Research pick: Juggling gun law - "A Marxist analysis of American gun culture"

Much has been written about the USA’s so-called “gun culture”. Opinions are extremely divided between those for and against firearms in the context of the right to bear arms, “open carry” law, and other issues. Indeed, while there may well be a spectrum of opinion if one examines the issue closely, American society, and indeed foreign opinion about American society, is largely split between those who are pro- and those who are anti-gun.

An analysis of a survey undertaken of US citizens by researchers in the UK and published in the Internation Journal of Critical Accounting comes to some intriguing conclusions about gun culture. Fundamentally, the attitudes of gun owners is mostly aligned with the political and public views of the National Rifle Association while people who do not own a gun favour the idea of government passing tougher gun control laws in the future. The researchers have then examined this split in opinion in terms of the Marxist perspectives of Alienation Theory and Conflict Theory to help them better understand American gun culture within the context of what is perhaps the archetypal capitalist society.

The researchers discuss the modern wave of gun violence in their paper and point out that more people are killed by guns in a typical week in the USA than in all of Western Europe in a year. US society’s apparent love affair with firearms pours outwardly from TV and movie screens every day while much of the media reinforces the notion that guns are the solution to the violence that is already occurring. It is beyond doubt that history lies at the centre of the American gun debate. The original meaning and intention of the second amendment of the US constitution essentially lost to that history but used to this day controversially to argue the pro-gun case.

Unfortunately, the team points out, there is a lack of current political will, an inability to pass reasonable laws, the existence of a toxic violent society, and the sheer proliferation of firearms that ensure that the industry will always put its profit ahead of the public’s safety despite the number of firearm deaths including the many of children often in school. “Until this situation changes, the cycle of gun culture violence in the USA will continue on unabated,” the team concludes.

James, K. and McKenzie, J. (2018) ‘A Marxist analysis of American gun culture’, Int. J. Critical Accounting, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp.491–518.

Taken from https://sciencespot.co.uk/juggling-gun-law.html