DEFENSIVE GUN USE AND THE STANDARD MODEL OF EXPLAINING THE IRRATIONALITY OF DEFENSIVE GUN OWNERSHIP
We continue with our consideration of James Wright’s fourth observation in his 1995 essay, “Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America”:
Observation 4: Many guns are also owned for self-defense against crime, and some are indeed used for that purpose; whether they are actually safer or not, many people certainly seem to feel safer when they have a gun.
Note that the second part of Observation 4 is italicized because we considered the first part of this observation in Module 2.
In this session we will consider some important implications of Gun Culture 2.0: whether guns are actually used for self-defense and whether defensive gun ownership is rational.
CORE RESOURCES
*David Yamane, “Articulating The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership,” unpublished paper presented at a workshop on “The Ethics, Law, and Social Science of Self-Defense and Firearms” convened by the Center for Ethics in Society at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire (November 2022).
*RAND Corporation, “The Challenges of Defining and Measuring Defensive Gun Use” (2 March 2018).
*David Hemenway and Sara J. Solnick, “The Epidemiology of Self-Defense Gun Use: Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007–2011,” Preventive Medicine (October 2015).
*David Studdert, et al., “Handgun Ownership and Suicide in California,” New England Journal of Medicine (2020).
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES
*Nicholas Buttrick, “Protective Gun Ownership as a Coping Mechanism,” Perspectives on Psychological Science (2020).
*Wolfgang Stroebe, N. Pontus Leander, and Arie W. Kruglanski, “Is It a Dangerous World Out There? The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2017).
*Tara D. Warner et al., “To Provide or Protect? Masculinity, Economic Precarity, and Protective Gun Ownership in the United States,” Sociological Perspectives (2022).
*Brandon Hunter-Pazzara, “The Possessive Investment in Guns: Towards a Material, Social, and Racial Analysis of Guns,” Palgrave Communications (2020).
SUPPORT
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