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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Every year in the MacArthur Foundation announces a new class of MacArthur Fellows, commonly known as a Genius Award. The foundation grants a substantial no strings attached grant to about two dozen exceptionally talented individuals each year. Jennifer Carlson is part of this year's class of Fellows. Jennifer is an associate professor of sociology and government and public policy at the University of Arizona, and her work explores how guns shape American life, culture, and identity.

Her latest research explores experiences of trauma among gun violence survivors, and that's the work she was doing when the MacArthur Foundation was trying to reach her to tell her she'd been selected.

Jennifer Carlson: I got several calls, I assume they were spam. Of course, when you're focused on an interview, the last thing you want to hear is that beep but it turns out it wasn't spam. When I finally answered the call I was absolutely shocked.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What contrast, right, to get this extraordinary news at a time when you are doing work that is, frankly, pretty difficult.

Jennifer Carlson: Yes, you want people to care about your ideas and all of that stuff, but it's only when something catastrophically tragic happens that people want to talk to you. There's a lot of weight to doing this kind of research, and it's actually made me reflect on my own relationship with this subject matter because it's very easy to become numb to it in this country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How is it that your work helps us to reconfigure our conception of gun culture?

Jennifer Carlson: We often will cite these statistics that are hugely tragic, but that doesn't really even scratch the surface of how guns shape trauma and shape traumatic experiences. For example, when I think about what happened at the University of Arizona, we don't talk about the other people who are in that building. We don't talk about the students who were realizing this was happening maybe in a classroom desperately trying to lock their doors and figure out how to go on lockdown.

Interviewing gun violence survivors some of the most harrowing stories are actually from people who are at mass shootings but are not necessarily shot themselves but are doing something that is fun and suddenly that space transformed into a war zone. You don't even have to hear the gunshots to have that be extremely traumatizing to your sense of safety and security and self. I should also say that this is not evenly born out across people in the US.

People of color, particularly African Americans, are much more likely to be not just victims of gun violence, but also just exposure to gun violence which we know that impacts school engagement, math and reading skills, all sorts of things that have just cumulative effects on people's, not just their immediate psychological wellbeing, but their wellbeing throughout the course of their lives. That part of the conversation, we don't get into because I think it's a hugely big issue that I don't think we talk about it at the scale that it actually is.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you lay out for us why there are challenges for people who do gun violence research?

Jennifer Carlson: When you look at the amount of research that's done, there's a lot of criminological research, there's a lot of legal research on like what does the Second Amendment mean and how should it be interpreted and what have you. As far as a social science perspective on like, what's the appeal of guns, how does gun violence move through people's lives? These questions that sociologists and social scientists are really adept to answer, there is shockingly very few scholars but one of the reasons with respect to the gun violence is the Dickey Amendment.

This is an amendment that was passed in the 90s that basically restricted CDC funding for public health research on gun violence. Even though that didn't impact other kinds of funding, it still had this chilling effect beyond that. That being said, the federal government continues to fund gun violence research and has funded gun violence research that focuses on criminal justice approaches. I think that's really important to recognize because when we say, Oh, we don't have gun control in the US or that we don't have a background check system or registration system or mechanisms like Canada or Australia or the UK that people who advocate for stricter gun control tend to compare the US to but what we do have is a very robust system of gun criminalization, which really fits into this broader project of mass incarceration that has largely and disparately impacted Americans of color.

There's a lot going on with respect to federal funding. Most certainly when you think about scaling this up and really thinking about the breadth of this, it's an incredible opportunity. It's an incredible responsibility with the very no strings attached to MacArthur Fellowship.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What's the difference between gun militarism and gun populism?

Jennifer Carlson: Those are terms that I developed in my book, Policing the Second Amendment, which focuses on public law enforcement as key actors that are often overlooked with respect to the gun debate. Those two terms really get at different approaches to imagining guns in the hands of civilians as a threat and as something that police have to marshal this militarized force to address and so that's gun militarism and that I heard in the context of "urban gun crime," the kinds of gun crime and criminality associated with people of color.

Whereas gun populism was much more of a shared understanding by police that, for example, if they find themselves in a mass shooting, of course, they would want someone who was lawfully armed and trained to also provide some kind of support in terms of firepower and that's imagined to take place in white spaces. I think that those terms actually get at something that the terms gun rights versus gun control don't totally unpack.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Then just a final question to bring it back to the personal for you for this moment, after you found out who was the first person that you told, celebrated, and shared with?

Jennifer Carlson: The rules are that you're allowed to tell one person. My cat was actually in the room, so he got a free pass. I told my husband and we were stunned by ourselves for weeks. It was very painful not to be able to tell anybody else. I'm still in shock as you can probably tell.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's the best kind of shock. This is the kind of shock that we'll take. Jennifer Carlson, a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, now a certified genius. Thank you for joining us today.

Jennifer Carlson: Thank you so much.

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