Historians trace relationships between gun rights and political movements, and trace ways that gun economies map onto larger colonizing projects. Sociologists and anthropologists speak to persons living in “gun country” to better understand the significances of firearms within families or social networks, or track expanding community undulations of gun-related trauma. Scholars from beyond traditional biomedical fields have begun to address these complex issues. Such an approach understands guns as both denotative entities made of real mass and that draw real blood, and as connotative cyphers whose associations trigger themes such as protection, danger, safety, identity, race, gender, class, erotics, oppression, or revulsion. They aim to uncover what guns mean, in addition to what they do.Īddressing guns symbolically means recognizing ways that firearms emerge as powerful symbols shaped by history, politics, geography, economy, media, and culture, as well as by actors such as gun manufacturers or lobbying groups. These types of questions get at the divergent ways that people talk and feel about guns, in addition to living with and dying from them. What larger social and political contexts surround guns? How do narrations of gun rights or gun trauma map onto larger scripts about matters such as identity, bias, racism, or nationalism? Guns also invoke larger questions about politics. For instance, how do people in gun-dense regions narrate the roles that firearms play in their daily lives? Is there a pleasure in gun ownership? What stories do people tell about their weapons? Why do some people feel they need guns in their homes or neighborhoods, while others reject guns out of hand? Improving such communication requires understanding the complex valences that guns accrue for people and communities when these guns are not shooting bullets or causing mortal wounds in other words, focusing not just on death data, but on life data as well. Gun researchers also often fail to communicate with people in communities where there are a lot of guns (Metzl, 2019). Policy level approaches that aim to stem tides of rising rates of gun injury and death then struggle to develop strategies for bridging polarizing political divides about gun ownership and gun-related trauma. The result is an often-predictable tug of war between the research community on one hand, and critics who assail anti-gun bias in academia on the other. Meanwhile, leading public health organizations and medical groups decry the lack of funding for gun research, and the silencer it places on knowledge (Metzl, 2018). Pro-gun communities thus encounter public health research in the context of backlash against findings that highlight the risks of having too many guns, or that posit the failures of pro-gun policies (Gun Owners of America ( 2009) Lott, 2014 Hsieh, 2016)-without addressing the larger contexts of gun ownership. Gun supporters reject research suggesting policy solutions to gun-related morbidity and mortality because of what they call a “tainted public health model” biased against their interests (Faria, 2001). Gun-related injury and death is an urgent problem that plays out increasingly across the world, and often in particular ways in the United States-a country that has less than five percent of the world’s population, but over forty percent of its civilian-owned guns (Small Arms Survey, 2018). A 2018 position paper by the American College of Physicians (Butkus et al., 2018) warned that “firearm violence continues to be a public health crisis in the United States that requires the nation’s immediate attention” while detailing the daily toll of firearm violence “in neighborhoods, homes, workplaces, and public and private places across the country.” Scholars use words such as “crisis” or “epidemic” to describe spiraling mortal costs of gun-related morbidity and mortality. 157).Įvidence suggests that shootings rise in correlation with increasing numbers of civilian owned firearms. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed” (Reagan, 2016, p. “No matter how hard I tried to breath it seemed I was getting less and less air. “Getting shot hurts,” President Ronald Reagan once put it after surviving and assassination attempt. Academic research on guns often focuses on gun-related injuries and deaths, and for good reason-getting shot leads to profound real-world consequences.
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