Understanding the ideology of guns

Jennifer Carlson, who teaches sociology at Arizona State University, is a noted expert on US gun culture. By my count, this is her third full-length work on the subject, in addition to a coedited volume. But this important new book begins in a highly personal way, reflecting a problem with which many of us can deeply identify. Carlson says she writes in part to try to understand the politics of her own late father, from whom she was deeply estranged, at least politically. They couldn’t talk about politics—the divide was too large.

Carlson says that, before her father’s death in 2019, her dad “still managed to vote absentee one last time in Michigan, where his vote counted much more than it would had he cast it in Arizona. . . . On the day that Trump was elected, I was angry that my father couldn’t see the consequences of his vote.” She wonders whether her father would have been all in on everything that happened over the next four years, and everything that continues to happen in the aftermath of the Trump-created crisis after the 2020 election. This book, then, shows a sociologist doing her work to understand what has gone wrong on the American right, motivated by a desire to understand her dead father.

Carlson had me with this introduction, and off we went. The book’s method stems from Carlson’s in-depth interviews with 50 US gun sellers in four states, undertaken during the pandemic. The interviewees are identified for the reader by age and state each time they are quoted. While Carlson also cites progun media sources and other relevant background studies, the interviews are both central and hugely illuminating.