and cultural context mattered little, too. A Republican president or Republican-controlled Senate or House of Representatives has not deterred the NRA from claiming gun rights are on the verge of being eliminated, and with them all individual rights and freedoms. The 2016 election cycle was no different. Preemptively, LaPierre warned NRA members (in the organization’s political magazine, America’s First Freedom) that this election was like no other: ‘The media will say this is scaremongering, but there is plenty to be scared about. The threats to our liberty have never been greater’ (LaPierre, 2015a). Those mid-2015 thoughts launched the NRA’s efforts to defeat Hillary Clinton. Months later, LaPierre made a claim he’s made repeatedly for twenty years: ‘At this point in the NRA’s history, in American history, your courage, your strength and your determination to fight alongside the NRA has never been more important’ (LaPierre, 2015c). Just as he did in 2000, when Al Gore was the Democratic nominee, LaPierre wrote in 2016 of Clinton: ‘With the future direction of the

128 Scott Melzer Court at stake, there has never been a more important election than this one’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 92; LaPierre, 2016c). The court has been the NRA’s focus since the 2008 Heller decision: ‘If Hillary Clinton were to achieve her dream of capturing the White House in November, she would use her vast power to erase American liberty as we know it. Hillary’s record in targeting the First and Second amendments – the two amendments that inseparably protect all of our freedoms – sets her apart as the most anti-freedom candidate to run for the White House’ (LaPierre, 2015c). ‘Unprecedented’ is how the NRA framed Clinton’s threats to gun rights, though they used similar language for Obama, Gore, and former President Clinton. Determining what is or is not hyperbolic is, undoubtedly, an interpretive process. However, there are clear examples of NRA frames not aligning with the facts. For example, the organization has focused on the recent uptick in violent crimes in some cities, namely Chicago. However, in LaPierre’s attempts to frame Obama and Hillary Clinton as soft on crime, he inaccurately refers to ‘unprecedented murder rates in in places like Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.’ (LaPierre, 2016d). The uptick in homicides has not been universal, and is far from historically high given that violent crimes have dropped precipitously over the last twenty-five years. New York City’s homicide rate in 2016 was under 4/100,000, a historically low rate and almost impossibly low for a large city (DeStefano, 2016). NRA threat frames in 2017 are similarly disconnected from the political reality. The election of Donald Trump and Republicans to majorities in both chambers of Congress makes gun control a non-threat legislatively. LaPierre applauds NRA members for preventing legislation during the Obama presidency, but adds, As committed freedom fighters and NRA members, we also know that we’re headed for some tough, ugly fights in Congress next year. Whether it’s universal gun registration, semi-automatic bans, repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) or a host of other attacks on our rights, we now face a gun-ban army that’s more dangerous than ever – in a country that the national elections have revealed as more divided than ever. (LaPierre, 2016f) It is impossible to reconcile his warnings with the legislative reality in Congress. Trump won, which the NRA celebrated, but the threat framing is ceaseless: In fact, with a seismic change in which the far left’s tactics and goals are mainstreamed, the threat to American values will become even more treacherous. Our job of taking back lost liberty and restoring the American culture we cherish through the peaceful transition of government is increasingly being poisoned by well-organized political guerilla forces using “resistance” tactics on a massive scale. (LaPierre, 2017b)

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 129 The NRA, like many social movement organizations, has learned that perceived threat has the strongest mobilizing effect. Therefore, regardless of the nature or extent of threats to gun rights, the NRA frames any and all as dire. Culture war tyranny

Charlton Heston’s late-1990s series of culture war speeches pointed the finger at liberals for influencing America’s universities, or ‘incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism’ that ‘stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 102). He and other NRA leaders through today have framed the organization and its members as victims of a left-wing culture war. In the wake of 9/11, LaPierre compared ‘anti-gunners’ to terrorists – ‘They’re attacking freedom . . . they’re terrorists . . . they’re political terrorists’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 107). In 2013, NRA First Vice President James Porter borrowed Heston’s and LaPierre’s language: ‘This is not a battle about gun rights,’ he said, referring to it instead as ‘a culture war’ (McNary, 2013). War metaphors are littered throughout NRA framings of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic politicians: ‘Clinton and the fresh crowd she would bring with her aren’t just reinforcements, they are a whole guerilla army of gun-ban ideologues and accomplished government insiders ready to take up where Obama will be leaving off’ (LaPierre, 2015a). The ‘ObamaClinton axis lauds Australia’s theft of freedom from its law-abiding citizens,’ LaPierre says, referring to that country’s 1996 restrictive gun control legislation following a deadly mass shooting (LaPierre, 2015b). The NRA frames Democratic politicians as freedom-hating militants determined to impose government control over people’s lives. Freedom is under attack, they say: ‘But over the next four years, there could likely be at least four vacancies on the high court. If it’s a Hillary hand-picked court, our nation as we know it could be sunk’ (LaPierre, 2015c). LaPierre argues, ‘If Hillary Clinton takes the White House and the pro-gun Senate majority is lost, then everything we hold dear as free Americans – our freedom defined by the Founders’ words, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” – will be under threat of eradication’ (LaPierre, 2016b). Combining hyperbole and culture war framing, LaPierre says, ‘There is no greater danger to American liberty and to the security of our nation than a Hillary Clinton administration’ (LaPierre, 2016e). ‘With all of the threats to the very existence of the country we grew up in and love, there is a larger mission for NRA,’ he says, ‘It means working not only to protect our gun rights, but to protect against the wider assaults on our country, our culture, our heritage and our future’ (LaPierre, 2015a). Connecting threats to gun rights to a particular American identity and culture that reflects conservative views of the role of government in citizens’ lives enables the NRA to ignite passionate support in many of its members. That the threat came from the first woman candidate of a major U.S. party, and by all accounts the favorite to win, helped feed the NRA’s and conservatives’ gendered, nanny-state culture war backlash.

130 Scott Melzer Freedom fighters

The NRA couples its victimization framing with that of patriots and freedom fighters, holding up the organization and its members as defenders of not only gun rights, but also of all individual rights and freedoms. Equating his service as NRA President with past U.S. wartime presidents, Charlton Heston accepted a third term in 2002 and said, ‘George Washington hung around until the Revolutionary War was won. Roosevelt hung around until World War II was won. Reagan hung around until the Cold War was won. If you want, I’ll hang around until we win this one, too’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 106). In a fundraising letter sent by LaPierre, members were given similar treatment: ‘[The Founding Fathers] took a risk – and made a sacrifice – that you and I still reap the benefits of 225 years later. I’m asking for your sacrifice today . . . that our descendants can reap the benefits of 225 years from now’ (Melzer, 2009, p. 106). This language persisted through Donald Trump’s 2016 election. ‘NRA is Freedom’s Safest Place’ was the organization’s election season theme. Once again, NRA leaders portrayed members as heirs to the heroes of the American Revolution: As NRA members, you and I are part of an unbroken line of patriots who have answered freedom’s call, generation after generation and without fail. Our liberties were first won by ordinary but brave men and women who left their families and farms to risk their lives against the greatest military power the world had ever known. Since then, when ordinary Americans have been called upon to face extraordinary threats, they’ve risen to the challenge every single time. (LaPierre, 2016f) Months before presidential votes were cast, LaPierre wrote, With the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts in play, these elections are indeed the tipping point for freedom – not just in our lifetime, but in the history of our remarkable republic. The NRA is the heart and soul of all that is good in our nation – and, as in the past, our leadership is the key to preserving liberty for all Americans. (LaPierre, 2016b) If the NRA stands together, he argued, ‘We will save our freedom and our country’ (LaPierre, 2016e). Heston often equated his Civil Rights support and gun rights support; LaPierre continues using that framing strategy today: You and I know there is one force that stands between the end of freedom and the salvation of individual liberty – the men and women of the National Rifle Association of America. We are, after all, the oldest

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 131 civil rights organization in America. No matter what the threat is, we will defend our civil rights and our right to self-defense. (LaPierre, 2016a) With Trump’s win, the NRA did a victory lap. LaPierre wrote, With the 2016 election victories, NRA members saved the Second Amendment. We saved the country. We saved freedom. We saved the bedrock values and culture of liberty that throughout history so many Americans have fought and died for. As I cross the country I have never experienced such a feeling of pride and relief, not just from NRA members but from ordinary people everywhere who know their country will indeed be great again and we, the people, will be free again. With Donald Trump in the White House we will have the most pro-Second Amendment president in history. And we have majorities in both houses of Congress. You did it – you and your families, friends, co-workers and neighbors. (LaPierre, 2017a) By casting themselves as patriots and freedom fighters defending against culture war attacks from the Left, the NRA appeals to a conservative, frontier masculinity politics that resonates with many of its members in ways beyond the mere protection of gun rights. Appealing to their group identity and deeply held political beliefs, the NRA generates passionate, committed supporters.

