Part of the Road to Election series
Location: Online via Zoom
Language: English
Registration: Please register under this link.
Gun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Jennifer Carlson’s Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy.
Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Carlson takes readers to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture—armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship—as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process.
Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy.
This event is organized as part of the 2024 Road to Election virtual event series, a collaboration of over 30 transatlantic partners. For more information about the project and other upcoming events, please visit www.roadtoelection.de.
With: Jennifer Carlson, Arizona State University
Moderated by: David Patrician, Journalist
In cooperation with: Amerikazentrum Hamburg
Kindly supported by: the German Federal Foreign Office
is Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University, where she directs the Center for the Study of Guns in Society. In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant for her research into how guns shape American life in a multitude of ways. She is known for her non-fiction books Policing the Second Amendment and Citizen-Protectors. Her most recent book is Merchants of the Right, which explores the surge of gun sales during the pandemic and the 2020 election.
is an American moderator/journalist currently based in Hamburg, Germany. He came to Germany on a Fulbright Journalism Scholarship and has reported for a variety of media outlets (i.e. Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, N-tv, RTL Nord and the Hamburger Abendblatt). In addition, he has moderated numerous international events and conferences (i.e. the TEDxFulbright in Frankfurt, the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, Hamburg’s 2023 AI.Summit). In 2022, he received the Amerigo Media Award, presented by ENAM (European Network of American Alumni Associations).
