The Gun Gap

How does gun ownership influence someone's personal politics?

Posted on April 5, 2021 in Reviews of the Month

The Gun Gap: The Influence of Gun Ownership on Political Behavior and Attitudes

Joslyn, Mark R. Oxford, 2020
224p, 9780190064839 $27.95, 9780190064860

In this succinct, rigorously empirical, and unusually evenhanded book, Joslyn (political science, Univ. of Kansas) explains the connection between guns and politics in the US. The “gap” to which the book’s title refers is the political difference between those who do and do not own guns. The gun gap has been neglected by scholars of political behavior in favor of examinations of race, class, and gender gaps. But Joslyn argues that the gun gap in voting frequently exceeds these other gaps. Using survey data from a number of sources, the author documents how the gun gap manifests itself across a range of outcomes, from voter preference (discussed in chapter 2) to turnout (chapter 3) to other perceptions and attitudes that have political consequences, such as the death penalty (chapters 4–7). To his credit, Joslyn digs more deeply into the experiential roots of these differences than have many gun scholars (e.g., those who take a quantitative approach), highlighting how the different social worlds inhabited by gun owners and non-owners shape their orientations to guns, risk, and policy. A valuable resource for those interested in the roots and expression of the US’s polarized gun politics.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
Reviewer: D. Yamane, Wake Forest University
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Law & Society
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Political Science – U.S. Politics
Choice Issue: Jun 2021

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Enjoy this week’s post? Check out more reviews of US politics titles:

• Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy
• Representation and the Electoral College
• The American Nonvoter
• What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South
• The President on Capitol Hill: A Theory of Institutional Influence
• Politics on Display: Yard Signs and the Politicization of Social Spaces

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