The past as prologue: NRA and gun rights politics in 2016 and beyond The 2016 election season saw the completion of the NRA’s multi-decade process of embedding itself within the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The NRA’s agenda of ensuring and expanding gun rights has been furthered by their conscious decision to connect threats to gun rights to threats to all individual rights and freedoms at the hands of the political Left. Presidential candidate Donald Trump similarly demonized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a threat to American freedoms, as conservatives define them. The NRA’s early endorsement of Trump – whose politics before running for president were decidedly mixed, including some previous support for gun control – gave him conservative political cover and credibility. It also signaled he was likely to enjoy a jolt of grassroots support from gun rights activists, along with the NRA’s significant economic resources. In Trump, the NRA saw a kindred spirit whose electoral strategy was to feed red meat to the conservative base rather than appeal to the political middle. Trump railed against immigrants and immigration (especially Muslims

132 Scott Melzer and Mexicans), political correctness, high taxes, and trade agreements that exported American jobs, as well as gun control. He simultaneously identified a litany of threats and offered himself up as the patriotic hero who would eliminate these threats and roll back the clock to a (mostly imagined) bygone idyllic era when America was always ‘winning.’ He promised to ‘Make America Great Again.’ His campaign and subsequent rhetoric as president appeals most to disaffected whites who feel that the country has changed for the worse. Liberals, Trump and his supporters argue, have given preferential treatment to everyone else (Blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, terrorists, welfare recipients, transgendered people, and so on) at the expense of hard-working, native-born whites. Liberals’ politics and policies, Trump and conservatives argue, are not only unfair but dangerous because they prioritize diversity, forced equality, and political correctness over competition, personal safety, and national security. In short, there is almost no daylight between Trump’s culture war rhetoric and the conservative movement that he mobilized to victory, and the movement the NRA has been tapping into and expanding for two-plus decades. Trump’s abysmal polling numbers suggest that it may be more difficult to govern the entire country by appealing almost solely to the conservative base. His Republican predecessors more intentionally or skillfully framed their politics in ways that appealed to a broader spectrum of Americans. Only time will tell if his early presidency yields a 2018 wave election for Democrats, and whether he can get reelected in 2020. Conversely, the NRA’s status as a social movement organization brings with it fewer political restrictions. The NRA’s recent and long-term political power and efficacy seems to be dependent on its staking out a conservative culture war position that animates a base of deeply committed and active gun rights supporters. This has been a winning formula for over two decades. However, the NRA too faces a future more uncertain than it has since Bill Clinton left office. The needle moved some after the death of seventeen more people in early 2018 in yet another school shooting, this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The subsequent activism of the surviving students generated national mobilization and some gun control legislation in a state that otherwise passes none. No action resulted in the Republican-controlled Congress, even with President Trump surprisingly tepidly supporting some modest gun control legislation. Something changed in the gun debate. Will the NRA’s rhetoric or politics change, too? Doing so would amount to altering their winning playbook. They are unlikely to do so until they find themselves on the losing end of multiple battles. Barring a seismic shift in gun politics, the NRA will continue to wage a conservative culture war.

Notes 1 For examples, see Kimmel, 1996; Melzer, 2018. 2 For an exhaustive discussion of whether there has been a gun control movement, see Goss, 2006.

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 133

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134 Scott Melzer americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/1/26/standing-guard-defending-your-rightto-defend-yourself-remain-our-watchwords/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2016b). Standing guard: Hillary: packing the courts for a generation. America’s First Freedom. February 23 [online]. Available at: www.americas1stfreedom. org/articles/2016/2/23/standing-guard-hillary-packing-the-courts-for-a-generation/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2016c). Standing guard: when it comes to gun rights, 2016 election is about the court, too. America’s First Freedom. April 26 [online]. Available at: www. americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/4/26/standing-guard-when-it-comes-to-gunrights-2016-election-is-about-the-court-too/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2016d). Standing guard: taking the fight to Hillary: bring it on! America’s First Freedom. June 21 [online]. Available at: www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/ 2016/6/21/standing-guard-taking-the-fight-to-hillary-bring-it-on/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2016e). Hillary: contempt for the truth and American freedom. America’s First Freedom. September 26 [online]. Available at: www.americas1stfreedom.org/ articles/2016/9/26/hillary-contempt-for-the-truth-and-american-freedom/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2016f). With historic challenges just ahead, freedom’s future is in our hands. America’s First Freedom. November 24 [online]. Available at: www.americas1st freedom.org/articles/2016/11/24/with-historic-challenges-just-ahead-freedomsfuture-is-in-our-hands/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). LaPierre, W. (2017a). NRA members must stand tall as liberty’s bodyguards. America’s First Freedom. February 27 [online]. Available at: www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2017/ 2/27/nra-members-must-stand-tall-as-libertys-bodyguards/[Accessed: 29 August 2017]. LaPierre, W. (2017b). The fight to restore our freedom is an uphill battle, but one we must win. America’s First Freedom. March 21 [online]. Available at: www.americas1st freedom.org/articles/2017/3/21/the-fight-to-restore-our-freedom-is-an-uphillbattle-but-one-we-must-win/ (Accessed: 29 August 2017). McAdam, D. (1999) Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCarthy, J.D. and Zald, M.N. (1977) “Resource mobilization and social movements: a partial theory.” American Journal of Sociology, 82, pp. 1212–1241. McNary, C. (2013). At NRA convention in Houston, official says ‘culture war’ more than gun rights. Dallas News. May 3 [online]. Available at: www.dallasnews.com/ news/texas/2013/05/03/at-nra-convention-in-houston-official-says-culture-warmore-than-gun-rights (Accessed: 17 September 2017). Melzer, S. (2009) Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War. New York: New York University Press. Melzer, S. (2018) Manhood Impossible: Men’s Struggles to Control and Transform Their Bodies and Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Philips, K. (2017). “No more powerful ally than the NRA”: group names itself leader of Trump’s #counterresistance. Washington Post. February 23. [online] Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/23/no-more-powerful-allythan-the-nra-group-names-itself-leader-of-trumps-counterresistance/?utm_term=.2 bed5384c67c (Accessed: 10 September 2017). Reagan, R. (2018). “Inaugural address - january 20, 1981.” [online] Reaganlibrary. archives.gov. Available at: https://reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/ 1981/12081a.htm (Accessed: 10 September 2017).

Fighting the Left and leading the Right 135 Reich, G. and Barth, J. (2017) “Planting in fertile soil: The National Rifle Association and State Firearms Legislation.” Social Science Quarterly, 98, pp. 485–499. Spies, M. and Balcerzak, A. (2016). The NRA placed big bets on the 2016 election, and won almost all of them. Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets Blog. November 9 [online]. Available at: www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/11/the-nra-placed-big-betson-the-2016-election-and-won-almost-all-of-them/ (Accessed: 10 September 2017). Terrill, D. (2017). NRA releases financial statement showing revenue, expenses for 2016. Guns.com. May 5 [online]. Available at: www.guns.com/2017/05/05/nra-revenueexpenses-in-2016/ (Accessed: 10 September 2017). Wolfe, A. (2006) “The culture war that never came.” In: Dionne Jr. E.J. and Cromartie, M. (Eds), Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Brookings Institution Press, pp. 41–73.

7

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? Gun control politics over two decades of change Kristin A. Goss

Introduction In April 1999, a catastrophe befell the leafy suburbs of Denver. Two heavily armed teenagers went to their high school and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher while injuring two dozen others. The shooting at Columbine High School followed a string of similar mass shootings in schools and other presumptively safe spaces. The Columbine shooting horrified the nation and felt like a tipping point in American gun politics. The response was immediate and far-reaching. Families got involved. Parents of Columbine victims found their voices as advocates, and after a shooting four months later at a Jewish community center in California, mothers in particular had had enough. Taking advantage of the first generation of Internet tools, such as listservs and websites, moms mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to march on Washington and in scores of cities and towns across the country. Unfolding on Mother’s Day 2000, the Million Mom March combined images of playful maternalism and fearless womanhood to demand policy change. Wealthy donors got involved. Everyday people sent small contributions to gun control groups, but big money flowed, as well. A tech billionaire supplied millions of dollars to create a new, pragmatic gun control group (Americans for Gun Safety) that sought to break the political logjam on firearms policy. The President got involved. Bill Clinton flew to Colorado to console the families and the community. After returning to Washington, he continued advocating privately and publicly for stricter gun laws over the following year, the last of his final term. Congress got involved. A bill to tighten federal gun laws – specifically by expanding the national background check system to some private firearm transfers – surged to the top of the Congressional agenda. The measure failed to pass. States got involved. Colorado and Oregon (which also had endured a traumatic high school shooting) put private-sale background checks on the popular ballot. Both measures passed by a wide margin. For those favoring stricter gun laws, the legacy of Columbine was mixed. A lot of people got involved in advocacy for gun regulation. Incremental policy

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 137 change occurred at the state level. And then gun control dropped from the public agenda. Thirteen years later, another catastrophe befell the nation, this time in quaint Newtown, Connecticut. Here the mass shooting unfolded at an elementary school, and the victims were 20 first-graders and 6 educators. As with Columbine, the massacre felt like the brutal culmination of a series of mass shootings that had come before – most recently at a Congress member’s meet-and-greet in Arizona (2011), at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin (2012), and inside a movie theater in Colorado (2012), to name a few. As with Columbine, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School horrified the nation and was broadly interpreted as a tipping point. As with Columbine, the response was immediate and far-reaching. Families got involved. The parents and other relatives of the victims went en masse to Washington to testify for stricter gun laws. They formed an organization to work on school-based strategies to prevent another such tragedy. Mothers around the country mobilized, this time using ‘Internet 2.0’ tools. As with moms who had organized more than a decade earlier, this group of female activists creatively combined maternalism with ‘bad ass’ womanhood to take on the nation’s powerful gun lobby and advocate for policy reform. Wealthy donors got involved. As before, a tech billionaire supplied millions of dollars to create a new, pragmatic gun control group (Everytown for Gun Safety) that sought to break the political logjam on guns. The President got involved. Just as Bill Clinton had, Barack Obama went to the families’ side to console them, then turned his bully pulpit and political capital toward the cause of strengthening gun laws. Congress got involved. After years of moldering, a background check bill returned to the top of the agenda. Following several months of hearings and intense media attention, the U.S. Senate failed to pass the measure, ensuring that it would not even be considered in the House. States got involved. Again, states put private-sale background checks on the popular ballot and before state legislatures. This time, 11 states enacted changes, either instituting or expanding background check requirements (Keneally, 2017). For those favoring stricter gun laws, the legacy of Sandy Hook – like Columbine – was decidedly mixed. A lot of people got involved in advocacy for gun regulation. Incremental policy change occurred at the state level. And then gun control dropped from the public agenda. Gun politics in America can be reminiscent of the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ with each day just like the one before. And yet, notwithstanding the parallels to Columbine, much actually did change in gun politics and policy after Sandy Hook, and even before. The conventional wisdom holds that ‘nothing ever changes’ after mass shootings: public outrage is followed by public action and then by a swift reaction from foes of gun control (Spitzer, 2018). Lawmakers lie low until the fury subsides, and all returns to normal. Upon closer inspection, it appears that ‘things can change’ after high-profile events, but

