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This chapter employs the same American Rifleman editorials and gun control-related letters to explain how the National Rifle Association (NRA) has created a gun-centric political ideology, in which gun rights are central to a broader set of issue positions, and thus how gun rights became so closely related to contemporary conservatism in the United States. For many gun owners, gun rights stand at the center of a broader political ideology that embraces liberty, nationalism, limited government, and law and order. The chapter addresses the roots of this ideology and its relation to the gun owner identity by examining NRA's decades-long efforts to build an ideology around gun rights. Working in conjunction with its group identity, the NRA's ideology comprises the second stream of the gun-centric worldview it has used to advance gun rights. This group ideology increases the political unity of gun rights supporters — they are similar not just in their shared support for gun rights, but also along a broader range of issue positions and values. In connecting gun rights to other issues, the chapter unveils how ideology linked the gun owner identity to other politically relevant identities, strengthening each.

In this chapter, the authors provide a review of firearm-related laws (i.e., federal, state, landmark legal cases), policies (e.g., “Stand Your Ground,” background checks, child access prevention), and programs (e.g., Project ChildSafe). The mixed research related to the effectiveness of these firearm policies and laws, as well as program evaluation, is summarized. Issues related to the intersection of gun-involved violence and suicide, gun ownership, and mental illness are addressed. Moreover, gun restoration programs and firearm ownership disqualification systems are discussed, as well as the important court cases related to these complicated issues. While the media and public opinion have influenced much of the legislation related to gun ownership and gun control, the authors provide the reader with a foundational knowledge of the available empirical literature related to such.

This chapter lays out a framework for answering why supporters of gun rights are so dedicated to their cause and why the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its members have such an important place in the Republican Party. It discusses how the NRA has crafted a worldview around guns, consisting of both a gun owner social identity and a broader political ideology. The chapter then looks into greater detail about each of these central ideas: the ideational resources of identity and ideology, and the party–group alignment that has been so central to the NRA's more recent political power. The chapter ends by circling back to the previous chapter's discussion of political power, exploring what the NRA can teach us about how power is built and exercised.

This chapter examines 20 national conservative campaigns that used consumer activism from 2004 – 2014. These campaigns involved gun rights, abortion, opposition to LGBT rights, and a host of other “culture war” issues. Consumer activism continues to be mostly used by liberals, but since the 1970s, conservative organizations have organized marketplace activism more frequently to fight against shifting societal values. Conservative campaigns strengthened democracy by increasing overall rates of political participation and expanding public discussion of “culture war” issues. They also improved corporate accountability. On net, conservative use of consumer activism improves the health of democracy, but campaigns opposing LGBT rights weaken democracy by curbing minority rights and protections.

Despite focusing on the ethics of gun control, we cannot ignore the legal status quo. A 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court judged that the Second Amendment grounds a right to bear arms, but there are historical reasons to doubt this interpretation. In any case, the court underscored the compatibility of gun control with a right to bear arms—a point overlooked by some gun enthusiasts. Ethics, meanwhile, is important to the discussion (1) because ethics may either support or undermine the assertion of a fundamental right to gun ownership and (2) because, within the legal status quo, ethics is relevant to appropriate policy. Central to the ethics of gun policy is the idea of a moral right. A moral right to private gun ownership, if it exists, is a negative, nonabsolute, derivative right whose existence in a particular society depends on its role in enabling the realization of one or more basic rights.

Chapter 6 examines survey respondents’ estimations of the actual number of people who own guns in the United States. Evidence from the surveys shows that most people overestimate the gun owner population and believe that the number of owners will increase even further in the next decade. Most, in fact, predict that within the next ten years gun owners will represent a majority of Americans. While most estimates may be inaccurate, they are important because they have consequences for the respondents’ gun policy preferences. Data show that those who overestimate the percentage of gun owners in the United States are notably supportive of gun rights policies.

