The Oxford Literary Festival
Jennifer Carlson will be participating in The Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, March 23, 2024 from 2-3pm at the Oxford Martin School: Lecture Theatre.
Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
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 Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Public Law Enforcement and the Politics of Race and Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline.
Part of the festival’s programme of American literature and culture.