138 Kristin A. Goss the story of change is complex, often unfolding gradually and outside the media spotlight. This more nuanced story may be unsatisfying to pundits, who thrive on simplified narratives, and to advocates on both sides of the American gun debate, who must continue to fire up their base. But the nuanced story is in keeping with the way the American policy process typically works. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I describe the state of the gun control movement at the end of the 20th century. It was a movement that had faced considerable hurdles but was struggling to emerge. I then discuss how the rebranded gun violence prevention movement sought to overcome its predecessor’s challenges. In both sections, I focus on three critical factors: patrons, frames, and strategies. After reviewing how these three elements have evolved in ways favorable to supporters of stricter gun laws, I review important developments on the gun rights side. While gun regulation supporters were gaining steam, so were their opponents. I conclude with brief thoughts on the state of the great American gun debate 50 years after the modern push for gun control began.

The missing movement for gun control in America The Columbine tragedy, along with other high-profile mass shootings around that time, drew scholarly and media attention to gun politics in America. Most of this work focused on the strength of gun rights advocates as engaged citizens, organizers of collective action, and framers of public discourse and debate. Efforts to strengthen gun control laws were doomed to fail because gun rights forces were indomitable, even after especially heart-wrenching events. Indeed, America’s gun rights organizations historically have enjoyed great strengths, both inherent in their enterprise and as a result of strategic choices they have made. Participating in any organization entails money, time, and energy. To recruit and sustain members, organizations seek to lower these costs either directly, by subsidizing membership dues, or indirectly, by providing benefits to individuals. Gun rights groups have been able to do both exceptionally well (Goss, 2006; Patterson and Singer, 2006; Spitzer, 2018). In the formative decades of the National Rifle Association (NRA), for example, public policy provided a financial incentive for gun owners to join. Becoming a member of the NRA was required to purchase surplus military weapons at a cut rate, and the NRA ran government-subsidized gun clubs and shooting competitions. Even beyond these policy benefits, the NRA has a bevy of incentives that it can offer to potential members. These incentives fall into three categories: material, solidary, and purposive (Wilson, 1995; Patterson and Singer, 2006). Material incentives include magazines and discounts on products and services especially valuable to gun hobbyists. Solidary incentives include the ability to join in fellowship with other sportsmen and gun rights advocates. Purposive incentives connect individual gun ownership to the defense of liberty and country. These structural advantages stem from the

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 139 organization’s identity as a hobbyist organization and its skill at strategically leveraging understandings of American exceptionalism. But as every sports fan knows, a good starting advantage doesn’t guarantee victory. The winning team is only as strong as the losing team is weak. Like sports, political struggle demands an understanding of both the winning team’s strengths and the losing team’s weaknesses. My 2006 book, Disarmed, dug into the weaknesses of gun control organizations by systematically assessing conventional explanations while subjecting the gun control case to a cross-issue, historical analysis. This exercise revealed that, actually, the absence of a vigorous gun control movement was not a foregone conclusion. There had been numerous ‘movement moments’ in which the factors that social movement theory would expect to produce a social movement were firmly in place. Yet no vigorous movement for gun control had arisen. The historical analysis suggested that conventional explanations for the gun control movement’s weakness were missing important elements. To better understand why movements not only arise but also, importantly, fail to do so when expected, the study generated a cost-benefit theory of mass mobilization. The theory hypothesized that movements arise when advocates both socialize (or spread) the costs of individuals’ engagement and personalize the benefits of participation. The theory identified three mechanisms by which movements historically have socialized costs or personalized benefits. The first way was by securing resource patrons – whether individual donors, government agencies, or civil society organizations. By assuming some of the movement’s costs, patrons free movements to focus on their missions, as opposed to fund raising, and lower the costs borne by individual members. With respect to gun control, however, a combination of restrictive public policies and changes in the larger interest group environment had constrained the flow of money and other resources that might have allowed momentum to build. The second mechanism was framing. Using historical case studies, I argued that movements for social reform seemed to converge on a narrative centered on children and the need to protect them. These understandings produce collective-action frameworks that draw mothers as advocates and envision the state as a protective father (Carlson and Goss, 2017). By tapping into the everyday emotions and experiences of parenthood, such maternal frames personalize the benefits of movement participation. While most movements for social regulation had focused on children, gun control organizations had focused on crime. The crime frame made the solution the province of law enforcement experts. By framing gun control as a self-evident ‘problem’ that experts would solve, gun control groups missed an opportunity to link their cause to broadly shared civic values. The third mechanism was organizational strategy. The early gun control movement sought bold reforms, such as handgun bans, and focused its attention on Congress. This strategy had a policy logic but was not conducive to movement building. These efforts produced few wins upon which to build and lent credence

140 Kristin A. Goss to gun rights groups’ worst fears. In other issue domains, successful movements had worked incrementally, building policy upward from the local level to the state and then national levels, and outward through a series of modest reforms that cumulated to a comprehensive policy regime. These strategies changed the costbenefit calculus by increasing the expected incremental payoff of participation while reducing the personal costs. To be sure, incremental strategies aren’t for everyone; people may not be excited to join a movement that takes a long, slow view. But history has been friendly to such pragmatic approaches. Disarmed had a subtitle: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. While national and state organizations strived for stricter gun laws, they had not come together to form a true social movement in the way that other reform efforts had. The ‘missing-ness’ showed up in multiple ways. Gun control groups lacked the mass engagement that other issue organizations enjoyed; the media seldom reached out to gun control groups as authoritative sources for the pro-regulation perspective; key supporters of stronger gun laws bemoaned the tepidness of collective action for gun control; and the term ‘gun control movement’ failed to gain resonance in the way that, say, ‘pro-life movement’ had (Goss, 2006). There were all sorts of reasons to expect a fulsome gun control movement in America, but it had not arrived. To be sure, the 1990s offered glimpses of a movement struggling to emerge, and these glimpses provided limited yet important opportunities to test the costbenefit theory. The Million Mom March deployed a child-protection framework that drew people to the cause and sustained their involvement (Goss, 2003). Gun control groups that found opportunities to move incrementally succeeded in growing their base and enacting policy (Goss, 2006). These small tests of the theory suggested that it was promising. But it remained a theory. A year and a half after Columbine, and six months after the Million Mom March, opportunities to test the theory abruptly evaporated. A gun-friendly administration came to power in Washington. And after the September 11 terrorist attacks reordered politics, gun control vanished from the public agenda. With people and elected officials focused on external threats, America was in no mood to tighten regulations on the means of self-protection. Gun control groups suffered major policy setbacks, including the expiration of a federal assault weapons ban (in 2004) and the passage of a federal law that largely immunized firearms manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits (2005). At the state level, lawmakers eased restrictions on obtaining a license to carry concealed guns in public places. In this environment, the already ‘missing movement’ for gun control was even less in evidence. Gun control groups struggled to maintain themselves as revenues plummeted.1 Privately, advocates portrayed the 2000s as a period of setbacks, reflection, and regrouping. This judgment did not change with the election of a Democratic president and Congress in 2008. And yet, a decade later, gun politics looks very different from the quiescent 2000s. Here I review three of the most important changes: the emergence of a

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 141 robust and apparently sustainable movement for gun regulation, a growing legal and cultural accommodation to guns in public life, and a strong alignment of gun politics with partisan politics writ large.

