The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership

Last year I was invited to contribute to a special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science by the editors Cassandra Crifasi, Jennifer Dineen, and Kerri Raissian. The theme of this issue is “Gun Violence in America: What Works and What is Possible.”

Specifically, the editors invited me “to write a paper overviewing the evolution of American gun culture – from hunting to gun culture 2.0. Your scholarship in this area will help readers of the special issue understand the role guns play in American culture and how that role has evolved (or not) over time.”

I am always flattered but such invitations, though perhaps I should not be. Maybe the first dozen people they asked said “No”? More likely is the reality that not many scholars have focused their work on gun culture per se, as opposed to adverse outcomes with guns, which is the primary focus of this special issue.

As usual, my participation in these sorts of enterprises reminds me of the Sesame Street song I remember so well from my childhood.

My contribution will focus on the rise of Gun Culture 2.0, the self-defense core of American gun culture today. But I also want to engage what I call “The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership” – the primary way gun studies scholars approach Gun Culture 2.0.

An excellent example of The Standard Model can be found in “Protective Gun Ownership as a Coping Mechanism” by Nick Buttrick, a postdoc at Princeton University.

The Standard Model has the following structure:

(1) It recognizes Gun Culture 2.0: “the culture of protective gun ownership has become the dominant mode in American life” (Buttrick 835). No argument there!

(2) It discounts the need for and utility of guns for defense: “And yet gun owners rarely use their guns to prevent victimization” (Buttrick 835).

Here it is mandatory to reference David Hemenway’s and Sara Solnick’s 2015 article, “The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007–2011.”

In this article, Hemenway and Solnick argue against both the need for guns and their utility for defense: (1) “Self-defense gun use (SDGU) occurs in fewer than 1% of contact crimes,” and (2) “SDGU is not associated with a reduced risk of victim injury.”

(3) It holds that the opposite is true of owning guns: “In contrast, bringing a gun into one’s home clearly makes it more dangerous: A gun in the home substantially increases the likelihood that a household member will die by a gun, whether by homicide, suicide, or accidental shootings” (Buttrick 835).

Public health research on guns focuses on this point in particular, so the citations are numerous, but The Standard Model looks to founding architect Arthur Kellerman’s twin towers published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 (“Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership”) and 1993 (“Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home”).

(4) Therefore, defensive gun ownership is not rational but irrational. It is irrational both in a psychological sense that motivations for gun ownership are driven by fear instead of the reality of need and utility (Point 2) and in a utility maximization sense that the risks are greater than the rewards (Point 3).

Therefore, claiming self-defense as a reason for gun ownership is actually a rationalization. In reality, something else is motivating defensive gun ownership.

(5) Scholars from sociology and political science define the something else as:

(A) Downward economic mobility. Key works include: Prominent in Jennifer Carlson’s Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline and Carson Mencken’s and Paul Froese’s “Gun Culture in Action.”

(B) Stereotypical/Toxic masculinity. Key works include Angela Stoud’s Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry and Scott Melzer’s Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War.

(C) Racism/Racial resentment. Key works include Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland and Alexandra Filindra’s series of articles on the topic.

Of course, many scholars adopt an intersectional approach wherein two or more parts of social science’s Holy Quadrinity of race-class-gender-sexuality come together in a single analysis of the drivers of defensive gun ownership. Carlson and Stroud both focus on race, class, and gender. In Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, Caroline Light criticizes “white hetero/cis-masculinity” as driving defensive gun culture.

(6) Psychologists define the something else as a coping mechanism. As Buttrick argues, “guns act as a maladaptive coping mechanism that allows their owners to manage the psychological threats that they face in their everyday lives, but at a serious cost” (p. 836). In addition to Buttrick, Wolfgang Strobe and colleagues use this framing in “Is It a Dangerous World Out There? The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership.”

(Psychology is not my forte so I welcome suggestions for other work that falls under Point 6.)

Conclusion

One of the benefits of elaborating the terms of The Standard Model is that it facilitates a sort of plug-and-play approach to new studies I come across.

For example, a recent episode of the “Red, Blue and Brady” podcast caught my eye. It was on “The Social Lives of Firearms: How Guns are Made – And What They Mean.” The special guest was Brandon Hunter-Pazzara, a doctoral student in anthropology at Princeton, discussing his article, “The possessive investment in guns: towards a material, social, and racial analysis of guns”

Hunter-Pazzara’s argument: “This new era of guns in American life builds from a longer history in which the gun remains central to the maintenance of the American racial order.” In my framework, 5C.

Two other recent articles (one published in the special issue of Sociological Perspectives I edited) fall under my framework’s 5B: Tara Warner and colleagues’ “To Provide or Protect? Masculinity, Economic Precarity, and Protective Gun Ownership in the United States” and Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino’s “Sometimes (but Not This Time), a Gun Is Just a Gun: Masculinity Threat and Guns in the United States, 1999–2018.”

And so on.

I will be breaking down each of the parts of The Standard Model into separate posts in the future so I can keep a running bibliography of the major works in each. Stay tuned for that!