Taking crime guns seriously: A socio-material perspective
| Author | David Bright,Mark Halsey,Andrew Goldsmith |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895820971319 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820971319
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2022, Vol. 22(3) 462 –479
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895820971319
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Taking crime guns seriously:
A socio-material perspective
Andrew Goldsmith ,
Mark Halsey and David Bright
Centre for Crime Policy and Research, Flinders University, Australia
Abstract
This article argues that guns, as objects used in and for crime, have received insufficient
criminological attention. It proposes a socio-material perspective for taking crime guns seriously
as material agents in the ways many serious crimes are planned and executed. Drawing in part
upon affordance theory, the perspective links the ‘objective’ physical properties of guns to their
allure and take up for the purposes of carrying out crime. Guns are powerful organising objects
in the commission of crime, it is argued, capable of provoking as well as enabling a range of
threatening and harmful activities. The perspective is developed drawing upon interview data from
a large qualitative study of convicted gun criminals. These data enable the notion of materiality
to be considered at different stages of criminal career, particularly prior to first criminal gun use
through to enforced or voluntary desistance. The article concludes with a consideration of policy
options suggested by the socio-material perspective. In a post-Covid 19 world in which guns
have gained greater salience in many countries, it is argued that the need to ‘dematerialise’ gun
attraction and use has never been greater.
Keywords
Affordances, guns, materiality, serious crime, socio-materiality
Introduction
Guns have been described as ‘the most significant, highly charged register of material cul-
ture in the world today’ (Springwood, 2007: 2). They are widely marketed, trafficked and
regarded as highly desirable possessions. It is generally accepted that ‘access to guns
increases lethality of violence, particularly in cases of murder, domestic violence, and
Corresponding author:
Andrew Goldsmith, Centre for Crime Policy and Research, College of Business, Government and Law,
Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia.
Email: andrew.goldsmith@flinders.edu.au
971319CRJ0010.1177/1748895820971319Criminology & Criminal JusticeGoldsmith et al.
research-article2020
Article
Goldsmith et al. 463
suicide attempts’ (Cukier and Eagen, 2018: 109). Aside from their role in the infliction of
violence, guns more often induce a sense of fear and intimidate audiences by their sheer
presence (Overton, 2016). As well as being shown to elevate aggressive thinking and hos-
tile appraisals (Benjamin et al., 2018), they can also provoke feelings of attachment and
affection (Mencken and Froese, 2019; Springwood, 2007). Guns, then, are serious objects.
It is somewhat remarkable, therefore, that consideration of their materiality and
related implications for serious gun crime has gone largely unexplored within criminol-
ogy. More commonly, there has been a focus on the individual and social drivers of
criminal violence, whether in relation to specific crimes such as drug dealing (e.g. Reuter,
2009), homicide, and armed robbery (Wright and Decker, 1997a) or to gang activity
(Contreras, 2013). Comparatively little attention has been afforded to the role of weap-
ons, even guns, in these analyses. In this article, we will suggest, the materiality of crime
guns matters because, as objects, they uniquely afford, indeed solicit and invite, uses
linked to generating fear and inflicting serious physical harm.
Drawing partly upon data from our in-depth interviews with 75 offenders convicted
of serious crimes involving guns, we shall develop a socio-materialist framework for
examining the question of ‘how [crime] gun possession can affect one’s sense of self and
agency’ (Selinger, 2012). This framework proposes that we look at the role of crime guns
relationally, accepting that the ‘materiality [of guns] is integral to organizing, positing
that the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life’ (Orlikowski,
2007: 1437). Support for these proposals will be drawn from our data as well as from
other literatures in archaeology, anthropology, psychology and material cultures that deal
with the nature of objects in social relations.
The framework, developed further below, draws extensively upon the notion of
affordances, conceived of as prompts, as well as possibilities, for action (Withagen et al.,
2012). In considering how guns afford certain actions, we propose to examine the mate-
riality of crime guns in terms of (1) the materials used to make guns, and their physical
properties (or features); (2) what purposes and uses (affordances) are attributed by peo-
ple to guns as artefacts in social use (materiality); and (3) how guns materialise through
the organising of social life; in other words, how guns under certain conditions influence
interactions in significant ways, shaping interpretations of events and practical outcomes
(Leonardi, 2018).
This article consists of five parts. In the next section (section ‘The criminology of
guns’), we consider the state of gun criminology to date. The limited scope given to the
material implications of crime guns is demonstrated so that the gaps in need of theoreti-
cal attention are identified. While some of this literature is not silent on the material
nature of guns, many of the implications are left implicit and unaddressed. In section
‘An affordance perspective of crime guns’, we outline a framework for a materialist
analysis of crime guns. A version of affordance theory is outlined for this purpose. This
perspective enables us to link particular physical properties and .potentialities of guns
to the different criminal uses of guns, and to look in particular at how some aspects of
the former shape how gun users see themselves, decide what they want to do, and how
to go about it.
A socio-material analysis is explicitly interested in how guns exercise an allure to
some people, especially many young men, and how that allure gets translated into
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