Guns and Values: Individualism in the American Gun Debate

The American gun control debate is best understood as a battle in a war over the influence of individualism on American culture, politics, and policy. This book demonstrates that the gun debate is fundamentally about values. Specifically, it is about what we value most: private rights, or the public good. This helps explain why the technical, empirical, or legalistic arguments we hear aren’t persuasive. A review of scholarly literature on both the politics of gun control and American political culture finds an American bias toward an individualism that embraces personal rights. We argue that this bias stacks the deck against gun control. Interviews we conducted with activists show that support for, or opposition to, gun control is linked to concern for the public, or private, good. Finally, we trace the federal gun control debate in Washington from the 1960s to 2010s to show the ebbs and flows of individualism’s influence.