Attending the 2015 American Society of Criminology Annual Meetings

Despite some concerns about traveling recently, to the District of Columbia in particular, I have made it back safely from my trip to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. This year is the third year I have attended the meetings.

I began attending these meetings when I started studying guns not because I am interested in criminology per se. To the contrary, I have been critical of the problems of studying guns only in connection with crime and social problems.

I attend because these are the only professional meetings where I can find with a large number of social scientists studying guns, even if their primary concerns are illegal activities with guns and mine is legal gun culture.

The first year I just observed and wrote a series of blog posts about what I learned (about illegal guns and homicide, and gun ownership and risky behavior, and school shootings, and lessons from the United Kingdom, and who gets shot, and fear of crime, and regulation of ammo purchases).

For the past two years, I have also presented my own research on American gun culture (about which, more later). And this year I also served as a “discussant” on a panel on gun violence.

In my upcoming posts about the meetings, I will share my thoughts on the gun violence panel, both the papers in particular and the topic of gun violence in general. I will also highlight some of the interesting findings from other sessions I attended. And I will share a bit about the research I presented, on the increasing prominence of self-defense in gun advertising as indicative of the rise of Gun Culture 2.0.

Stay tuned for this series of Thanksgiving holiday posts!