UPDATED TLDR (2/16/2022): The research discussed below, co-authored with Wake Forest University graduate (and current George Washington University Law School 2L) Riley Satterwhite and my son Paul Yamane (Wake Forest ’16), has since been published as a chapter Second Edition of the book, Understanding American Gun Culture.

For longer than I care to remember, I have been working on an analysis of the portrayal of women in gun advertising. I have posted some elementary thoughts about this along the way, including on Crimson’s Trace’s interesting banner at the 2016 NRA annual meeting and a pair of ads they ran in The American Rifleman in 2009, as well as a TV ad for the M&P Shield placed on Sportsman’s Channel by Smith & Wesson.

Although gun culture is typically characterized as embodying hegemonic masculinity, looking at advertisements over a 100 year time period complicates the gender story. To wit: As soon as I embarked on my study of the rise of self-defense (Gun Culture 2.0) using ads in The American Rifleman (and later Guns), I noticed some surprising appearances of women in those magazines. One example I first posted about in 2015 (did I mention I have been at this for a while?) was an ad for Peters Cartridges featuring a Lady Champion shooter which ran in January 1937.

Of course, just scanning magazines for images of women can lead to false conclusions driven by confirmation and other biases (see Daniel Kahneman). To overcome this takes serious time and effort. Our systematic study of gender advertisements in The American Rifleman over a 100-year time period took hundreds of hours to complete.

In the end, we found a more complex portrayal of women in gun advertising than we expected based on the scholarly literatures on gun culture and on gender in advertising.

Reflecting gun culture itself, gun advertising as a whole is largely the domain of men, though the gap in gender representation is shrinking, especially from the 1980s forward (see Figure 1 reproduced above). Moreover, when women do appear in gun advertising, at least in The American Rifleman, some of the worst stereotypical gender displays we find in the world of print advertising more broadly are more muted or absent altogether.

For the empirical basis of this conclusion, please download and read the pre-print on SocArXiv.

TLDR: I just posted a publicly-accessible pre-print of a book chapter, “A Woman’s Place in Gun Advertisements: The American Rifleman, 1920-2019,” co-authored with recent Wake Forest University graduate (and current George Washington University Law School 1L) Riley Satterwhite and my son Paul Yamane (Wake Forest ’16). The chapter is scheduled to appear in the forthcoming Second Edition of the book, Understanding American Gun Culture.

For longer than I care to remember, I have been working on an analysis of the portrayal of women in gun advertising. I have posted some elementary thoughts about this along the way, including on Crimson’s Trace’s interesting banner at the 2016 NRA annual meeting and a pair of ads they ran in The American Rifleman in 2009, as well as a TV ad for the M&P Shield placed on Sportsman’s Channel by Smith & Wesson.

Although gun culture is typically characterized as embodying hegemonic masculinity, looking at advertisements over a 100 year time period complicates the gender story. To wit: As soon as I embarked on my study of the rise of self-defense (Gun Culture 2.0) using ads in The American Rifleman (and later Guns), I noticed some surprising appearances of women in those magazines. One example I first posted about in 2015 (did I mention I have been at this for a while?) was an ad for Peters Cartridges featuring a Lady Champion shooter which ran in January 1937.

Of course, just scanning magazines for images of women can lead to false conclusions driven by confirmation and other biases (see Daniel Kahneman). To overcome this takes serious time and effort. Our systematic study of gender advertisements in The American Rifleman over a 100-year time period took hundreds of hours to complete.

In the end, we found a more complex portrayal of women in gun advertising than we expected based on the scholarly literatures on gun culture and on gender in advertising.

Reflecting gun culture itself, gun advertising as a whole is largely the domain of men, though the gap in gender representation is shrinking, especially from the 1980s forward (see Figure 1 reproduced above). Moreover, when women do appear in gun advertising, at least in The American Rifleman, some of the worst stereotypical gender displays we find in the world of print advertising more broadly are more muted or absent altogether.

For the empirical basis of this conclusion, please download and read the pre-print on SocArXiv.

The article was published in a special issue of the journal Palgrave Communications on “What Guns Mean.” It is available open access (i.e., FREE!!!).

We again find that Gun Culture 1.0 themes of hunting and recreational shooting decline from the mid-1960s on while Gun Culture 2.0 themes of personal protection/self-defense and concealed carry increase over the same period of time. The two themes cross over in the early 2010s, highlighting that Gun Culture 2.0 is now the core of American gun culture.

Although the change is more pronounced in Guns magazine, the overall pattern is nearly identical to what we found when we examined changes in gun advertising themes in The American Rifleman from 1918-2017.

For example, reflecting on my first experience attending the National Rifle Association annual meeting, I came away with the conclusion that the NRA is a Christian organization. Of course, this was a somewhat impressionistic observation.

Recently, Dr. Jessica Dawson — a sociologist the United States Military Academy at West Point and a U.S. Army Major — has addressed this issue more systematically in an article entitled, “Shall not be infringed: How the NRA used religious language to transform the meaning of the Second Amendment” (the journal, Palgrave Communications, is open-access, there is no paywall to read or download it).

Examining every issue of The American Rifleman from January 1975 to December 2018, Dawson coded the text for discussions of the Second Amendment tied to religious discourse. For example, looking for language of “God” or “God-given” rights.

