Female Firepower: Exploring the Politics of Gun Ownership and Gender

Abstract

Pro-gun organizations have made great strides in mobilizing women and have been successful in inculcating women into gun culture. This raises questions about the intersection of gun ownership, an emerging political identity, and gender. Thus, this dissertation explores the cross pressures women face from their gun ownership status and the political consequences of such cleavages using an intersectional approach. First, I examine the effect of gun ownership on women’s political participation and engagement. I find gun owning women to be more engaged and participatory than non-owning women, and find them to be particularly motivated by gun issues. Second, I study the effect of gun ownership on women’s feelings of safety in public spaces where firearms are present. Women often feel empowered by owning a gun, and I find gun owning women to be much less averse to firearms than non-owning women. Furthermore, in some cases, women owners were even less averse than their male counterparts. Lastly, I examine the effect of gun ownership on women’s attitudes about use of force policies, namely the death penalty and the use military force. Here, gun owning women are more supportive of such policies than non-owners, and gun ownership is found to mitigate the expected gender gap in attitudes on these issues. I conclude by addressing the importance of these findings for the literature and for politics, the limitations of these studies, and avenues for future research.