Description
Most countries have a restrictive gun control policy but the legislative diversity and the surrounding ethical dilemmas remain an important puzzle for political scientists. Despite being a deeply polarised issue, the gun policy debate is different from other polarising policy debates in that it sustains a stable coalition structure over time. What explains this stability? We approach our question from the lenses of moral foundations. Moral Foundations Theory suggests that the framing of moral issues builds on six psychological foundations – Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity, Liberty. Studying the long-term evolution (2012-2022) of this policy in the United States, we argue that moral values anchor actors into stable antagonistic camps. Using Discourse Network Analysis, and 3000 news agency articles, we emphasize which moral foundations represent the glue that binds actors together and which foundations polarize them into opposing camps, ultimately explaining which (combinations of) foundations are decisive to understand and differentiate between the underlying moral system of gun rights and gun control supporters. We offer a toolkit to study ethical questions from an empirical perspective, which can be applied to a range of policy areas across the world.
