Gender and Firearms

Private gun ownership for self-defence remains a major personal and public issue in the US, driven by concerns about crime, vulnerability and a range of ’ideological’ factors. As media attention centres upon the extent to which women are taking up firearms, with the gun lobby and firearms manufacturers celebrating the ’new armed woman’, and guns being promoted as ’Rape Prevention Kits’, this book explores the changing gendered aspects of gun ownership. Can ownership of firearms by women be considered, as some have claimed, the embodiment of what might be termed ’pioneer feminism’, as women resist male violence in a dangerous world, or is a different story told by the prominence of women in firearms control campaigns, or the fact that women remain the most common victims of male gun ownership? Analysing representations of the ’armed woman’ in firearm and gun lobby marketing and advertising campaigns, together with television and popular music forms, Gender and Firearms: My Body, My Gun, My Choice examines the directions taken in the public debate on weaponisation in the US, considering the role of women in the politics of gun safety and gun control. The book draws on statistical evidence in order to shed light on trends in gun ownership, whilst engaging with feminist scholarship on the relationship between gender, violence, risk and vulnerabilities, thus opening up new debates surrounding identity, performance, gender and risk in contemporary societies. As such it will apply to sociologists and scholars of cultural and media studies with interests in gender, embodiment, risk, criminology and violence.

Peter Squires is Professor of Criminology & Public Policy at the University of Brighton, UK. He is the author Shooting to Kill, Gun Culture or Gun Control, and Gun Crime in Global Contexts, co-author of Rougher Justice , editor of Community Safety, and Asbo Nation, and co-editor of Criminalisation and Advanced Marginality. Jayne Raisborough is Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self and co-editor of Risks, Identities and the Everyday. Hannah Frith is Principal Lecturer in Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton, UK