Of Peaceable Kingdoms and Lawless Frontiers: Exploring the Relationship between History,Mythology and Gun Culture in the North American West

The United States is more violent than Canada and it always has been. Even in the face of mass shootings, most Americans remain culturally and politically resistant to the sorts of gun control measures that have long existed in Canada. America’s unique gun culture is embedded in the history, imagery, and especially the mythology of the American frontier. Canada had its own frontier experience and has its own history of gun ownership, but it does not have a parallel gun culture. This article presents a comparative analysis of post-Civil War/post-Confederation frontier history and mythology, and examines the construction of contrasting cultural narratives of America’s “Wild West” and Canada’s “Mild West.” It suggests that US–Canadian differences in gun laws and gun culture—even in the borderlands region of Alberta/Montana—are better explained by the countries’ two different frontier mythologies than by their actual western histories.     

Angels versus Devils: The Portrayal of Characters in the Gun Policy Debate

This research examines the role of the devil shift and angel shift in interest group rhetoric using the case of gun policy. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) suggests that the devil shift—whereby political actors characterize their opponents as more malicious and powerful than they actually are—is common in intractable policy debates. Through an analysis of e‐mails and press releases by two gun control organizations and two gun rights organizations, I examine how groups portray themselves and their opponents. I identify two dimensions relevant to these portrayals: (1) whether a character in a policy narrative is portrayed as good or evil, and (2) whether a character is portrayed as strong or weak. The findings indicate that while the devil shift is present, the angel shift—that is, the glorification of one's own coalition—is more common in gun policy groups' communications. Two alternative characterizations, which I call the angel in distress and the devil diminished, are also present. The use of these character portrayals varies significantly across political coalitions and as a function of communication purposes. The results suggest a need to reconceptualize character portrayals to better understand how they operate as narrative strategies in the NPF.     

Constructing Policy Narratives in 140 Characters or Less: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations

This study examines interest groups’ framing of gun policy issues via an analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association spanning from 2009 to 2014. Utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I investigate the extent to which interest groups use social media to construct policy narratives. This research shows that much can be conveyed in 140 characters; both gun control and gun rights organizations used Twitter to identify victims, blame “villains,” commend “heroes,” and offer policy solutions. This research sheds light on the politics of gun control by revealing trends over time in groups’ framing and suggests refinements for hypotheses of the NPF. Finally, this work underscores the importance of social media for public policy scholarship.     

Retrieving the Cultural Biography of a Gun

Abstract

The meanings of objects change as the people with whom they are associated change. Over the course of an artefact’s existence, the sum of these meanings constitutes a cultural biography, a life-story of the item. This is the case with objects associated with conflict, just as with those from other contexts; in this case, cultural biographies can have sharply contrasting phases. However, identifying the object in each of its changing relationships with people can be problematic. In the case of a World War I German 150 mm gun, that is one of the few of its type remaining in the world, this has been achieved by comparison of detailed characteristics, markings, and battle damage with historical photographs and surviving documentation. By these means, its role in the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, and after its capture by the Australian Corps, can be pieced together. The biography of such a gun can include manufacturing technology, a means of destruction, a valued war trophy, a public exhibit, a neglected relic, a source of scrap metal, a museum showpiece, and even a children’s plaything, but the gun investigated here was more fortunate. It is preserved in a museum, although its relationship to people could continue to change.     

Gun rites: hegemonic masculinity and neoliberal ideology in rural Kansas

Drawing upon empirical data from a qualitative research project in Southeast Kansas, this paper employs feminist and decolonial theories to analyse the interlocking relationality of hegemonic masculinity, neoliberal ideology, social conservatism, rurality, and gun culture. The first goal is to shed light on the subordinating and marginalizing tendencies that arise as a result of gendered conceptions of gun use. The second aim is to illustrate how gun culture is normalized, and often valorized, through individualistic narratives of self-reliance, security, protection, and defence. The third objective is to interrogate the ways in which particular material practices and gendered discourses regarding gun use are reinforced by settler colonialism, whiteness, heteronormativity, enabledness, and nationalism. Finally, the paper critically examines the social hierarchies that are reaffirmed as a result of culturally embedded patriarchal, white supremacist, and neoliberal ideologies, and how rurality mediates the masculinist subjectivities that are produced in such spaces.     

武成永固大将军炮考

故宫端门西广场陈列着一尊清代武成永固大：降军炮（图1,中国国家博物馆藏,一级文物）,它是康熙帝为平定“三藩之乱”而铸造的。清初,平西王吴三桂、平南壬尚可喜、靖南王耿精忠分镇云南、广东、福建,拥兵自重,形成割据势力。康熙十二年（1673年）八月,清廷下令撤藩。十一月,三藩中势力最大的吴三桂起兵,自称天下都招讨兵马大元帅,次年,称周王。先后夺占贵州、湖南、四川。     

Buzz Kill: State Adoption of DUI Interlock Laws, 2005–11

Most states have adopted significant measures to reduce the incidence of driving under the influence (DUI) but a DUI death occurs about every 53 minutes; a significant portion of these accidents are the result of recidivist DUI drivers. A relatively new and novel way states can reduce DUI deaths from repeat offenders is to require offenders to install an interlock device on their vehicle, but not all states have adopted this measure. We explore whether the Policy Typology and Policy Diffusion Frameworks can help us understand the politics behind why some states have adopted interlock policies while others have not. Employing over‐time data from the American states our results suggest that the adoption of interlock laws is best explained by internal factors to the state and the adoption of interlock laws by neighboring states. In addition, the adoption of interlock laws is a form of incremental policymaking—states with existing DUI laws are more likely to adopt interlock policies. We conclude that interlock policies diffuse in a manner similar to other regulatory policies and that interlock policies should be categorized as protective regulatory policies rather than social regulatory policies.     

