Posted May 27, 2015 5:26 pm by Comments

By Bob Owens

I must confess that I don’t have a great deal of respect for the “soft sciences” of psychology and sociology, and so it was with skeptical view that I read Jennifer Carlson’s “Why men feel the need to carry guns,” which seems to have been based on her book, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline.

She begins:

Since the 1960s, the national conversation on firearms in both political and academic circles has revolved around one main question: Do guns increase crime or reduce it? Are guns tools of escalation or deterrence?

Lately, however, social science researchers have become interested in a different question — not the relationship between guns and crime but the relationship between guns and people.

A new generation of sociologists takes as its point of departure the sheer preponderance of guns: an estimated 300 million firearms in the hands of civilians, and more than 11 million concealed carriers. We want to understand why Americans do not just own but also carry guns. To us, cultural politics matter at least as much as instrumental value.

Carlson’s desire for research took her to “Rust Belt” Michigan, where she seems to have interviewed primarily blue collar workers (and possibly …read more

Source:: Bearing Arms

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