She finds that references to “God-given” in connection with the Second Amendment increased dramatically after the 2000-2004 time period (see blue line in Figure 1).

If people think the NRA is using more God-talk to legitimate the Second Amendment, they are right, at least according to the NRA’s discourse in this magazine. I attended the NRA meeting for the first time in 2013, right in the middle of this sacralization.

Dawson also breaks down “God-given” into connections with aspects of the Second Amendment. Given my interest in the rise of self-defense gun culture (Gun Culture 2.0), I was fascinated to see how the increase in the use of God-talk in  connection with the right to self-defense follows the same general pattern as God-talk in general but begins from a lower starting point and slightly earlier.

There is much more to this article than these two brief snippets, but the fact that my impressionistic observations at the NRA annual meeting in 2013 are confirmed in a systematic analysis of NRA discourse in its flagship magazine, The American Rifleman, was reassuring.

So, here is the citation and a link to the book chapter: David Yamane, Sebastian L. Ivory, and Paul C. Yamane, “The Rise of Self-Defense in Gun Advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918-2017,” in Jennifer Carlson, Kristen Goss, and Harel Shapira, eds., Guns: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2019).

I am currently writing up a replication study using advertisements in Guns magazine from 1955-2019, which I presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meetings in San Francisco this month. I will post a link to that paper when it is ready.

So, here is the citation and a link to the book chapter: David Yamane, Sebastian L. Ivory, and Paul C. Yamane, “The Rise of Self-Defense in Gun Advertising: The American Rifleman, 1918-2017,” in Jennifer Carlson, Kristen Goss, and Harel Shapira, eds., Guns: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2019).

I am currently writing up a replication study using advertisements in Guns magazine from 1955-2019, which I presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meetings in San Francisco this month. I will post a link to that paper when it is ready.

The full text of a draft of this chapter is available on the SocArXiv site. It has been downloaded 291 times to date. I’d like to think we can do better than that, though.

It’s especially exciting to see named as co-authors two recent Wake Forest University graduates, one of whom also happens to be my son!

Of course, I will post details here about the book once it is finally published.

During that time, I have been trying to describe and understand the new incarnation of America’s historic gun culture that seems so evident today. A culture centered on armed self-defense and concealed carry.

From time to time I get some push back, either saying that self-defense has always been a part of American gun culture or that there is no singular gun culture today but only plural gun cultures centered on the various things people do with their guns: self-defense, hunting, collecting, and many different kinds of sport or recreational shooting including plinking, target shooting with pistols, long range precision rifle, skeet, trap, sporting clays, muzzleloaders, Cowboy Action Shooting, 3 Gun, IDPA, USPSA, IPSC, and on and on.

This work addresses these issues by examining the themes present in advertisements in The American Rifleman over a period of 100 years, from 1918 to 2017. Although this is only one small measure of everything that gun culture is, using a consistent source of data over time allows us to see the historical trend more clearly.

Of course American gun culture has always been composed of various subcultures, just like American culture in general. Self-defense has long been a part of American gun culture, and hunting remains part of American gun culture. But in my presentation at the Gun Studies Symposium I will argue that the data show the core or center of gravity of American gun culture has shifted away from earlier emphases on hunting and sport or recreational shooting to self-defense and concealed carry.

This major conclusion is reflected in the figure that appears above. If you would like to read the entire argument, I have made a draft of the paper freely available on the SocArXiv website. As this is a work in progress, I welcome your feedback on it.

That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Reading year after year of The American Rifleman, this well-known passage from the Tanakh ring ever so true.

Two examples below are similar to others I have found, from 1929 and from the 1940s and 1950s.

50+ years ago, an August 1961 editorial reacts to legislative threats to “one of the basic individual liberties of the American way of life” – “the right of reputable citizens to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes.” It encourages laws that regulate persons not firearms. It maintains that laws will not prevent criminal from getting guns.

It argues that gun accidents will not be prevented by laws; to the contrary, gun safety education is essential to reducing such accidents and the National Rifle Association is the leading organization providing such education (then, as now).

Almost 50 years ago, in November 1967, another editorial reacts to propaganda campaigns waged by the media against gun ownership, and argues that various anti-gun extremists are behind the effort “to destroy what we know and treasure as the American way of life.”

Common elements with today’s situation:

-Well-financed anti-gun campaign (pre-Bloomberg): “These vocal, argumentative, well-financed campaigners wish to deprive some 50,000,000 Americans, a group larger than any minority element and composed of all elements, of a civil right older than the United States and prized by free men everywhere.”

-Ignorance of guns: “The people who are most against guns are the people who understand them least.”

-Comparing civilian firearms deaths to war deaths (though without contemporary infographics): “One of the anti-gun spokesmen’s prize statistics, true or false, is that 750,000 Americans have been killed at home with guns in this century, more than in all the nation’s wars.”

-Comparing firearms deaths to car deaths: “the car fatality rate went up last year 4 times as much as the gun homicide rate. What are these intense humanitarians doing about car deaths?”

These small finds as I work my way through the past 100 years of The American Rifleman continue to reinforce to me that the increasingly hard line political stance of the National Rifle Association in defense of gun rights has developed symbiotically with the increasingly hard line political stance against guns by its opponents.

Brought to you by CCI-Speer Lawman ammunition, American Rifleman (February 1979).