Matchlocks, Flintlocks, and Saltpetre: The Chronological Implications for the Use of Matchlock Muskets among Ottoman-Period Bedouin in the Southern Levant

This paper examines the chronological implications for the prolonged use of matchlock muskets by the Bedouin during the Ottoman Period (1453–1918). Although the technology behind the matchlock ignition system is from the fifteenth century, this weapon was used by many Bedouin until the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, the presence of gun parts from matchlock muskets poses a potential problem for identifying Bedouin occupations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the southern Levant and in northern Arabia. This issue is heightened by the paucity of diagnostic artifacts found at archaeological sites associated with the Bedouin during the Ottoman Period.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 2. April 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 2 Front Cover: School shootings Student lie‐in at the White House to protest gun laws, 19 February 2018. The demonstration was organized by Teens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington, DC area in the wake of the 14 February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Earlier on the day of the shooting, the priest at the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe mused during the Ash Wednesday ritual whether valentine hearts and bouquets of red roses could coexist with ashes on foreheads and reminders of human mortality. Could love and death be partners? As the congregation exited the church, mobiles rang with news of yet another school shooting and the deaths of 14 high school students and three teachers trapped inside an elite high school in suburban Florida. The gunman was a high school reject and white supremacist. It was the 292nd school shooting in America since Sandy Hook, the tiny tot massacre of 2013. Yet America's presidents and political leaders across the political divide remain hostage to the National Rifle Association's mantra: more automatic rifles equals more security, now including in US schools. State laws prevail over executive orders. Currently 14 states in the US arm teachers and 16 states allow local school boards to decide whether to do so. But one thing has changed as the survivors of the school massacres and their young followers have taken the reins. Beginning on 14 March, thousands of students from elementary and high schools have begun to march out of their classrooms. A new and powerful civil rights movement is spreading across the nation. Meanwhile Trump and his education secretary are proposing to target poor, black and Latino students, to undo President Obama's policies that protected male minority students from disproportionately harsh ‘zero tolerance’ school policies. In this issue, Scheper‐Hughes considers school shooting antecedents, beginning with the misfired Clinton campaign against youth violence. Back Cover: ESTHER GOODY (1932–2018) Esther Goody during fieldwork in Ghana, 1957. Esther Goody was a member of one of the most famous husband‐and‐wife teams in anthropology. She devoted her working life to the study of northern Ghana's peoples and to synthesizing social anthropology and social psychology.     

Guns and Homicides: A Multiscale Geographically Weighted Instrumental Variables Approach

This article assesses the locally varying effects of gun ownership levels on total and gun homicide rates in the contiguous United States using cross-sectional county data for the period 2009–2015. Employing a multiscale geographically weighted instrumental variables regression that takes into account spatial nonstationarity in the processes and the endogenous nature of gun ownership levels, estimates show that gun ownership exerts spatially monotonically negative effects on total and gun homicide rates, indicating that there are no counties supporting the “more guns, more crime” hypothesis for these two highly important crime categories. The number of counties in the contiguous United States where the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis is confirmed is limited to at least 1258 counties (44.8% of the sample) with the strongest total homicide-decreasing effects concentrated in southeastern Texas and the deep south. On the other hand, stricter state gun control laws exert spatially monotonically negative effects on gun homicide rates with the strongest effects concentrated in the southern tip of Texas extending toward the deep south.     

Saints, Stalwarts, and Slackers: State Financial Contributions to Welfare Reform

Considerable literature finds that spending levels are important predictors of poverty rates, both in the American states and in western European nations. Those jurisdictions with the most generous support programs generally have lower poverty rates. This article examines state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) spending levels in relation to national norms, the spending ability of the state as predicted by their total taxable revenue base, and the state's poverty rate. The analysis shows enormous variation in state per capita TANF spending, with many states spending far less than the national mean and their fiscal capacity. Most of the low-spending states have the fiscal ability to fund more vigorous programs but at optimal levels; some would still fall below the national mean. In return for improved funding, these states would be candidates for increased federal assistance. A few states with a high poverty rate and usually with large numbers of poor citizens are generous spenders, indicating that funding is one component of effective programs.     

