The Gun Gap: The influence of gun ownership on political behavior and attitudes

by Mark R. Joslyn

In The Gun Gap, Mark R. Joslyn advances gun owners as a new classification for understanding political behavior and attitudes. He demonstrates a "gun gap," which captures the differences between gun owners and non-gun owners, and shows how this gap improves conventional behavioral and attitudinal models. The gap represents an important explanation for voter choice, voter turnout, perceptions of personal and public safety, preferences for gun control policies, and support for the death penalty. Moreover, the 2016 presidential election witnessed the largest recorded gun gap in history. The Gun Gap thus affords a new and compelling vantage point to evaluate modern mass politics.

234 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 30, 2020

Reviews

[David Yamane · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this succinct, rigorously empirical book, unusually even-handed book, Mark R. Joslyn (political science, Kansas University) explains the connection between guns and politics in the United States. The “gap” to which the book’s title refers is the political differences between gun owners and those who do not own guns. The gun gap has been neglected by scholars of political behavior in favor of understanding race, class, and gender gaps. But Joslyn observes the gun gap in voting frequently exceeds these others. Using survey data from a number of sources, he documents how the gun gap manifests itself across a range of outcomes, from voter preference (ch. 2) to turnout (ch. 3) to other perceptions and attitudes that have political consequences (chs. 4-6), such as the death penalty (ch. 7). Joslyn does well to dig more deeply into the experiential roots of these differences than many (especially quantitative) gun scholars, highlighting how the different social worlds inhabited by gun owners and non-owners shape their orientations to guns, risk, and policy. This book will be of interest to undergraduate students of all levels, graduate students, faculty, and anyone interested in the roots and expression of America’s polarized gun politics.

[Oren · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book contains some really strong qualitative analysis, the quantitative analysis is frequently not statistically sound, reproducible, or able to be followed—in some cases it is even self-contradictory. Even beginning with Figure 1.1, there is actually inaccurate data, and there’s a factual inaccuracy as soon as page 4 (the GSS began asking about gun ownership in 1973, not 1972). Additionally, this book falls into the trap that many people do: of viewing guns as a safety concern only insofar as they may be used by one person against another. Over half of US gun deaths each year are firearm suicides, and a failure to acknowledge this takes nuance away from a book otherwise attempting to find more of a middle ground.