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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Law and Public Policy



D03 - The Great Gun Debate: Comparing Gun Control Policies and Politics in Canada and the United States

Date: Jun 2 | Time: 10:30am to 12:00pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Aaron Ettinger (Carleton University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Aaron Ettinger (Carleton University)

Quick Draw Community: the NRA Annual Meeting, firearms safety education and the great gun debate.: Noah Schwartz (Carleton University)
Abstract: The debate over firearms policy is a critical flashpoint in the culture wars that continue to create political divides across North America, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) is a key player in this debate. Despite being well known for its lobbying, the majority of the NRA’s budget goes towards providing services like firearms training, putting on its annual meeting and disseminating communications material. Why does the NRA devote so many resources to its educational and cultural production work, when its lobbying is so successful? My paper examines the role that points of contact between the NRA and its membership, like the Annual Meeting and firearms safety classes play in the organization’s larger political strategy. Drawing on the literature on the role of ideas in the policy process, it argues that the NRA uses these points of contact in order to work towards the social construction of the gun culture in America, which it can then draw on for political support. This article is a part of my dissertation project which examines the NRA’s use of narrative to build a community of gun owners, and how it mobilizes this community to influence policy. This project involved three months of ethnographic fieldwork in the US, including participant observation at the Annual Meeting and firearms safety courses, and semi-structured interviews with NRA officials and ordinary gun owners. Aside from contributing to our understanding of this important collective actor, my paper will add to the broader material-ideational debate in the policy literature.


Investigating ACF Policy Change Theory in Canadian Gun Control Policy: Tim Heinmiller (Brock University)
Abstract: The period 1989-2012 was a tumultuous one for Canadian gun control policy. The Montreal Massacre in December of 1989 sparked a movement for stronger gun control measures, culminating in the passage of the Firearms Act in 1995. This legislation established universal firearms registration in Canada but, after its scandalous implementation, universal registration was repealed through the Ending the Long-Gun Registry Act of 2012. These two major policy changes make Canadian gun control policy a useful diachronic case study for investigating ACF policy change theory and that is the task taken up in this paper. Building on the methodology developed by Leifeld 2013, Olofsson, et al. 2018, and Heikkila et al. 2019, this paper undertakes a content analysis of newspaper articles from the Toronto Globe & Mail to collect data on the actors in the Canadian gun control policy subsystem, their core beliefs, and their policy-relevant activities. Using this data, social network analysis is then applied to determine the presence of advocacy coalitions. Furthermore, the two ACF policy change hypotheses are investigated empirically using novel methods. The first policy change hypothesis is investigated by developing indicators – that can be applied to the content analysis data – for each of the four policy change pathways, supplemented by corroborating process tracing. The second hypothesis is investigated by using the veto player concept to determine which advocacy coalition(s) are “in power” during each major policy reform. The paper will present the case and methodology in detail, along with some preliminary findings to illustrate the method’s strengths and limitations.


Participants:
Noah Schwartz (Carleton University)
Tim Heinmiller (Brock University)



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