The Popular Basis of the State’s Monopoly on Legitimate Violence: How American Voters Use Political Values to (De)Legitimate Gun Rights

Stemming from Max Weber (1946 [1919]), many sociologists understand legitimate violence as monopolized by the state. The literature has established that for the state to maintain legitimacy it must either demonstrate sustained efficacy or have its legitimacy based on the values of its citizens (Lipset 1963). The statistics on gun control in the United States (Giffords Law Center 2020) and sociological literature (e.g. Hill et al. 2020a, 2020b) demonstrate the sustained inefficacies of gun rights. Thus, this article investigates the legitimacy of these rights in terms of voters’ political values. I use a case set (Small 2009) of 120 voters interviewed in Arizona from 2013-2015. My analysis is an example of qualitative secondary analysis (Duchesne 2017; Belot and Van Ingelgom 2017; Davidson et al. 2019). My findings confirm and extend the literature on the bases of legitimate violence in the United States (e.g. Shapira and Simon 2018; Carlson 2019). Furthermore, my findings provide evidence of voter socialization into a political culture that combines public, declarative, and nondeclarative forms of culture (e.g. Lizardo 2017). These findings also bridge the sociological literature on values (Wuthnow 2008), political sociology (Lipset 1963), the sociology of culture (Miles 2015), and moral psychology (Haidt 2012).