Narrative Strategies in the Gun Policy Debate: Exploring Proximity and Social Construction

While much scholarship has explored the framing of gun policy, the bulk of that work has focused on general themes or arguments made in support or opposition to gun control. This study offers a more nuanced examination of the framing in the gun policy debate, utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to identify rhetorical and political strategies of gun control and gun rights organizations. Drawing on a data set of more than 58,000 Facebook posts by 15 gun policy organizations, I examine how groups portray the victims of gun violence, particularly with respect to the race and age of victims. I also examine the types of gun violence that groups emphasize on social media. The findings suggest that gun control organizations seek to broaden the scope of debate by focusing on child victims and on mass shootings. Gun rights organizations pursue a similar strategy, but with a focus on self‐defense shootings. Despite the fact that gun violence primarily affects minorities, both types of organizations rarely mentioned race. I attribute this to groups' efforts to emphasize proximate and positively constructed characters. This research suggests that both types of organizations systematically distort the nature of the gun policy problem. 虽然许多文献对如何制定枪支政策进行了探索, 然而大部分工作集中在支持或反对枪支管制的宏观性主题或论点上。围绕枪支政策, 目前已形成了支持枪支管制与支持私人枪支保有权的两种组织派别, 本研究通过利用叙述式政策框架来识别两个组织各自所采用的修辞性策略和政治性策略, 对如何框定有关枪支政策的讨论进行了更细致的考察。根据15个枪支政策组织发布的超过58,000个脸书帖子的数据集, 我研究群体如何描述枪支暴力的受害者, 特别是在关于种族和年龄方面的特征上。同时, 我研究了群体在社交媒体上所强调的枪支暴力类型。研究结果显示, 枪支管制组织试图通过关注儿童受害者和大规模枪击案来扩大枪支政策的讨论范围。枪支保有权组织追求类似的策略, 但是其重点放在自卫射击上。尽管枪支暴力主要影响少数族裔, 但是这两类组织都很少提到种族问题。我将这归因于政策群体的选择, 他们努力强调与自己特征接近的以及那些被正面构建的人物。这项研究表明, 两种组织都系统性地扭曲了枪支政策问题的性质。