Articulating The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership

A renaissance of interdisciplinary research on guns has followed the shift in American gun culture from hunting and recreational shooting to self-defense, from what I call Gun Culture 1.0 to Gun Culture 2.0. Latent in this body of research is what I call The Standard Model of Explaining the Irrationality of Defensive Gun Ownership. This Standard Model unites scholars’ critical responses to Gun Culture 2.0 across disciplines, including sociology, psychology, political science, economics, law, and public health. The irrationality is identified at both the individual level (self-defense guns increase a person’s risk of harm without any offsetting benefit) and societal level (self-defense guns increase rates of harm in society without any offsetting benefit). Because it is not a rational response to our current reality, The Standard Model sees defensive gun ownership as just a pretense or rationalization. There must be something else that is actually motivating it. How these rationalizations and pretenses are conceptualized vary by discipline. At the individual level they include hegemonic masculinity, racial resentment, disinhibition, and coping with psychological or identity threats. At the societal level, we add the cultural work being done by the gun industry and gun rights organizations to sell the myth of armed self-defense. In this paper, I articulate the 5-point logical structure of The Standard Model highlighting key works at each point.