In the year 2021, Pew Research Center found that the United States reported almost 49,000 gun deaths, “a 23% increase since 2019, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to the CDC WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports, in 2003, there were approximately 30,000 gun deaths in the United States. The change from 2003 to 2021 represents a 63% increase.

For any other industry, statistics linking their product with a significant rise in deaths would be undoubtedly detrimental to sales and the overall success of the industry. But the firearm industry is different. During roughly the same time period to which this increase in deaths is associated, the firearm industry has seen continued success and rising profits. This apparent anomaly against standard economic expectation begs the question: how has the firearm industry turned potential PR disaster into one of America’s most predominant subcultures: The American Gun Culture?

In the hope of providing a piece of the answer, the following study of language use in firearm advertisements over two decades was conducted.

METHODS

This study looked at 50 product catalogs from 7 of the top performing firearm manufacturers in the United States (based on recent sales performance). The catalogs were scraped for their text using a code in JavaScript, outputting text documents that were then analyzed by R software. The R software output lists of every word included in each respective catalog and listed the number of appearances of the word. 

Three groups of key terms were analyzed: words associated with hunting/recreation, words associated with self-defense, and words associated with the intangible values a firearm might supply. Words demonstrating the intangible values can be understood as language implying that the firearm might provide the consumer with non-material utility. This promised non-material utility can be anything from claims that the firearm makes you more masculine, more powerful, more of a patriot, more aligned with a certain identity, etc.

Based on prior research in the field, I hypothesized there would be an overall decrease in the presence of key terms associated with hunting/recreation and an overall increase in both key terms associated with self-defense and with lifestyle appeal. For each group of key terms, R software produced a scatter plot comparing the year of the catalog to the overall presence of key terms.

FINDINGS

For the top three performing firms — Smith & Wesson, Ruger, SIG — hunting/recreation key terminology had a gradually decreasing presence.  For the top three performing firms, words associated with self-defense gradually increased in magnitude of appearance. For words associated with lifestyle appeal, the top three firms shared a positive trend over the last two decades.

Of all of the firms included, it is important to note that data was most accessible and least damaged for the top three performing firms. In the interest of displaying results that more clearly display the most significant findings, scatter plots have been simplified to exclude individual datapoints, and only display the trends of the top three performing firms — Smith & Wesson, Ruger, and SIG Sauer.

IMPLICATIONS

All three components of my hypothesis were supported by the resulting data. In accordance with previous research done on gun advertisements, this data showed an increasing emphasis on self-defense as a selling point for the firearm while showing a decreasing emphasis on its use for hunting. Given the success that this industry has found in the last two decades, we can surmise that selling the firearm as a tool to assuage fears of danger has been profitable for these firms. In contrast, we can assume that selling the firearm as a sporting good has been decreasingly profitable, therefore meriting a decreasing emphasis in marketing material. There is more profit to be found in convincing consumers that your product is a prerequisite for continued safety than there is in offering consumers a product that has niche uses in recreation.

Additionally, increases in the lifestyle key terms supports findings I previous research showing that marketing in this industry is largely targeted at the interests of repeat customers. According to the National Firearms Survey, 86% of the firearms in circulation in the United States are owned by individuals with multiple firearms. The cash crop for the firearm industry is their sales to repeat customers. But how do you sell a given product to someone who already owns it?

Lifestyle appeal — appeal to the intangible values of the firearm — can perhaps account for this question. By convincing consumers that the firearm can serve to enhance aspects of an identity, thereby giving it a certain immaterial utility, the firearm industry can continue persuading firearm owners that there is more of that utility to be had with continued purchase. While an individual who has purchased a firearm for the purpose of self-defense or hunting can fulfill that purpose with only one or two firearms, the abstract and immeasurable nature of the intangible values of the firearm prevent definitive fulfillment of that purpose. By creating a product for which the utility is essentially immeasurable, the firearm industry can continue convincing consumers that additional purchases have value.

I hope this study provides a starting place for more research on the advertising methods of firearm manufacturers. With better access to funding, fewer time restraints, and the benefit of more prior research to build upon, I believe the concepts explored in this study can serve as the basis for further research on the tactics used by the most profitable and powerful corporations in the arms industry.

