In most states in the u.S. it is legal to carry a concealed handgun in public, but little is known about why people want to do this. While the existing literature argues that guns symbolize masculinity, most research on the actual use of guns has focused on marginalized men. the issue of concealed handguns is interesting because they must remain concealed and because relatively privileged men are most likely to have a license to carry one. using in-depth interviews with 20 men, this article explores how they draw on discourses of masculinity to explain their use of concealed handguns. these men claim that they are motivated by a desire to protect their wives and children, to compensate for lost strength as they age, and to defend themselves against people and places they perceive as dangerous, especially those involving racial/ethnic minority men. these findings suggest that part of the appeal of carrying a concealed firearm is that it allows men to identify with hegemonic masculinity through fantasies of violence and self-defense.A n estimated six million people in the United States possess a concealed handgun license (Stuckey 2010), which means they have the legal right to carry a concealed firearm in most public places. Like gun use generally, the vast majority of concealed handgun license holders are men, and men are more likely than women to support concealed handgun licensing (Carroll 2005;Jones 2005). This study explores how gender dynamics shape the motives of men who are licensed to carry concealed handguns.Previous studies have argued that guns are symbols of masculinity
No abstract
In recent decades, neighborhoods across the United States have begun to employ digital media to monitor their communities for outsiders who are seen as suspicious. Yet, little is known about these surveillance practices and their consequences at the individual and neighborhood levels. Such monitoring behaviors are important to analyze not only because of the ways that perceptions of criminal threat are often racialized but also because of the role that private citizens play in initiating contact between strangers and the police. Based on an analysis of e-mails submitted to a listserv in a liberal, predominantly white neighborhood from September 2008 through August 2009, this article explores how residents identify, discuss, and respond to people whom they define as suspicious. Findings show that most suspicious person e-mails focus on black men who are also more likely to be portrayed as unique threats to neighborhood safety. These results suggest that listserv surveillance practices foster racialized notions of criminal threat that both reinforce the boundaries of predominantly white neighborhoods and reproduce the perception of black men as criminals.
Building on literatures that examine why firearms are appealing and to whom and employing Weber’s concept of “legitimate violence”, this paper utilizes an online concealed carry forum to critically analyze how firearm proliferation is rationalized in the U.S. The analysis focuses on three specific examples of violence—the Parkland, Florida, and Philando Castile shootings, and stories of children who find guns and shoot themselves and/or others. This work is a critical examination of the social construction of “legitimate violence” that deconstructs the discourses embedded in the “pro-gun” notion that the answer to gun violence is more guns.
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