The gun violence prevention movement Although separated by some 13 years, the Columbine and Sandy Hook massacres bequeathed similar political dynamics. As noted, donors, moms, presidents, Congress, and states mobilized for stricter gun laws, with limited success. But viewed with a broader lens over a period of years, the post–Sandy Hook movement looks considerably more robust and sustainable than that which struggled to arise after Columbine. The gun control movement is arguably no longer missing. Sandy Hook marked a critical point in the emergence of the newly reconstituted ‘gun violence prevention movement,’ but its roots stretched back earlier. The modern history of the movement reflects a series of focusing events and strategic choices that have built upon one another. As the third decade of the 21st century approached, the movement’s field had been well tilled, and new activists and organizations were joining. Movement organizations at last were making strides toward solving the three issues that Disarmed had identified, bringing the gun control movement into line with historical antecedents in other issue domains. The first issue was a lack of external patronage. Here, the role of billionaire Michael Bloomberg deserves special attention. Bloomberg, who co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006, pledged $50 million toward gun reform in 2013. That same year, the Mayors group merged with a nascent organization of mothers to become Everytown for Gun Safety. We cannot see how much Bloomberg has donated to this organization because donors to nonprofit social welfare groups are not required to be publicly disclosed. But it is perhaps telling that, according to tax filings, the organization’s revenues increased more than fourfold from 2012 to 2013, rising to $37 million that year, and then to $53 million in 2016.2 The post–Sandy Hook era brought a surge in contributions to other gun reform groups, as high-profile shootings often do, but Everytown’s one-year increase of $28 million in revenue dwarfed boosts enjoyed by other groups. The Brady groups’ combined revenues increased by $3 million between 2011 and 2013 (a jump of 52%); the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s, by $730,000 (up 92%). Such windfalls were significant for these relatively small organizations, which had struggled mightily through the doldrums period, but these gains paled in both the dollar and percentage increase enjoyed by Everytown. It would be unusual for a new organization to enjoy the revenue tsunami that Everytown experienced without significant help from one or more top-dollar patrons. Elite patrons, along with small-dollar donors, did not offset the financial advantage enjoyed by the NRA and other gun rights groups, but the revenue gap narrowed. The NRA and the three other prominent national gun rights groups (the National Association for Gun Rights, Gun Owners of America,

142 Kristin A. Goss and the Second Amendment Foundation), together with their charitable affiliates, had combined revenues of nearly $437 million in 2016. The six nationally prominent gun violence prevention groups, together with their charitable affiliates, had combined revenues of just under $95 million – or about 22% of the gun groups’ total.3 But this figure constituted real gains from a decade earlier, when national gun violence prevention groups had about 3% of the combined revenues of their gun rights counterparts (Goss, 2006). A second major change in the gun violence prevention movement is the reframing of guns as a threat to children and families. This understanding has been propelled by two developments: the emergence of a powerful grassroots organization of politically engaged mothers and the development of a critical mass of family members and survivors of mass shootings who are devoting their lives to gun control advocacy. Again, focusing events were critical here. When a young gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech in 2007, and injured many more, parents of the victims mobilized. Quietly, they worked with Congress to secure federal legislation to improve reporting of records to the databases that support the national instant background check system. Equally important, these parents, along with some of the surviving students, became a nucleus of victim advocates who would provide both a support system and an organizational template for survivors to mobilize after future mass shootings, including those in Tucson (2011) and Aurora (2012). While the early gun control movement had struggled to include victims in nationally prominent roles, the new gun violence prevention movement has incorporated them as paid staff members and spokespeople. Everytown maintains a survivors’ network totaling well more than 1,000 members. While not all nationally prominent advocates are survivors of mass shootings or family members of victims, many are, and they are demonstrating a staying power that typical advocates for gun control historically lacked. As I noted in Disarmed, maternal activism has a long and storied history in American social reform. After a series of school shootings in the late 1990s, and then at a Jewish day care center in 1999, a suburban mother who was also parttime television publicist organized the Million Mom March for stricter gun laws. Unfolding in Washington and in scores of cities and towns across the country, it was the largest gun control protest in history. Chapters of mom-activists formed out of that organizing effort and were absorbed within the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, then the largest and best-known gun control group. The moms’ groups remained active for several years, but in the aftermath of 9/11, and with two wars and fears of terrorism dominating the public agenda, the mothers were organizing in hard times. Nevertheless, they had figured out how to draw in women by creatively combining maternal, egalitarian, and feminine identities (Goss and Heaney, 2010). The march organizers had developed a collective action framework capable of mobilizing modern women for gun control. When the Sandy Hook shooting occurred, another Middle American mother took to the Internet to start organizing women for gun reform. This founder, Shannon Watts, had much in common with the Million Mom March

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 143 founder, Donna Dees-Thomases. Both were white suburban mothers in their forties who had professional backgrounds in public relations. Both were horrified by the shootings of small children. Both thought in terms of a ‘million mothers’ – Watts’ initially called her fledgling group ‘One Million Moms for Gun Control.’ And both saw the Internet as a critical tool for identifying other women who shared their outrage and uniting these would-be activists across geographic bounds. However, there were key differences. The Internet that Dees-Thomases used was one of websites and email listservs. Watts had social media, especially Facebook, which allowed for the creation of virtual communities. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, as the group came to be called, quickly established local chapters that worked offline on typical political activities, such as letter-writing, protests, and visits to lawmakers. Importantly, however, Moms Demand quickly developed an elaborate online organization, including private Facebook groups. Facebook and other social media tools allowed members, often unknown to one another outside this virtual space, to share ideas, cheer one another on, boost sagging spirits, and build community around shared identities. These online spaces helped organizers to keep the movement moving between offline actions. Another social media tool, Twitter, allowed leaders such as Watts to contribute constantly to elite debate about firearms and to push out memes depicting ‘bad ass’ mothers ready to do battle with the mighty (mostly male) gun lobby. Moms Demand Action enjoyed another advantage that the Million Moms had not. In late 2013, one year after its founding, it merged with another organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, to form Everytown for Gun Safety. Watts and the co-founder of Mayors, Michael Bloomberg, announced the merger on national television. While the merger and rapid growth of Everytown was not without internal friction and external controversy, five years later Moms Demand, under Watts’ volunteer leadership, retained a good deal of autonomy and recognition as the grassroots army of the gun violence prevention movement. After a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, the group saw a surge of 140,000 new volunteers (up from 60,000 four months earlier) and 150 new chapters (Kohn, 2017; Stuart, 2018). A fastgrowing Students Demand Action affiliate also formed. Grounding the gun violence prevention movement in a language of child protection brought it broad resonance, especially with middle-class, predominantly white mothers. As Disarmed noted, nationally prominent gun control groups tended to be white, while gun violence affects people of color disproportionately. Both Moms 1.0 and Moms 2.0 sought to close the racial divide, but faced cultural, geographic, and other difficulties in doing so. The shootings of unarmed African American youths while they went about their daily lives provided an opportunity to bridge these divides. Three cases stand out: Trayvon Martin, shot dead while coming back from a Skittles candy run in his father’s gated community; Jordan Davis, shot dead while playing music in a car with his friends; and Hadiya Pendleton, who became an accidental victim of a gangland shooting a week after performing for President Obama’s

144 Kristin A. Goss second inauguration. The mothers of these young people assumed prominent positions as ‘mothers of the movement’ simultaneously advocating for racial justice and gun violence prevention. Davis’s mother, a former flight attendant, became Moms Demand’s national spokesperson and, as of this writing (summer 2018), is a Democratic nominee for Congress. At the grassroots level, the modern gun violence prevention movement is largely a movement of women. This gender dynamic is not a surprise: Women have fueled movements for social regulation throughout American history (Goss, 2006, 2013). Women also have been significantly more amenable to gun regulation than have men (Smith, 1984; Goss, 2006; Goss and Skocpol, 2006). Gun rights groups have sought to solve their ‘woman problem’ by framing firearms ownership as a means of feminist empowerment and protection against male violence. The gun industry has developed products tailored to women’s bodies and tastes. Yet the vast majority of gun owners still are men, with no discernible increase among women from the 20th century into the 21st century (Goss, 2017). What is more, being a woman has remained a reliable predictor, all else being equal, of support for stricter gun laws (Goss, 2017). While female gun subcultures certainly exist (see, for example, Browder, in this volume), evidence suggests that the world of gun enthusiasts remains predominantly male just as its activist-critics are predominantly female.

Strategy: The gun violence prevention movement’s pragmatic turn In Disarmed, I showed how early gun control advocates had pursued a bold strategy, one that made sense given the policy logic and politics of the day but one that, in hindsight, appeared at odds with the way that social reform typically happened in America and with the conservative winds that were beginning to blow. I termed the bold approach the ‘rational national’ strategy: ‘rational’ in the sense that effective policy should lack obvious loopholes; and ‘national’ in the sense that state-by-state patchworks tend to be only as strong as their weakest link. This policy-centric approach had political ramifications that ended up hobbling the development of a vibrant and sustainable grassroots gun control movement. One ramification was that gun control advocates, with their talk of bold national policies, threatened large numbers of everyday citizens who owned guns and used them responsibly. Gun rights groups such as the NRA built a political machine around this threat, making subsequent gun control activism even more difficult to sustain. Besides fueling an anti-gun-control force, the rational-national approach also limited the movement-building aspirations of gun control advocates themselves. If comprehensive federal policy was the only approach that would do any good, gun control groups wondered what use there was in building organizational capacity at the state level. Maintaining chapters required staff and financial resources, which national gun control groups often lacked. As one early strategy documented noted, chapters and their volunteer activists would have a ‘driving need for

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 145 activity’ that the national organization would have to meet (Goss, 2006). Providing local organizations with things to do became even more challenging as states passed NRA-supported laws ‘preempting’ cities and towns from regulating firearms; preemption laws deprived local activists of local policy measures around which they might mobilize (Goss, 2006). By the 2010s, however, the gun violence prevention movement had abandoned the rational-national strategy in favor of policy incrementalism. Having failed to secure national legislation after Columbine, and having been forced into serious reflection during the subsequent doldrums decade, national gun control groups quietly embraced political pragmatism. Instead of a singular focus on federal policy, these groups would invest in state-based organization building and campaigns. Instead of advocating for comprehensive policies, groups would pursue incremental improvements to existing laws and the enactment and enforcement of measures targeting people at heightened risk of misusing guns. In the new gun violence prevention movement, different organizations played different roles. Moms Demand Action, working alongside cadres of survivor advocates, formed the grassroots base of volunteer activists. They would be the ones showing up at lawmakers’ town halls, legislative hearings, and protests. They would go on television to speak movingly and authentically about America’s unusual problem with gun violence and, importantly, to construct gun violence as a problem affecting innocent children. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, which had begun in the mid-1970s as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, turned to states as laboratories for changing the politics of guns. Its sister organization, the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, sponsored the Consortium on Risk-Based Firearm Policy, which produced a blueprint for state-level reforms grounded in good social-science research. A movement that had been deeply divided over whether to ban handguns had quietly come together around a common policy agenda centered on improving and expanding the federal background check system, stripping domestic abusers of firearms, and providing a legal mechanism for police and family members to remove guns from individuals at demonstrable risk of doing harm to themselves or others. While gun control policy has stalled at the federal level – even after the Sandy Hook tragedy, Congress failed to expand background checks to private transfers – the states have been quietly enacting laws high on the gun violence prevention movement’s agenda. Often these laws have come in response to citizen group pressure following nationally galvanizing mass shootings or locally salient tragedies. Between 2004 and 2014, 38 states enacted at least one law aimed at restricting firearm access to the severely mentally ill (Goss, 2015). Between 2008 and 2017, the number of laws restricting domestic abusers’ access to firearms nearly doubled.4 In the same time frame, there was a tripling in the number of states requiring a background check at the critical moment when a gun is purchased.5 States began moving toward allowing police or family members to petition for the temporary removal of a dangerous person’s firearm. States with so-called extreme risk protection orders quintupled between 2008

