Making the Personal Political: Creating a Woman's Place in the American Gun Debate

Gun regulation constitutes one of the most salient and polarizing issues in American politics. In the “great American gun war,” interest groups are increasingly seeking to enlist women. Using an original dataset of more than 1,000 tweets, this paper uses discourse analysis to map the strategies used by a leading pro-gun organization (the National Rifle Association/@NRAWomen) and a leading pro-regulation organization (Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America/@MomsDemand) to create, nurture, and mobilize communities of women within each respective social movement. We find that the pro-gun organization focuses on creating and affirming female communities within the private sphere of home and civil society, while the pro-regulation organization focuses on mobilizing women in the public, political sphere. The pro-gun organization empowered women for individual action, while the pro-regulation organization empowered women for collective action. We argue that these messages reflect the organizational imperatives of each organization – in one case, to shift sentiment, and in another to mobilize it – as well as the larger moral worldviews of the movements in which each “women’s community” is embedded.