Armin Sauermann studies the culture and politics of gun ownership in the United States, with particular attention to left-of-center owners and to the cultural narratives that shape how people take up and sustain the practice.
Armin Sauermann is a PhD student in Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and a Weidenbaum Center Graduate Fellow. His research investigates the culture and politics of gun ownership in the United States, drawing on interviews, survey analysis, and computational methods to examine how people come to own firearms, what those firearms come to mean to them, and what sustains ownership over time. He is particularly interested in left-of-center gun owners, a case where the usual link between gun culture and conservative identity comes apart.
He is currently conducting interviews with gun owners in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota and analyzing gun-related media narratives. Before Washington University, Armin was a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where he specialized in data processing and the analysis of large-scale observational data.