Unlike the Sagebrush Rebellion, which remained largely regional, the War for the West enjoyed national support through a conservative infrastructure of media, think tanks, public interest law firms, foundations, advocacy organizations, and militias. Frustrations over federal land management were knit into a broader, civil religious story of the American paradise lost, in which the federal government was portrayed as a tyrant bent on trampling the US Constitution, particularly Bill of Rights. The War for the West was led by the mainstream Wise Use Movement, which linked property rights to gun rights and religious freedom, and by the more extreme militia movement, driven by dark conspiracy theories and a profound antagonism toward the federal government. In the Republican Revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party struggled to hold together these mainstream and extreme factions to gain and retain power. This further integrated conservative, Western anger with federal land management into national politics.

This chapter explores a 2008 US Supreme Court case that brings into play two starkly contrasted readings of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution: a textualist or “originalist” reading written for the majority by Justice Antonin Scalia, and a “contextualist” reading written by two of the dissenting justices. The Court’s discovery of a previously unarticulated constitutional right (the right of private citizens to carry guns for self-defense) is firmly rooted in the libertarian principles of the US gun lobby. Yet its judgment in this case is made as though it were entirely free of any such context: the Court endows the text of the Constitution with an absolute authority and envisages its own decision-making processes as taking place within an apparently timeless and transcendental institution. That interpretive institution is, however, neither timeless nor transcendental but rather a field of self-reinforcing authority that enables and contains dissenting views and is composed of quite heterogeneous materials: a multiplicity of legal domains, a network of material and immaterial orderings, disparate forms of discourse, and the pre-judgments and tacit understandings that underpin them.

This chapter outlines three possible ways to characterize the manner in which constitutional jurisprudence deals with information. First, there are strategies that try to exclude as much information as possible. Information excluding strategies are ubiquitous in legal thought and practice. Here Justice Antonin Scalia’s public meaning originalism is taken as a prime example of this strategy. Another strategy is to include as much information as available. Recently this strategy has been exemplified in Richard Posner’s work on judging. Therein he labels the most honest and effective judge a “constrained pragmatist.” Finally, there is the possibility that courts could be set up to actually help produce relevant information. It is argued that the jurisprudence of democratic experimentalism exemplifies this strategy. Using Scalia’s information excluding opinion in the gun-rights case District of Columbia v. Heller, and Posner’s information including Second Amendment opinion, Baskin v. Bogan, it is argued that information-rich jurisprudence offers a much more effective and sensitive jurisprudential strategy in constitutional interpretation.

This chapter is the second part of the section of the book pertaining to the emerging roles of medical and mental health professionals in firearm-related matters. In this chapter, the authors provide a broad overview of therapeutic interventions, including outlining considerations in the following areas: (i) psychology as a science; (ii) contemporary treatment modalities, such as psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, and dialectical behavioral therapy approaches, among others; (iii) treatment for violence risk and violent offenders; (iv) treatment for victims of violence and domestic violence; (v) treatment for risk of suicide and self-harm; and (vi) youth interventions. The authors also address general considerations for health and wellness, firearm safety, barriers to treatment and restoration of gun rights, and vicarious trauma and self-care for practitioners.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the concept of securitarianism. Research on non-human animals including the Russian silver fox and American oldfield mouse as well as human research using eyetrackers suggests that protective threat responses are often based on something other than fear. Many securitarians do not trust others to take care of them and are attracted to isolationism and survivalist strategies not because they are fearful but because they believe being vigilant and working to provide security are ennobling duties. Thus, securitarians, including many intense Trump supporters, can advocate gun rights, tough crime laws, defense spending, and border walls even though they are not particularly neurotic and scared. Securitarians are not eager to fight and they are not eager to submit but they are eager to be vigilant and prepared. This chapter concludes by comparing securitarianism to other concepts such as libertarianism and communitarianism.

Chapter 3 explores the interpretive stasis of definition, where there is a question concerning the intended or appropriate scope of the basic sense of a term in a text. The chapter shows how rhetors, by persuasively articulating a definition and resorting to various lines of argument, can shift the meaning of passages and reframe controversies hinging on a text’s interpretation by adjusting the scope of a single term. But only linchpin terms (similar to Burke’s and Weaver’s ultimate terms) have this governing quality. The chapter’s central example consists of oral arguments from the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. City of Chicago that ultimately determined US citizens have a fundamental right to bear arms. The case partly rested on whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase privileges or immunities, generally protected from state infringement, includes this right within its scope. The centrality of definitional disputes to legal interpretation is also considered.