Browsing by Subject "Guns"
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Item "Arming the Good Guys?": An Examination of Racial Framing in Students for Concealed Carry on Campus(2014-07-25) Couch, ToddOver the last several decades, issues relating to gun rights have received growing attention from the academic community. Much of this research focuses on the importance of masculinity and violence and shaping modern gun culture in the United States. While these studies are important, they fail to analyze the importance of race in development of the modern gun rights organization. Addressing this gap in the literature, I engaged in 30 in-depth interviews with members of the student-based gun rights organization Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC). Based on my conversations with the members of SCCC, I discovered a very intense pro-white/anti-other racial framing guiding much of SCCC membership.Item Good guys and bad guys : race, class, gender and concealed handgun licensing(2012-05) Stroud, Angela Rhea, 1981-; Williams, Christine; Auyero, Javier; Carrington, Ben; Hartigan, John; Warr, MarkAbstract: This dissertation explores how cultural meanings around race, class, and gender shape concealed handgun licensing in Texas. This project utilizes in-depth interviews with 36 concealed handgun license holders and field observations at licensing courses and gun ranges to understand why people get a license, what their gun carrying practices are, and how they imagine criminal threat and self-defense. Through my analysis of interviews, I find that masculinity is central to how men become gun users and why they want to obtain a concealed handgun license. Women explain their desire for a CHL as rooted in feelings of empowerment. While traditional conceptions of “fear of crime” are not a motivating factor for most of the license holders I interviewed, I find that CHL holders feel vulnerable to potential crime because they assume that criminals are armed. These interviews also suggest that perceptions of criminality are highly racialized, as predominantly black spaces are marked as threatening. As I argue, part of the appeal of concealed handgun licenses is that they signify to those who have them that they are the embodiment of personal responsibility.