Peter Clark is a rising senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

According to the most conservative estimates from the United Nations, over half of all languages in the world today will be extinct by the year 2100. Maintaining Indigenous languages involves providing uses for the language. Tribal natural resources departments can provide opportunities to engage with language through communicating local ecological knowledge with citizens through social media.

A study conducted on Native people’s use of social media found that 78% of 132 participants received their news through the internet. There are three primary areas of language planning that can be aided through use of digital technologies, especially social media. These three planning categories include status, corpus, and acquisition planning. Returning to the study, Of the large majority of participants who obtain information online, 90% of those participants receive their news primarily through Facebook. The most used device by participants were smartphones. 

Use of language by Tribal governmental agencies is just one-half of the equation on language revitalization through social media use. For language to take hold through these methods, people must be engaged. An effective way to drive engagement discussed by consumer engagement scholars is to create communities where individuals can participate with organizations and fellow consumers for the purpose of building community. While nation-citizen relations are certainly different from consumer-brand dynamics, it could be inferred that Tribal nations could mirror this process to “sell” language to citizens. Engagement with a post can be recorded with likes as a proxy measurement to understand how certain types of content affect engagement. 

As part of a larger content analysis, I looked at the Facebook pages of Tribal Departments of Natural Resources across the United States and coded posts for language use. One year’s worth of data was coded and analyzed. I predicted that when Tribal Natural Resources pages utilize traditional language in their social media communications, engagement would increase. The sample size of the study is 964 posts, with 871 posts not including traditional language, and 93 including traditional language with a significance level of 0.05. Posts coded as containing language use had more likes overall (Mdn= 24) than posts coded as not including traditional language (Mdn= 19.41). The Mann-Whitney U-Test revealed a significant difference, U=25493.5, p=.1.177e-8, r=0.18.

The box plot above illustrates the difference in likes between posts that contain traditional language and those that do not. Box plots illustrate the distribution of the data and reveal significant outliers. This graph shows that overall posts containing traditional language in the caption receive more likes than posts that do not contain traditional language. There are far more outliers found in the no language use category, this can be explained by the much larger sample of posts without traditional language. Significant outliers were found in the no language use category, which often included posts with photos of large community events and culturally significant imagery. In the case of large community events, higher likes can be explained by people who attended interacting with the post. While this study does not record photo variables, these outliers seem to align with previous research on Tribal land management pages. Specifically research demonstrating the significant effects of different types of imagery on Tribal and non-Tribal audiences, such as “Environmental values and images: an analysis of Facebook images from Ojibwe and state natural resource management agencies”. With this study, I sought to answer the question of how the use of language affects engagement on Tribal natural resource department Facebook posts. After conducting my analysis, I have found that there is a significant difference in likes between posts that do and do not contain language. Posts containing Indigenous languages overall receive more engagement than posts that lack traditional languages. This could create the conditions for an effective use function for Indigenous languages that could greatly benefit language preservation and revitalization efforts.

In my experience connecting with my language from the Lummi Nation as a member of the Coast Salish diaspora, social media applications such as Facebook have provided an invaluable source of connection to those who still hold language knowledge. Many of whom themselves actively search for interested people to pass their knowledge forward, in hopes to preserve the old tongue long into the future. This is often done through the use of multi-modal methods such as image and text posts containing traditional language, recorded video lessons, and other kinds of content that can often initiate dialogues between learners and educators in comment sections of posts. Social media platforms, and by extension Facebook have many flaws in relation to their treatment of Indigenous peoples. On occasion, these flaws could impede language and cultural transmission through the suppression of certain kinds of Indigenous content and the dominance of non-Native languages and perspectives on the platform. Despite this, these platforms still have great potential to connect people for purposes such as language preservation and revitalization through the creation of interest groups of users and uses. 

According to estimates from the United Nations, half of all world languages will be extinct by 2100. Many of these languages are those from Indigenous communities and nations. I would like to paint a different picture of the next seventy-six years, one that acknowledges the agency and ingenuity of Indigenous people. In the year 2100, Indigenous people retain and continue to develop the languages that contain the wisdom of our ancestors, and set us as distinct peoples with our own songs to sing, scientific insights to provide, and stories to tell. The importance of the gift that is language is one that can be hard to put into words, so it would be beneficial to highlight the thoughts of Jim Thunder, elder and language keeper from the Forest County Potawatomi Nation. “What will happen to a joke if no one will hear it any more? How lonely those words will be, when their is power gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.”