146 Kristin A. Goss and 2018, while growing numbers of states were poised to enact such measures.6 To be sure, states were not rushing to outdo each other in the strength of their gun laws. In most states, gun laws remained relatively lax by global standards. But in the 2008–2018 period, a state-by-state accretion of modest, consensusbased measures was in evidence. These developments defy the conventional wisdom that tragic events seldom spur a policy response. In Disarmed, I portrayed the three elements critical for movement sustainability – patronage, good framing, and incremental strategy – as distinct forces. However, the emerging gun violence prevention movement has made clear that they are more clearly interdependent than the model appreciated. The pragmatic strategy of small wins appears to have attracted patrons, who in turn encourage such approaches. The maternal framework also goes hand-in-hand with policy pragmatism. The idea of mothers as practical problem solvers has broad cultural resonance; they can credibly portray modest policy reforms as a mom’s everyday common sense. Having locally rooted activists has encouraged policy innovation tailored to local political contexts. These developments, spurred by mass shootings and endemic violence, have broadened the base of gun violence prevention activists.

Gun rights challenges to the new gun violence prevention movement Evidence that the gun violence prevention movement is moving should not obscure a fundamental reality: these groups are David to the gun lobby’s Goliath. National gun rights groups in 2017 had revenues that were five times those of national gun violence prevention groups. After stalling in the 2000s, the NRA and its foundation saw a massive jump in revenues in 2007 (probably as a result of the Virginia Tech shooting) and, after falling back for a few years, enjoyed another surge in the 2011–2016 period, when mass shootings, a resurgent gun violence prevention movement, and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign created a threatening political environment. The NRA’s membership, measured by the combined circulation of its magazines, fell in the 2000s but rebounded after 2007. By 2016, the NRA’s revenues were up 60% in real terms from 2001, and its membership exceeded 3.5 million people. The 2000s and 2010s were also fruitful years for gun rights groups, entrenching policy arrangements that will be difficult for gun violence prevention groups to undo. Even as gun control organizations secured state laws aimed at presumptively dangerous categories of people, gun rights groups secured state laws normalizing guns in public spaces. In the early 1990s, the majority of states either barred people from carrying concealed firearms in public or strictly regulated the licenses to do so. By 2018, the situation was reversed. All states allowed concealed carry, and fewer than one in five states strictly regulated licensing (‘may issue’ states). More to the point, nearly a quarter of states had done away with permits entirely. States also normalized guns in public spaces by enacting Stand Your Ground laws, which extend the right of self-defense to places outside the home. In 1991, no states had such laws; by 2017, half did. These controversial laws were interpreted as a response

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 147 to neoliberalism and the shrinking of state capacity alongside the privatization of public functions (Carlson, 2015; Light in this volume) and to the changing status of men in society (Blanchfield in this volume; Messner in this volume). The push to allow guns in formerly off-limits spaces continues unabated. Between 2003 and 2017, 11 states decided to require that public universities allow guns on campus, though some place-based restrictions (e.g., inside dormitories) were permitted. Shootings in public elementary and high schools increased pressure to allow certain licensed adults to carry weapons inside those institutions, as well. In state capitals and in Congress, measures to relax restrictions on concealed carry have been a top priority of the NRA and other gun rights groups. At the local level, however, the push to normalize guns in public life has been the province of a relatively new type of gun rights group. Small, volunteer-led, and politically vocal groups with names like the Virginia Citizens Defense League and Open Carry Texas spread to more than half the states from the 1990s through the 2010s (Cook and Goss, 2014). These scrappy neo-populists see the professionally staffed gun rights groups, especially the NRA, as too establishment oriented and willing to compromise. Public opinion surveys show no shift toward pro-gun groups’ policy views – only about 4–8% of Americans in any given year would loosen firearm laws, and this share has held steady for nearly three decades (Jones, 2018). However, these groups’ influence shows up in the willingness of state lawmakers to respond to their policy demands. Gun rights groups are now better described as pro-gun groups (Cook, 2013). The emergence of these organizations signals a subtler shift in America gun culture, from one that appreciated firearms as sporting goods to one that sees them as civic goods. Indicators of this shift abound. Protection has overtaken hunting as the main reason why Americans own guns (Goo, 2013). By 2017, Americans were almost twice as likely to cite the protection rationale as they were in the late 1990s, even though crime had declined significantly since that time (Igielnik and Brown, 2017). The shift in gun culture also shows up in the reading habits of NRA members, who receive their choice of several gunthemed magazines. In the late 1990s, one-third chose American Hunter, but two decades later, that fraction had dropped to about one-quarter.7 The fraction of households that have a gun has slowly declined since the 1970s, yet firearms sales are booming – a pattern likely explained by existing owners stockpiling more and more weapons (Cook and Goss, 2014). One study found that gun owners possess, on average, just shy of 5 firearms; and just 14% of gun owners own half of all firearms in America (Azrael et al., 2017). The pro-gun movement also has seen public support for gun control weaken over time. The fraction of Americans who say they want gun laws to be made more strict fell by about 20 percentage points between the early 1990s and 2010s (Jones, 2018), while the share of Americans who prioritized gun rights over gun control rose by almost the same amount after 2000 (Pew Research Center, 2017). Cook (2013) attributes this development to research suggesting that guns are commonly used in self-defense, a claim that most criminologists find to be wildly exaggerated.

148 Kristin A. Goss Another, complementary explanation is that Americans’ social identities are becoming more and more neatly organized along partisan lines (Mason, 2018), and attitudes toward guns have become part of this sorting. The Pew Research Center’s question on whether individuals would prioritize controlling firearms or protecting gun owner rights illustrates the trend. In 2000, Democrats were about 21 percentage points more supportive than Republicans of the gun control position, but by 2016 that gap had opened up to a staggering 58 percentage points.8 Increasingly, being a good Republican requires supporting gun rights, while being a good Democrat means supporting gun regulation. Data from a different opinion barometer, the General Social Survey, reveals that two key subgroups – Democratic men and Republican women – are responsible for much of the sorting, with the former becoming more supportive of gun control and the latter, of gun rights (Goss, 2017). Even more strikingly, analysis of survey data shows that people’s political party affiliation is a strong predictor of their position on gun policy even after controlling for myriad other factors, including whether they own a firearm (Cook and Goss, 2014). This sorting is reflected at the organizational level, as well. Gun organizations have become key components of the Republican Party’s activist base. The NRA, for example, had been tilting toward the GOP at least since endorsing Ronald Reagan for President in 1980. But the gun organization’s move into the Republican camp became complete in the 2010s. In 1990, 64% of the NRA’s campaign contributions went to Republicans, but by 2016, that figure was nearly 100%.9 All of the pro-gun trends – in attitudes, laws, patterns of ownership, and organizational capacity – point to a core conclusion. Even with urbanization and demographic diversification, which might undermine America gun culture, the pro-gun movement is going strong. The growing accommodation to guns in public life poses considerable challenges to the gun violence prevention movement, even as its resource base and grassroots organization expand and even as it enjoys policy victories that were rare even a few years ago. Perhaps most interesting is how the gun issue has come to define larger schisms in American politics and society. To be sure, the issue long has divided people along lines of geography and culture – in the early 1970s, the Wall Street Journal identified a gun-loving ‘bedrock’ America at odds with a gun-hating ‘cosmopolitan America’ (‘Understanding Gun Control,’ 1972). But almost a half-century later, the battle lines appeared even more sharply drawn and the gun issue even more deeply incorporated into political parties and partisanship. The growth in both the gun violence prevention and pro-gun movements, coupled with these larger political dynamics, portends an escalation of the American gun war with little promise of resolution.

Notes 1 Author’s analysis of Form 990 informational tax returns for the two most prominent gun control advocacy groups: the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (and its affiliated Center) and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (and its affiliated Educational Fund). In real terms, Brady’s revenues in 2010 were about 40% of the

Whatever happened to the ‘missing movement’? 149

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

2001 total; the Coalition’s 2010 revenues were about 25% of the 2003 total. (The Coalition’s 2001 and 2002 Form 990s were unavailable.) The 2012 figures represent the combined revenues of Everytown’s predecessor organizations, Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund (the social welfare group) and United Against Illegal Guns Support Fund (the aligned public charity). The 2013 figures represent the combined revenues of Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund (the social welfare group) and Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (the public charity). The six groups, in order of combined revenues, are Everytown for Gun Safety (and its support fund), the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (and its affiliated center); Giffords (and its affiliated law center); the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (and its affiliated educational fund); Sandy Hook Promise; and the Violence Policy Center. Author’s calculations from the State Firearms Law Database (www.statefirearmlaws. org/state-state-firearm-law-data), Michael Siegel, MD, Principal Investigator. Author’s calculations from the State Firearms Law Database. Author’s calculations from the State Firearms Law Database and press accounts. Figures calculated from the NRA’s semi-annual reports to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, now the Alliance for Audited Media. Author’s analysis of Pew data. Open Secrets analysis of ‘Party Split’ available at www.opensecrets.org/orgs/sum mary.php?id=d000000082&cycle=A. Accessed June 27, 2018.

