Rise of the Anti-Media In-Forming America's Concealed Weapon Carry Movement

The American concealed weapon carry movement, consisting largely of political amateurs, has changed the direction of gun control policy in the United States in the last two decades, overcoming well-entrenched professional elites in the process. In Rise of the Anti-Media: In-forming America's Concealed Weapon Carry Movement, Brian Anse Patrick reports the results of his almost ten years of research on the concealed carry movement. He skillfully traces the emergence of a politically charged new American gun culture from the older traditional "hobby" gun culture. Patrick argues that the movement has succeeded because overlapping horizontal interpretive communities of new American gun culture developed their own anti-media of communication, bypassing mainstream media systems, creating a new and politically potent informational sociology that works to their benefit. Rise of the Anti-Media illuminates both how the American concealed weapon carry movement successfully reclaimed the territory of the Second Amendment as an unambiguously individual right, and how the anti-media of new American gun culture have reenergized the social action schematic underlying the First Amendment.