Gun Cultures and Gun Violence

The first session of the three-year Gun Cultures and Gun Violence Interest Group focused on the following questions: How do we make sense of gun cultures in the United States?What role has Christianity played in forming and sustaining such cultures?How do gun cultures relate to gun violence?What is the impact of gun cultures and gun violence on our political life?What vision of the human do gun cultures and gun violence produce in our society?In exploring these questions, this year's papers addressed the cultural conditions that sustain, and the social consequences that emerge from, gun prevalence and gun violence in the United States, laying the groundwork for discussion in the second and third years of the Interest Group.Michael Grigoni's paper, "American Gun Cultures as Signs of the Times: Historical and Sociological Perspectives," opened by arguing that Catholic theological treatment of guns in the United States cannot proceed in abstraction from the historical and sociological dynamics that characterize this issue.He provided an overview of gun-related statistics, with special attention to how rates of gun ownership and firearmcaused death increased during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the vast presence of guns negatively impacts social and political life in the United States.Guns are certainly among the signs of the times, he argued, but to "scrutinize and interpret them in light of the Gospel" (Gaudium et Spes 4), we must see them not simply as practical tools but as cultural objects resonant with meaning for those that use them.Grigoni elaborated further by presenting David Yamane's typology of American gun cultures, distinguishing between Gun Culture 1.0 which centers long guns for hunting and recreation and Gun Culture 2.0 which centers handguns for armed selfdefense.This latter expression of American gun culture has become dominant from the late twentieth century onward in the United States.Grigoni continued by reviewing ethnographic accounts of Gun Culture 2.0, drawing from the work of Harel Shapira, Jennifer Carlson, and his own research with evangelical Christian handgun owners for whom handgun ownership is understood to be consistent with Christian discipleship.He concluded by inviting us, as we begin a three-year deliberation on this issue, to center the truisms that guns are always situated within particular forms of life; that guns are cultural objects pregnant with significance and meaning for their users; and that our responses to this issue must attend to matters of context in dialogue with literatures bringing such dimensions of American gun cultures to light.Luis Vera, who was scheduled to present a paper titled, "Concealed Carry Culture and the Technocratic Paradigm," was unable to attend the convention due to personal extenuating circumstances.