Policy Diffusion and Strategies for Promoting Policy Change: Evidence From California Local Gun Control Ordinances

Recent research efforts on policy innovation and diffusion largely have focused upon policymaking at the state government level. In this article we seek to develop an understanding of the ways momentum for policy change can be generated among receptive local governments. We use gun control policymaking within California to illustrate how local government characteristics, the presence of regional associations, and the establishment of interest groups may lead to policy development and diffusion. We also identify linkages between interest groups, focusing events, and the successful use of a new image of gun violence as a public health problem, yielding insights into strategies that may be used successfully to promote policy change.     

Legal Geographies of Intellectual Property, ‘Traditional’ Knowledge and Biodiversity: Experiencing Conventions,Laws, Customary Law,and Karma in Thailand

This article explores the existence of customary laws relating to ‘traditional’ knowledge of plants in Thailand through micro‐ethnographic case studies. This is juxtaposed against global and national frameworks of intellectual property laws that have a privatising effect on knowledge under the rubric of discovery or ‘invention’, as well as liability rights approaches of compensation and benefit‐sharing for research access. By understanding scale and legal jurisdiction as socially and politically constructed phenomena, we explore how laws at different scales and in different jurisdictions may override each other, discriminate against foreign laws and practices, and ignore customary laws. In doing so, the paper presents complex legal geographies of plants and associated knowledge, which suggest that the customary laws and norms of Indigenous groups and traditional healers are often ignored by ‘outsiders’. The paper notes that the possibility of ‘injury’ to traditional healers remains considerable without appropriate consent and given the discriminations surrounding knowledge made by patent laws. However, the ethnographies also point to the possibility of local remedies to these injuries through ritual processes, and we note resistant co‐constitutions of law and scale through the Nagoya Protocol.     

Centralized Governance and Student Outcomes: Excellence,Equity, and Academic Achievement in the U.S. States

Are states with more centralized approaches to education governance more likely to have higher student achievement and lower achievement gaps between poor and nonpoor students? This article addresses that question by theorizing about the effects of political, administrative, and fiscal centralization on student outcomes. It tests competing hypotheses about the degree to which centralization across these three dimensions is associated with the promotion of academic excellence (higher achievement) and equity (narrower achievement gaps). The results demonstrate the virtue of studying academic performance through the lens of governance and more distal system‐level variables rather than, as has been common in the literature, more narrow policy‐oriented measures. The findings show that strong relationships exist between student outcomes and the degree of political centralization and administrative centralization in a state, yet there are no apparent associations with fiscal centralization. The results also illustrate that governing arrangements are not consistently related to the advancement of excellence and equity. In terms of administrative centralization, specifically, apparent trade‐offs may exist.     

略论新中国成立以来中国共产党对军队的绝对领导

中国共产党对军队的绝对领导,即"党指挥枪",是马克思主义建党建军学说与中国军事斗争实践相结合的伟大创造,是毛泽东建军思想的重要组成部分。新中国成立后,中国共产党逐步发展和完善了一整套领导人民军队的基本制度,实现了党的组织与军队建制的有机融合,实现了党的思想政治领导与军事行政领导的内在统一,并从新的高度深刻论述和发展了毛泽东"党指挥枪"的建军思想,为坚持党对军队的绝对领导奠定了新的理论基础。     

The States and the Differing Impetus for Divergent Paths on Same-Sex Marriage, 1990–2001

Using a regression model of pooled time series data from the 50 states in the United States in the period 1990 to 2001, we look at the political, demographic, and social movement factors that provide the impetus for the enactment of state laws that proscribe the celebration of marriages involving lesbian and gay couples. In doing so, we consider the validity of existing indicators that have been previously associated with the introduction of policies concerning sexual orientation at the state and local level, as well as introduce new factors that might apply uniquely to the area of same-sex marriage laws.     

Battlefield Casualty: The Archaeology of a Captured Gun

Abstract

Many artefacts in museums lack adequate information about the context from which they were collected. Not surprisingly, this often applies to artefacts recovered from battlefields, where chaotic conditions can result in uncertainty about their origins. This paper examines the case of a Second World War German 88 mm gun preserved in an Australian museum. The museum had little contextual information for this weapon, except that the Australian Army captured it in North Africa in 1942, probably after the Second Battle of El Alamein. However, an archaeological analysis of the gun, particularly of damage incurred during battle, can link it to photographs taken after the battle and re-establish its historical context and the circumstances of its acquisition. In this way, a museum artefact can become more than a mere exhibit: it can be made to document its own past.     

Renovating the Landscape and Packaging the Penguin: Culture and Nature on Summerland Peninsula,Phillip Island,Victoria, Australia

Changes in settler impacts on Summerland Peninsula, Phillip Island are examined, with an emphasis on the recent program of environmental restoration associated with the Penguin Parade, one of Victoria’s largest tourist attractions. Management strategies construct nature around an ideal of human absence, expressed in, for example, removal of residents and residential buildings; representations of the Aboriginal presence as both prehistoric and part of nature; and formalised rather than experiential environmental education. Paradoxically this encourages intensified tourism and its associated impacts, such that the economics of environmental preservation are dependent on its commodification. This paper draws on two traditions of cultural geography, with components undertaken more than 20 years apart. I argue that a combination of Sauerian and deconstructive approaches can be productively applied to many current environmental issues.