With thanks to Rocket Armory for the slogan and visual, liberals own guns, too.

This is a point I have made before. Approximately 20% of all gun owners in the United States — at least 12 million American adults — self-identify as liberal (compared to 36% of moderates and 45% of conservatives).

Although there is a connection between conservative politics and gun ownership, multivariate statistical analyses wash over interesting diversity within the gun owning population. In my Sociology of Guns seminar, I focus some of our limited time on this interesting subgroup.

In 2019, Randy Miyan of the Liberal Gun Owners ventured out of the North Carolina mountains to visit my class in person. In these COVID times, I am taking advantage of having my class sessions in Zoom to welcome Lara C. Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club.

Both were recently featured in a story in New York magazine, “‘Self-Defense is Self-Care’: How the Growing Ranks of Left-Wing Gun Owners See the Election.”

As preparation for our class session, Smith asked my students to examine three items. First, the Liberal Gun Club position on root cause mitigation as a way of addressing problems like suicide, homicide, and domestic violence. Second, and relatedly, the Liberal Gun Club position on firearms regulation.

The third item is a brief video news story from the BBC on “America’s least likely gun owners,” which featured Lara Smith.

Coming on the heels of a hotly contested election in which the winning candidate represented a party which had various restrictive gun laws in its official party platform, this promises to be a great session.