Jennifer Carlson

Sociologist Professor Jennifer Carlson says gun sellers in the US sell more than weapons, they also sell politics and helped to galvanise conservative opinion during a period of pandemic, racial unrest and a presidential election that rocked American democracy.
Carlson interviewed gun sellers across the US. She says that most sellers are conservative but new owners are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma for sellers yet they doubled down on gun politics as conservative politics and mobilised modern conservative culture around armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship.

Carlson is professor of sociology at Arizona State University. She is the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, Policing the Second Amendment and Merchants of the Right. She was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant in 2022 for her research into how guns shape American life, including those who survive gun violence’s harrowing aftermath, police who enforce the country’s complex gun laws, gun sellers and retailers who are on the front lines of surges in gun purchasing, and the people who choose to own and carry guns.

Part of the festival’s programme of American literature and culture.