Gun‐free Zones? Political Opportunities, Resource Mobilization, and Shooting Sports Organizations at U.S. Colleges and Universities

Abstract

Although the general public often thinks of schools as “gun‐free zones,” a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities recognize shooting sports organizations, enabling students to participate in rifle, pistol, shotgun, skeet, and trap sporting events. Building on recent scholarship that employs political opportunity and resource mobilization theories to analyze sports, we assess the roles that states’ political characteristics and schools’ resources play in the presence of student shooting sports organizations. Drawing on a comprehensive database of 1,953 four‐year colleges and universities in the United States, and employing logistic regression analyses, we show that Republican‐leaning states, schools with larger, mostly white, and majority men student bodies, and schools with Republican student organizations serve as conducive environments for shooting sports organizations. This article represents the most comprehensive study to date of shooting sports in U.S. schools and contributes to literatures on the sociology of guns, the sociology of sports, and social movements.

Who Are Gun Owners in the United States? A Latent Class Analysis of the 2019 National Lawful Use of Guns Survey

“…If gun ownership influences political opinions (Burton, Logan, et al 2021; Joslyn 2020), political affiliation also plays a significant role in terms of whether and how individuals are introduced to gun culture. For instance, going to a college with a higher proportion of Republican students makes it more likely to have access to a shooting sports organization on campus (McElroy and Coley 2021). While the policy ramifications of the correlation between gun subcultures and policy preferences may be substantial, at this point it is valuable simply to establish the substance of the variation in the gun-owning population so that any future work on this topic can approach the issue with an improved map of the landscape that avoids the pitfall of seeing this important population as monolithic.…”

Creating Secular Spaces: Religious Threat and the Presence of Secular Student Alliances at US Colleges and Universities1

“…Because secular organizing has recently been dominated by white men (Cragun 2015;Guenther 2019), I also include variables measuring the percent of white students and percent of students who are men at a school. Past studies analyzing the presence of student groups ranging from LGBTQ groups to anti-sweatshop groups to shooting sports organizations have included nearly all of these control variables of interest (Coley 2018(Coley , 2020Van Dyke et al 2007;Fetner and Kush 2008;Kane 2013;McElroy and Coley 2021).…”

“…Indeed, scholars have drawn on opportunity-based theories to argue that student groups such as anti-sweatshop groups and LGBTQ groups are more likely to be present in Democratic-leaning states, because students believe they have more opportunities to mobilize and create change in those states (Coley and Das 2020;Van Dyke et al 2007;Fine 2012). Similarly, another study shows that pro-gun student groups are more likely to be present in Republican-leaning states and that such groups spiked during the Presidency of Donald Trump, because Trump's election shaped students' perceptions of the types of groups that might be successful in their states (McElroy and Coley 2021). However, opportunity-based theories might not best explain the emergence of groups like Secular Student Alliances that seek to build community for the very reason that their states, counties, or schools appear hostile to their cause.…”

Red Schools, Blue Schools? Republican and Democratic Student Groups at U.S. Colleges and Universities1

“…However, student organization scholars have drawn on social movement theory to shed light on the factors associated with the presence of student groups more generally. Specifically, although not conceptualizing most student organizations as social movement organizations per se, student organization scholars have argued that social movement theory's attention to how political opportunities, educational opportunities, and resources shape people's willingness and ability to engage in collective action can similarly help us understand why students form organizations at their schools (see arguments by Coley 2021b; Coley and Das 2020;Dixon et al 2008;Fetner and Kush 2008;Kane 2013;McElroy and Coley 2021;Reger 2018;Van Dyke et al 2007). We thus draw on both conservative commentary and scholarship on student organizations to highlight two approaches to understanding the prevalence and correlates of College Republicans and College Democrats groups: (1) the red schools, blue schools approach and (2) the engaged schools, unengaged schools approach.…”

“…Some conservative commentary, along with scholarship emphasizing the role of sociopolitical context in student organizing (e.g., McAdam 1982;Meyer 2004), would thus suggest that College Republicans groups might be less common than College Democrats groups and most typically found at "red schools"-for example, at religious schools in Republican-leaning areas of the country. On the other hand, scholarship on student organizations that emphasizes the role of institutional characteristics and student body characteristics in student organizing suggests that characteristics such as schools' public statuses, endowment sizes, student body sizes, and student body composition should be associated with the presence of both College Republicans and College Democrats groups (e.g., Coley and Das 2020;Coley et al 2022;Dixon et al 2008;Kane 2013;McElroy and Coley 2021;Schachle and Coley 2022;Van Dyke 1998;Van Dyke et al 2007). These studies suggest that there might not be significant differences in the number or characteristics of schools that are home to College Republicans and College Democrats groups.…”