Special Issue Editors’ Introduction: A Sociology of Firearms for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This special issue of Sociological Perspectives arrives amid a renaissance in the academic study of guns in recent years. In addition to individual books and articles, this collection sits alongside several other recent edited volumes (Carlson, Goss, and Shapira 2019; Fisher and Hovey 2021; Obert, Poe, and Sarat 2019) and special issues of journals (Metzl as editor for Palgrave Communications in 2019 and Dowd-Arrow, Burdette, and Hill as editors for Sociological Inquiry in 2021). These works contribute new insights to our understanding of guns in society.With this special issue, our contribution to the scholarly discourse on firearms returns to the key insights a sociological perspective brings to firearms research. These articles advance scholarly firearms research as a sociological topic by emphasizing, among other themes, the importance of guns as cultural objects, political activities related to guns, and the importance of race, gender, and sexuality.While many scholars continue to advance research on firearm violence (and for good reason given the firearm homicides, suicides, and massacres that happen too frequently), nearly half a century of research has focused primarily on the illicit use of firearms, with a secondary focus on the statistical correlates of gun ownership (Wright and Marston 1975;Wright, Rossi, and Daly 1983). These emphases have left a broader research agenda exploring firearms and the social activities adjacent to them underdeveloped (Yamane 2017). The time has come for sociologists studying firearms to "walk and chew gum at the same time" by emphasizing the social roles of firearms and their influences on social behaviors. This is especially true in societies where firearm ownership and lawful use of firearms remain a common and, in some places, normative behavior. Simply put, we hope that readers will find in this issue the fruits of focusing on firearms as a topic of sociological interest in their own right.This issue consists of 11 contributions to this nascent research agenda. Though we did not consciously pursue themes within this issue, two broad areas of interest are evident among the articles. First, half of the authors explore the diversity and complexity of firearm owners, including owners' understandings of firearms and motivations for owning them, in ways that go beyond previous studies. Second, half of the authors examine the social attitudes and activities that emerge due to the presence of firearms in society, including but not limited to activism for criminal justice reform, information seeking after mass shootings, the compliance of gun dealers with policy, and how the notion of guns as a criminal justice problem has driven much of the funded research on guns in the United States.

Pictures of you: God images, gun ownership, and empowerment in the United States

“…As Yamane (2017) has noted, sociological perspectives on guns have been surprisingly underdeveloped. Although recent special issues on "guns and society" have attempted to broaden this area of study (Dowd-Arrow, Hill, and Burdette 2020;Steidley and Yamane 2022), scholars have mostly focused on a narrow range of research topics, including patterns and correlates of gun ownership (Dowd-Arrow, Hill, and Burdette 2019;Legault 2008), the changing cultural meanings associated with owning and using firearms in the United States (Carlson 2015b;Mencken and Froese 2019), and the relationship between gun ownership and well-being (Dowd-Arrow et al 2019;Hill et al 2020aHill et al , 2020bHill et al , 2022. Studies of religiosity and gun-related outcomes have been identified as especially "rudimentary" (Ellison et al 2021).…”