Target Practice: A Jungian Psychoanalytic Perspective on American AR-15 Gun Behavior

During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, gun control continued to dominate a significant part of our national discourse. In several weeks alone, there were tragedies involving AR-15 semi-automatic weapons used by civilian citizens with the intent to murder and massacre. First was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump while presenting at a rally in the “battleground state” of Pennsylvania by a 20-year-old White male who was a kitchen worker at a nursing home, with an associate degree level of education, who owned an AR-15 rifle. Second was a heartbreaking mass shooting that occurred at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, outside of Atlanta, when a 14-year-old White male killed two students and two teachers, with nine others hurt and seven shot by the boy’s AR-15 rifle that he received from his 54-year-old father. The teen was charged with felony murder, and his father with second-degree murder for providing him with the weapon.