References Azrael, D., Hepburn, L., Hemenway, D., and Miller, M. (2017) “The stock and flow of U.S. firearms: results from the 2015 National Firearms Survey.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3(5), pp. 38–57. Carlson, J. (2015) Citizen-Protectors. New York: Oxford University Press. Carlson, J.D. and Goss, K.A. (2017) “Gendering the second amendment.” Law and Contemporary Problems, 80(2), pp. 103–128. Cook, P.J. (2013) “The great American gun war: notes from four decades in the trenches.” Crime and Justice, 42(1), pp. 19–73. Cook, P.J. and Goss, K.A (2014) The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press. Goo, S.K. (2013) “Why own a gun? protection is now top reason.” Pew Research Center. May 9. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/09/why-own-a-gun-protectionis-now-top-reason (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Goss, K.A. (2003) “Rethinking the political participation paradigm: the case of women & gun control.” Women & Politics, 25(4), pp. 83–118. Goss, K.A (2006) Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goss, K.A (2013) The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Goss, K.A. (2015) “Defying the odds on gun regulation: the passage of bipartisan mental health laws across the states.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 85(3), pp. 203–210. Goss, K.A. (2017) “The socialization of conflict and its limits: gender and gun politics in America.” Social Science Quarterly, 98(2), pp. 455–470. Goss, K.A. and Heaney, M.T. (2010) “Organizing women as women: hybridity and grassroots collective action in the 21st century.” Perspectives on Politics, 8(1), pp. 27–52.

150 Kristin A. Goss Goss, K.A. and Skocpol, T. (2006) “Changing agendas: the impact of feminism on American politics.” In: O’Neill, B. and Gidengil, E. (Eds), Gender and Social Capital. New York: Routledge, pp. 323–356. Igielnik, R. and Brown, A. (2017) Key Takeaways on Americans’ Views of Guns and Gun Ownership. Washington: Pew Research Center. June 22. www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2017/06/22/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-guns-and-gun-ownership (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Jones, J.M. (2018) “U.S. preference for stricter gun laws highest since 1993.” Gallup Organization. https://news.gallup.com/poll/229562/preference-stricter-gun-lawshighest-1993.aspx (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Keneally, M. (2017) “How gun laws have changes in the five years since sandy hook.” ABCNews.com, December 12. https://abcnews.go.com/US/gun-laws-changedyears-sandy-hook/story?id=51668726 (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Kohn, S. (2017) “Congress has done nothing on gun safety. But that doesn’t mean there’s been no progress.” Cosmopolitan. November 17. www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/ a13529647/gun-safety-progress-moms-demand-action (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Mason, L. (2018) Uncivil Agreement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patterson, K.D. and Singer, M.M. (2006) “Targeting success: the enduring power of the NRA.” In: Cigler, A.J. and Loomis, B.A. (Eds.), Interest Group Politics. 7th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, pp. 37–64. Pew Research Center. (2017) “Public views about guns.” June 22. www.people-press. org/2017/06/22/public-views-about-guns/#total (Accessed: 27 June 2018). Smith, T.W. (1984) “The polls: gender and attitudes toward violence.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 48(1), pp. 384–396. Spitzer, R.J. (2018) The Politics of Gun Control. 7th ed. New York: Routledge. Stuart, T. (2018) “Gun control: why the response to Parkland was different.” Rolling Stone. March 23. www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/gun-control-parkland-shan non-watts-moms-demand-action-nra-w518254 (Accessed: 27 June 2018). “Understanding Gun Control.” (1972) The Wall Street Journal, June 7. Wilson, J.Q. (1995) Political Organizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

8

What if we talked about gun control differently? A framing experiment Sierra Smucker

Introduction Firearms kill Americans at a rate that far exceeds that of other developed countries (Grinshteyn and Hemenway, 2016), yet lawmakers rarely pass legislation that would tighten gun regulation (Goss, 2006). One explanation for lawmakers’ inaction is that, since the 1960s, the dominant political parties, have increasingly aligned with opposing sides of the gun debate (Cook and Goss, 2014): Republicans frequently reject gun regulation, while Democrats demand tighter restrictions (Pew Research Center, 2017a). When the parties take up extreme positions on an issue, the possibility of bipartisan support for a solution decreases (McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal, 2016). However, the legislative success of a set of gun control policies aimed at protecting survivors of domestic violence suggests that some gun policies may elicit bipartisan support. Between 2013 and 2015, NRA-supported Governors Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin), Nikki Haley (R-South Carolina), and Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana) signed bills that restricted access to firearms to individuals served with domestic violence–related restraining orders or convicted of a domestic violence–related offenses (Marley, 2014). State lawmakers in Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, and Nevada also passed similar regulations despite the powerful gun rights lobbies in their states (Flatow, 2014). What explains the success of domestic violence–related firearms policies in states with formidable grassroots support for gun rights? One explanation draws on theories of framing which propose that the way communicators present legislation affects citizens’ opinions. Framing is considered so important to citizens’ policy preferences that scholars have described it as the ‘essence of public opinion formation’ (Chong, 1993). An individual who is highly concerned with one aspect of a problem that a law seeks to address may be more responsive to frames that highlight her concerns with the issue (Slothuus, 2010). For example, women, who face a far higher risk of intimate partner violence than men (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000; Breiding et al., 2014), may be more likely to support policies restricting access to firearms to perpetrators of domestic violence when such restrictions are framed as domestic violence prevention, regardless of their overall views regarding gun policy.

152 Sierra Smucker However, research finds that the power of framing is limited and that framing effects may be constrained when an issue is highly polarized across parties. Political scientists have demonstrated the role of party identification in shaping citizens’ opinions on a range of policy areas (Goren, 2005; Carsey and Layman, 2006). Citizens who affiliate with a political party may be less susceptible to framing effects if their party has a strong position on the issue. Research in environmental politics finds that framing techniques often fail to shift citizen support for climate change policies away from their party’s welldefined platform (Egan and Mullin, 2017). The polarizing nature of gun politics in the United States suggests that firearms regulation may fall into that category as well, where efforts to use framing techniques are undermined by partisanship. This study tests the power and limits of framing. I examine whether framing a policy as domestic violence prevention (a policy area which is less polarized across parties) (Htun and Weldon, 2012; Hohmann, 2014) instead of gun control (a highly polarized issue area) (Pew Research Center, 2017b) increases bipartisan support for the legislation. On the one hand, if party identification drives policy opinions about gun control, framing should only impact citizen support for the bill among non-party affiliates. However, if citizens across parties are highly concerned about domestic violence prevention, framing the policy problem as a solution to domestic violence could outweigh political party allegiance, creating an opportunity for bipartisan collaboration. Drawing on these two theories, I test the validity of a null hypotheses – that framing will have no effect on overall support for the measure among partisans – and one alternative hypothesis – that women will respond to a domestic violence frame regardless of party. I test these assertions using an original survey experiment. I randomly assigned participants into two groups, in order to decrease the likelihood that differences between the groups are due to selfselection based on a confounding variable. I also controlled participants’ exposure to the treatment (domestic violence prevention versus a gun control frame), so I could be more certain that the treatment drives differences across participant outcomes. This study proceeds as follows. First, I provide an overview of the relevant literature that suggests that partisanship may overwhelm framing effects and develop two hypotheses from the existing research. Next, I discuss the experiment, data, and analysis I use to test the two hypotheses. Finally, I discuss the results of my analysis and the implications of the results for framing theory and gun politics.

Partisanship, policy preferences, and framing Issue framing is a process in which a communicator ‘defines and constructs a political issue’ (Nelson, Clawson and Oxley, 1997) by emphasizing ‘a subset of potentially relevant considerations’ (Druckman and Nelson, 2003). In doing so, a communicator points the receiving individual to the ‘essence of the issue’

