More than the Second Amendment: Liberal gun owners, citizenship, and emancipatory democracy in the United States

Abstract

ObjectiveThis study seeks to understand how liberal gun owners configure the rights and responsibilities of ethical gun citizenship in the face of a dominant public narratives that rejects guns as markers of liberal belonging.MethodsThis study employs a qualitative, textual analysis approach to explore the narratives of liberal gun owners participating in online discussions of mass shootings and contentious political elections.ResultsThe results show how liberal gun owners, in these online forums, advocated for an emancipatory democracy that largely prioritized the collective over the individual, demanded an accountable government, and was radical in its insistence on the importance of accessibility and meaningful participation, thus configuring social belonging and commensurability as central to formal citizenship.ConclusionThe results suggest that how one formulates the values of citizenship is linked to how one practices the politics of democracy. Highlighting the greater range of possibilities for the alignment of guns and citizenship may thus offer some hope to the rancor of contemporary partisan politics as liberal gun owners seek to normalize a democracy that brings individual and collective identities and needs into its culture and practice.