The COVID-19 pandemic, and protests, have marked an unprecedented increase in US gun sales. But America has long been an outlier; the stockpile of private guns climbed to almost 300 million in 2017. Scholars use multiple theories to explain why gun sales have tripled since the early 2000s, and why disruptions like the pandemic might cause gun sales. However, scholars have difficulty evaluating these theories with existing retrospective estimates of gun sales and other measures, limiting their ability to test theory or suggest policy changes.This study uses the known increase in gun sales during the COVID-19 pandemic to introduce and experimentally validate a novel measure of gun desirability. With a sample of 4,240 US residents, this project demonstrates that gun desirability is a valid measure of inclination towards gun ownership, and that a pandemic video vignette significantly increases overall gun desirability relative to a control video vignette. These results serve as a foundation for future scholarship to (1) discern gun desirability trends, (2) evaluate theorized causes of gun desirability, and (3) consider interventions on those conditions that arouse desire for gun ownership.

Theory with Consequents

by

Justin Lucas Sola

Doctor of Philosophy in Criminology, Law & Society

University of California, Irvine, 2024

Associate Professor Bryan L. Sykes, Chair

This article-based dissertation highlights problems with the operationalization of causal theories of neoliberalism. When our theory is incoherent or leads to incorrect predictions, that marks an opportunity to refine our understanding and be able to suggest better policy. The contribution of this approach is to invite productive challenges to our theorization of social problems. Rather than definitively answering a single large research question, I pursue these questions via four articles that test theories of neoliberalism and further our understanding of why Americans want guns. In the introduction I define what I mean by neoliberalism, discuss the motivations of my dissertations, and lastly discuss the four articles in greater depth. In article one I review how theories of neoliberalism have been operationalized in studies of criminology, law & society, and gun ownership, before critiquing some operationalizations’ adequacy to support causal claims. This motivates my dissertation. The second article is Transmitting Desire (Sola 2021), published in Sociological Perspectives. This article introduces a measure of gun desirability by validating it against the known increase in gun purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests. I argue that this measure is ideal to test theorized causes of gun interest, like neoliberalism. The third article is Firearms, Families, and Financial Distress (Sola and Warner), a manuscript-in-progress. We use a large dataset (from Sola 2021) to test a prominent causal claim from literatures linking gun ownership to neoliberal responsibilization: that men turn to guns in the face of socioeconomic threat. The fourth article is Widespread, bipartisan aversion exists to neighbors owning AR-15s or storing guns insecurely (Sola and Pickett 2024), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this article we test whether Americans are comfortable with their neighbors’ gun ownership and gun storage practices. I extend this article with an appendix that utilizes Honest Causal Forests, a machine learning approach to identify causal heterogeneity (Wager and Athey 2018; Brand et al. 2021). I use this method to explore who is comfortable with their neighbor owning an AR-15 rifle. I find a small group of respondents are comfortable with their neighbor’s AR-15, and then test whether such respondents are similar to citizen-protectors predicted by neoliberal responsibilization literature (Carlson 2015; Stroud 2016). The contribution of this approach is to invite productive challenges to our theorization of social problems.