What if we talked about gun control differently? 153 (Gamson and Modigliani, 1987). Scholars have demonstrated that issue framing can sway public opinion (Iyengar and Simon, 1993; Nelson, Clawson and Oxley, 1997; Chong and Druckman, 2007). Because most political issues are inherently multi-dimensional, they can be framed in a variety of ways. For example, a policy mandating paid maternity leave could be framed as the promotion of gender equality (i.e., paying women for their typically unpaid contribution to society) or child protection (i.e., ensuring that children have a primary caregiver). Depending on which frame the communicator uses, one could expect different levels of support from feminists or more conservative women’s organizations for the same policy. However, framing does have limitations. Elites are constrained in their ability to frame policies because citizens will consider the framers’ credibility when forming an opinion (Druckman, 2001). If a frame is believed to come from an unreliable source, it is unlikely to sway opinion. Furthermore, when citizens discuss frames with their peers, the power of framing is diminished (Druckman and Nelson, 2003). Also, when two frames compete, they can cancel each other out (Chong and Druckman, 2007). Partisanship can also moderate framing effects. Political psychologists suggest that framing polarized issues may be difficult because individuals are motivated to interpret information in a way that supports their established beliefs. This theory – called motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990) – states that individuals with strong convictions may be ‘goal-oriented’ and may only take in information that aligns with their established views. Because political parties serve as powerful social identities, citizens may use motivated reasoning to adopt a policy stance that aligns with their party regardless of the framing of the issue (Huddy, 2001; Bartels, 2002). Studies of polarizing policy areas like environmental protection find that partisanship often undermines framing effects, and that efforts to frame climate change policy fail to increase support among political conservatives (Bernauer and McGrath, 2016; Zhou, 2016). Americans are divided over the appropriate regulation of firearms in the United States. A citizen’s political party identification is one of the best predictors of his or her opinion on gun regulation (Pew Research Center, 2013). Descriptive statistics show that the partisan gap in support for gun regulation is typically 30 to 45 percentage points greater than the gap identified across demographic categories such as race, gender, and geography (although the partisan gap is driven, in part, by the demographic composition of each party’s constituency with regard to these variables). Party affiliation even outpaces the presence of a firearm in the respondent’s home (Pew Research Center, 2017b). These differences persist across specific firearms-related policy questions, such as whether assault weapons should be banned or whether gun reform would be effective. The polarizing nature of gun regulation suggests that the effect of framing on citizen opinions in this policy area may be limited: the one study of framing gun policy suggests that frames can shift opinion only when the citizen is predisposed to the frame (Haider-Markel and Joslyn, 2001). These findings suggest that party affiliation may undermine the

154 Sierra Smucker effect of framing on respondents’ support for new legislation that prevents domestic abusers from possessing firearms. This expectation is captured in the following hypothesis. H1: Among party identifiers, there will be no difference in average policy support between respondents who receive the domestic violence frame and those who receive the gun control frame. However, studies of party affiliation find that individuals do not always adopt their party’s platform on all issues. Instead, citizens with an individual interest or understanding of an issue may hold opinions that diverge from their party’s platform. For example, research finds that male Republican lawmakers with female children support women’s rights legislation at higher rates than Republicans without female children (Washington, 2008). Republican women, similarly, are more likely to support policies that promote women’s interests than their male colleagues (Dolan, 1998). Thus, while political parties may sway policy preferences among citizens, even strong partisans do not always follow a party line uncritically. Instead, citizens draw on their own beliefs and experiences to determine their opinions on the issue at hand (Goren, 2005; Slothuus, 2010). According to this research, regardless of political party identification, individuals who are highly invested in solving the problem of domestic violence will be more responsive to framing that emphasizes domestic violence prevention. Women represent one subgroup of respondents who may be interested in preventing domestic violence regardless of party affiliation for two reasons. First, women face a greater threat of domestic violence compared to men. In the United States, one in three women have experienced extreme physical violence by an intimate partner compared to one in seven men (Breiding et al., 2014). Furthermore, homicide is one of the leading causes of death for women and over half of female homicide victims in the United States between 2003 and 2014 were killed by intimate partners (Petrosky et al., 2017). Thus, compared to men in the same political party, women are likely to be more invested in passing legislation that confers them protection from domestic violence. Second, research on political identity suggests that the group ‘women’ is a compelling political identity in American politics. Gender and politics scholarship recognizes two forms of group identity among women. Gender consciousness refers to the understanding that a citizen’s relationship to the world is shaped by being female (Rinehart, 1992). Relatedly, feminist or oppositional consciousness suggests that women recognize the political world is structured to benefit men, and that this power imbalance is unjust (Mansbridge, 2001). These two forms of consciousness have practical implications for political decisions. Studies find that women and men report different policy preferences (Shapiro and Mahajan, 1986) and that women who feel affected by the social conditions under which women live are likely to express a uniquely ‘woman perspective’ on policy issues (Conover, 1988). While much of gender consciousness literature focuses on ‘feminist’ women who most often identify with

What if we talked about gun control differently? 155 liberal ideologies and the Democratic Party, gender consciousness also influences the policy preferences of women with conservative political leanings (Schreiber, 2002). Moreover, a study of gender bias in voting for female candidates suggests that women voters’ partisan identity is often trumped by an affinity with gender. Brians (2005) finds that female Democratic candidates who face male Republican candidates benefit from Republican women’s crossover support (Brians, 2005). Thus, research suggests that gender may influence women’s political decisions and policy opinions across the partisan divide. Domestic violence presents a unique policy area for testing the importance of women’s gender identity on support for otherwise partisan political issues. Domestic abuse is an act that, while historically legally condoned, most consider a crime that requires state intervention (Htun and Weldon, 2012). Theories of gender consciousness predict that because gendered violence is a form of inequality that impacts women, women will be more supportive of and invested in legislation that seeks to curb domestic abuse. Lawmakers’ actions also suggest that women’s support may be bipartisan. In recent years, many conservative lawmakers have drawn attention to their support for programs that will curb domestic abuse (Hohmann, 2014). Such efforts are mainly targeted at female constituents, to gain their support on election day. Based on the notion that women are uniquely attuned to policy areas that impact women as a group, I predict that women will be more likely than men to respond to a frame that highlights domestic violence prevention.1 I also hypothesize that this effect will persist regardless of political party affiliation. Accordingly, the present study investigates the validity of the second hypothesis. H2: There will be greater support for the policy among women who are presented with the domestic violence frame, regardless of party identification. If focusing on domestic violence prevention instead of gun control allows advocates to draw more significant support from women, or citizens passionate about preventing violence against women, then this may explain why states with powerful gun rights support have passed new gun control legislation in recent years. The movement for gun control has historically struggled to recruit the numbers of grassroots supporters that could rival those of the gun rights movement (Goss, 2006). However, citizens concerned about domestic violence, including women’s rights activists, have successfully organized to pass legislation even in hostile political environments (Smucker, in progress). By tapping into the organizing strengths of the women’s movement, gun control groups could begin to rival gun rights groups in terms of political power. This shift in power dynamics could, then, explain the passage of gun regulation in states that historically resist it. In the next section, I outline my research design and analytic strategy for testing both hypotheses.

156 Sierra Smucker

Research design This study leverages an experimental survey design to test the hypotheses described above. Experimental survey designs allow researchers to test whether survey respondents answer a survey question differently depending on factors that the researcher manipulates. In other words, a survey experiment is a randomized controlled trial, where the experimental assignment assures that other factors are uncorrelated with the outcome variable. In doing so, researchers can more closely link changes in a participant’s outcome to the intervention itself, as opposed to other factors, while acknowledging the possibility of random error.

Survey experiment

To test whether study participants respond differently to a question depending on whether the policy is framed as domestic violence prevention or as gun control, survey respondents were randomly assigned to answer one of two questions about their support for a domestic violence–related firearms policy. One-half (n=505) of respondents received a question that calls the policy ‘domestic violence prevention,’ while the other half (n=495) received a question that calls the policy ‘gun control.’ The dependent variable is the level of support for a policy that restricts access to firearms by those convicted of a domestic violence-related offense. Question 1: Newly proposed domestic violence legislation would prevent individuals convicted of abusing their spouses or romantic partners from purchasing, owning, or possessing firearms. How likely are you to support this legislation? Extremely likely Very likely Likely Neither likely nor unlikely Unlikely Very unlikely Extremely unlikely Question 2: Newly proposed gun control legislation would prevent individuals convicted of abusing their spouses or romantic partners from purchasing, owning, or possessing firearms. How likely are you to support this legislation? Extremely likely Very likely Likely Neither likely nor unlikely

What if we talked about gun control differently? 157 Unlikely Very unlikely Extremely unlikely It is important to note that this framing treatment is considerably ‘weaker’ than most. Typically, framing experiments provide respondents with a longer explanation of the argument for the policy that features the frame tested in the study (Nelson, Clawson and Oxley, 1997; Druckman, 2001; Druckman and Nelson, 2003). However, to come as close as possible to a natural situation for respondents, I limited the difference between the two questions to the description of the policy. In everyday life, citizens have limited time to consider new policy proposals debated by policymakers. Accordingly, a weaker frame is necessary to test whether its impact could generate differences in support across citizens. If the treatment produces an effect, it will provide substantial evidence that reframing the policy proposal could lead to significant differences in policy support. Sample

To test my two hypotheses, I draw on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a nationally representative survey administered by YouGov Polimetrix. The survey designers used a sample match methodology to draw a sample of 64,600 individuals from the population of the United States. The sample was created using two lists: one composed of American consumers that reflects 95% of the adult population; and one that lists individuals who have agreed to take surveys for YouGov Polimetrix as part of its panel, Polling Point. The survey is conducted online using this opt-in panel of respondents. In the first stage, a random sample of consumers was drawn and a list of key demographic variables was recorded for each member of the sample, using data from the 2012 American Community Survey (ACS). The sample was limited to American citizens 18 years and older due to the survey’s focus on voting and political orientation. To construct a representative sample, demographic variables including age, race, gender, education, marital status, number of children under 18, family income, employment status, home state, and metropolitan area were recorded. In addition, data on religion, church attendance, born again or evangelical status, news interest, party identification, and ideology was matched from the 2007 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. YouGov Polimetrix then used a matching algorithm to find Polling Point panelists who most closely matched individuals from the consumer file. In this way a matched random sample was constructed for all people in the consumer sample. The data and a full description of the sampling methods are available at the Harvard University Dataverse (Cooper, 2016). From that 64,600-person sample, Duke University researchers asked a randomly drawn 1,000-person subsample a set of original questions. I submitted a set of questions to be included in the 2016 questionnaire, which was administered in the pre-election phase of the survey between July and September of 2016.

