University of Pennsylvania Masthead Logo ScholarlyCommons CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research College of Arts and Sciences Electronic Journal 3-26-2019 Rifles nda Reinforcement: The aN tional Rifle Association’s Partisan Approach to Gun Ownership August Gebhard-Koenigstein University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/curej Part of the American Politics Commons Recommended Citation Gebhard-Koenigstein, August, "Rifles and Reinforcement: The aN tional Rifle Association’s Partisan Approach to Gun Ownership" 26 March 2019. CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/225. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/225 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Rifles nda Reinforcement: The aN tional Rifle Association’s Partisan Approach to Gun Ownership Abstract The NRAas h long been the dominant player in the battle vo er gun control. Scholars have attributed this dominance in large part to the NRA’s ability to mobilize its membership when necessary. Lacombe (2018) has written of the NRA’s cultivation of a politicized social identity around gun ownership that assists it in doing so. In this thesis, I show that the NRA ash tied this gun owner identity to conservatism and to the Republican party. I find that the NRA’s homogenous membership composition advantages it in its strategy of developing a partisan politicized gun-owner identity among its members. The NRA lde iberately taps into members’ existing identities in the process of cultivating such an identity. Using Liliana Mason’s (2018) work on identity reinforcement as a framework, I demonstrate that the NRA ash much to gain from facilitating the alignment of a gun owner identity with a Republican partisan identity.