Shooting Together: Gun Rights Politics, Social Capital, and Positive Feeling in a Florida “Gun Collective”

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 14: Criminal Justice

Abstract

Everyday gun culture can be understood as movement-like political participation that generates powerful emotional rewards through community formation. Drawing on ethnographic research in and around ‘Mosby’, a conservative city in Southwest Florida, I show how “engaging in guns” is simultaneously engaging in politics: shooting is not only a sport, but is experienced as exercising and protecting freedom in a contested field of gun legislation and advocacy. Political talk and alignment are central to how enthusiasts form allegiances and strong in-group ties, echoing arguments that gun commerce and gun practice often sell a political culture (Carlson, 2023).

This politicized practice sets in motion a process whereby engagement in gun-rights politics produces community cohesion, forming a “gun collective” that cultivates positive emotions and wellbeing. In a context of declining civic engagement and social capital since the late 1960s (Putnam 2000), Mosby gun enthusiasts compensate for weak neighborhood/community life by building reliable ties through shooting competitions, club nights, and post-range dinners—“bowling alone, but shooting together.”

I argue that the gun collective operates as affective infrastructure: it produces belongingness, self-worth, and felt security through friendship-making, mutual recognition, and shared meaning. Thus, gun ownership should not only be viewed through a lens of fear and insecurity (Carlson, 2015; Stroud, 2016), but also through its potential to facilitate positive emotions.

Author

• Alice Hawryszkiewycz, University of Oxford