158 Sierra Smucker The 1,000-person subsample largely mirrors demographic averages of the original representative pool of 64,600 but departs from recent U.S. population estimates in several ways. In the subsample, 53% of respondents were female, while in the larger sample and the U.S. population are 52% female. The average age of respondents (all over 18) in both samples was 48 in 2016. However, the subsample contains respondents with a higher level of education than the U.S. population. Only 3% of respondents in the subsample did not graduate from high school, compared to 11% in the larger sample and 13% in the U.S. population.2 Two-year college degrees were earned by 12% of the subsample, but only by 9% of the respondents in the larger sample and only 8% in the U.S. population. Fully 22% of respondents in the subsample obtained four-year degrees, while only 17% of respondents in the larger sample and 18% in the U.S. population could claim the same. Finally, 13% of the subsample earned postgraduate degrees compared to 9% in the larger sample and 11% in the U.S. population. Thus, the results of my analysis shed light narrowly on Americans with a greater than high school education.3 The subsample largely matches the respondents’ racial makeup in the larger sample and the U.S. population. Whites constitute 73% of the subsample, 74% of the larger sample and 73% of the U.S. population. Black Americans make up 13% of the subsample and 12% in the larger sample and 13% of the U.S. population. Native Americans make up 1% of the subsample, similar to the 1% of U.S. population; the larger sample reflects 0.3%. Asian Americans made up 3% of both the subsample and the larger sample; 5% of Americans identify as Asian American. However, Hispanics are underrepresented in the CCES subsample. Fully 7% of respondents in the subsample identified as Hispanic which is similar to the 8% shown in the larger sample. However, 17% of Americans identify as Hispanic, limiting generalizability of the findings presented below.4 The CCES subsample slightly overrepresents Democrats and Independents/ non-party affiliates and underrepresents Republicans. In 2016, 33% of registered American voters identified as Democrats, but Democrats make up 37% of the subsample (Pew, 2016). Fully 38% of Americans identify as Independent or non-party affiliates while 41% of respondents in the subsample identify as Independent or non-party affiliates. However, 32% of Americans identify as Republican compared to 22% of the subsample. The underrepresentation of Republicans may bias the results by allowing a smaller proportion of Republicans to stand in for a larger group. Further research should replicate the analysis with a larger and representative sample to ensure the results hold when tested in a more generalizable group. Table 8.1 provides a comparison of both samples as well as U.S. population data drawn from the 2012–2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates and the 2016 Party Identification Detailed Tables from Pew Research Center. Despite the differences in ethnic identity and political leanings between the sample and the U.S. population, the randomization between treatment groups is balanced across several relevant variables. A balanced experiment

What if we talked about gun control differently? 159 Table 8.1 Comparison of Subsample (N=1,000) with Representative Sample (N=64,600) and the U.S. Population Demographics

% of CCES Subsample % of CCES Sample % of U.S. Population*

Female Male Age No high school degree High school degree Some college 2-Year college 4-Year college Post-grad Democrat Republican Independent/non-Party Affiliate White Black Asian American Native American Hispanic

53% 47% 48 3% 25% 26% 12% 22% 13% 37% 22% 41%

52% 48% 48 11% 29% 24% 9% 17% 9% 38% 24% 38%

52% 48% – 13% 28% 21% 8% 18% 11% 33% 29% 38%

73% 13% 3% 1% 7%

74% 12% 3% 0.3% 8%

73% 13% 5% 1% 17%

* This column provides the percentages the larger representative sample sought to replicate. However, there

are some differences. The American Community Survey (2012–2016) percentages estimates include all ages while the CCES only includes individuals over 18. The ACS education data is restricted to individuals 25 and older. The CCES sample restricts to data from individuals 18 and over for all categories which may explain some variation in the percentages. The political data comes from the Pew Research Center’s ‘2016 Party Identification Detailed Tables’ which includes a representative sample of registered voters. I do not provide an average age because the column is a composite from different age groups. Some percentages do not add to 100% due to rounding.

is an experiment with no statistically significant difference between the treatment groups across variables that one might expect to impact the outcome variable. I tested for balance across treatment groups for political party affiliation, gender, race, age, marital status, and position on gun regulation, and found no statistically significant difference across the groups (results available upon request). Variables Policy support.

I use responses to the question ‘Newly proposed domestic violence/gun control legislation would prevent individuals convicted of abusing their

160 Sierra Smucker spouses or romantic partners from purchasing, owning, or possessing firearms. How likely are you to support this legislation?’ to calculate policy support. I calculate mean support by transforming respondents’ answers into a scale of 1 to 7 where 1 equates to ‘extremely unlikely’ to support the policy and 7, ‘extremely likely.’ A higher mean score translates into a higher level of support for the policy. I also created a binary measure to assess policy support. Respondents who stated they were ‘likely,’ ‘very likely,’ or ‘extremely likely’ to support the policy received a 1 for this variable. All other respondents were coded as 0. No respondents skipped this question. Political party affiliation.

Political party affiliation was measured using a question that asked participants whether they identified as a ‘Democrat,’ ‘Republican,’ ‘Independent,’ ‘Other,’ or ‘Unsure.’ Fully 51 respondents reported they were ‘Not sure’ about their political party identification. Another 31 respondents selected ‘Other.’ While these two groups are dissimilar from individuals who reporting being ‘Independents’ along some demographic dimensions, the driving question in this study centers on partisanship in the two dominant political parties, Democrats and Republicans.5 Thus, any respondent who did not report an affiliation with either group was considered a non-party identifier along with Independents. In the remainder of the study, this group is referred to as non-party identifiers to indicate that the group members do not affiliate with either of the two major political parties in the United States. Gender.

I created the gender variable using a question that asked respondents to identify as either ‘male’ or ‘female.’ No respondents skipped this question. Table 8.2 provides a summary of the relevant variables.

Table 8.2 Variables and Descriptions Variable

Coded

Min

Max

Mean

Policy Support (Scale) Policy Support (Binary) Political Party

Support for policy scale of 1–7 with 1 being no support and 7 high support Support for policy (1) or no support/ unsure (0) Affiliation with Democratic Party (1), Republican Party (2), Independent (3), Other (4), Not sure (5) Identify as Male (0) or Female (1)

1

7

5.67

0

1

0.78

1

5

n/a

0

1

0.53

Gender

What if we talked about gun control differently? 161 Analytic strategy

In this study, the treatment is receiving the question that refers to a new policy as ‘domestic violence’ legislation. The control group is the respondents who received the question that refers to the legislation as ‘gun control’ legislation. It is important to note that the control group could be considered another treatment group, because a perfect control group would receive the question with no descriptor (gun control or domestic violence). Without a control to compare the results to, one could argue that it is difficult to establish the impact of changing the question language. However, the exceptionally polarized debate over gun control suggests that any policy that includes gun regulation is likely considered gun control. If this is true, removing the descriptor ‘gun control legislation’ from the question, therefore, would be unlikely to produce any variation in responses compared to the question that describes the policy as ‘gun control.’ Given this expectation, I decided to use the ‘gun control’ question as the control group. In the first part of the analysis, I report average support levels for domestic violence–related firearms legislation across the entire sample and across subgroups of interest. Then, I perform an initial test of the effect of the treatment on respondents’ support for the legislation. I test the difference in mean support using a two-way t-test to establish whether the difference is statistically significant across groups. Then, I perform the same test across variables of interest: political party affiliation and gender. Next, I test the first hypotheses using ordinary least squares linear regression (OLS). The first model estimates the effect of the treatment on non-party identifiers compared to Democrats and Republicans. If Hypothesis 1 is correct and partisanship ‘swamps’ the effect of the frame, the treatment will only impact ‘non-partisans’ or those who do not identify as a Democrat or Republican. I use an OLS regression where the dependent variable is policy support and the explanatory variables are treatment group, party affiliation, and an interaction between the two. To test Hypothesis 2, that those with a personal interest in the policy area may be less influenced by political party and more influenced by framing, I estimate an additional model. The model predicts the effect of the treatment on women’s support for the legislation. Because women face a higher risk of domestic violence relative to men, I expect this group to be more responsive to a framing effect that stresses domestic violence prevention. Again, I use ordinary least squares linear regression of the dependent variable (policy support) and dummy variables for domestic violence frame x gender. To test whether party affiliation moderates this effect, I then control for political party affiliation.

Results Descriptive statistics

Figure 8.1 reports the rates of support for the policy across the 1,000 respondents.6 Two-thirds of respondents (65.8%) said that they were

162 Sierra Smucker

Figure 8.1 Support for DV and Firearms Policy Across All Respondents (N=1,000)

‘extremely likely’ or ‘very likely’ to support a policy that would prevent individuals convicted of abusing their spouses or romantic partners from purchasing, owning, or possessing firearms. Only 6.0% of respondents reported that they would be ‘very unlikely’ or ‘extremely unlikely’ to support such a policy. The remaining 28.2% of respondents reported they would be ‘somewhat likely,’ ‘neither likely nor unlikely,’ or ‘somewhat unlikely’ to support the legislation. The results suggest that, in general, respondents were supportive of the legislation. Support for domestic violence-related firearms regulation varies by demographic and political groups. Table 8.3 reports the mean level of support for new regulations that would bar domestic abusers from possessing firearms across subgroups. The results suggest that, on average, female respondents supported domestic violence–related firearms legislation at higher rates. Women reported an average level of support of 5.92 (which correlates with the response ‘very likely to support the policy’), a half a step above men’s average responses (5.40). A Chi-square test suggests that these differences are statistically significant (p