Kain Eller is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

If you go off of weight alone, plants are by far the most prevalent life form on the planet, making up greater than 80% of the total biomass on Earth. This is intuitive as trees are known for being very heavy. What is less intuitive is that the second most prevalent form of life on the planet is bacteria, making up around 80% of all non-plant biomass on the planet. When most people think about bacteria, we tend to associate them with disease. In recent days, talk of probiotics and fermentation has slightly shifted people’s views of bacteria to a more positive light. That said, the scope of bacterial roles in ecosystems is not commonly comprehended, especially given their clear hyper prevalence on this Earth.

It is difficult to quantify the cumulative environmental impact of microbes due to the enormous diversity of microbe species. It is clear, however, that microbes are vital due to their key roles in nutrient cycling, soil health, and plant-microbe interactions. Soil microbes in particular are responsible for driving various biologic transformations that convert soil organic matter into readily available pools of micro and macro nutrients. Various soil bacteria form complicated metabolic relationships with plants that contribute greatly to the stress resistance of the plants and their ability to uptake nutrients from the soil. Due to the extensive supporting role that microorganisms play in every ecosystem, climate impacts on their populations have the potential to destabilize and destroy ecosystems as well as cripple agricultural production from the bottom up.

Due to the complex interactions that occur between abiotic and biotic environmental factors, it is a huge challenge to accurately predict how climate change will shape life on our planet in coming years. This uncertainty poses a real threat to human life as our existence is intrinsically linked to the health of the ecosystems that we interact with and exist within. Due to the prevalence of bacteria and their significance in ecosystems, understanding how different environmental conditions can contribute to stress on their populations is an important area of research for predicting climate change outcomes. While effects of drought and heatwaves on bacteria have been studied, little research has been done on how chemical conditions can affect climate stress in bacteria.

The 2021 paper The Division Defect of a Bacillus subtilis minD noc Double Mutant Can Be Suppressed by Spx-Dependent and Spx-Independent Mechanisms by Yu et al. identified that genetically weakened soil bacteria, die when exposed to high temperatures. This paper reasonably assumed that temperature was the sole stressor aside from the genetic factors which affected the survival of the bacterium. Un-published research found that the specific media (think bacteria food) which the bacteria was grown on could be altered in order to allow the bacteria to survive, implying that the chemical conditions that the bacteria grew on contributes in some way to the death of these stressed soil bacteria at high temperatures.

In order to better understand this unforeseen interaction, I used a different media that resulted in the death of the same genetically stressed soil bacteria at high temperature and a process known as transposon mutagenesis. Transposon mutagenesis allows you to find specific genetic mutations, known as suppressors, that allow bacteria to survive in conditions that they cannot otherwise survive in. By identifying which genes can be mutated in order to allow survival of these genetically stressed soil bacteria at high temperatures, the mechanism of lethality can be better speculated at and understood. My assumption in undertaking this process was that the same suppressors would be identified in my study as were identified in the Yu et al. study, which would imply that the same chemical and temperature interaction was causing the cells to die on both forms of media.

Unfortunately, the suppressors that were identified in my study and the suppressors that were identified in the Yu et al. study were almost entirely different. This difference demonstrates that a different chemical interaction was causing death at high temperatures on the two separate types of media. This finding opens the door for future research as it establishes the climate change outcomes for bacteria in chemically different environmental conditions can be greatly different.

Due to the environmental significance of various soil bacteria, it is incredibly important to be able to predict how increasing environmental temperatures will affect their populations in various ecosystems. In order to best manage impacts on humans caused by climate change, this will likely become a more important area of climate change research. Climate change is a severe threat to human quality of life. It is necessary to do all that we can while we can to make preparations for the changes that ecosystems will go through.

Seth Heatwole is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Have you ever taken a walk through a forest in the Midwest? Have you ever wondered what determines which species of trees are found where, within a given forest? The temperate forests of Eastern North America (ENA) comprise the second largest temperate forested region on Earth. Historically, regional species richness, composition and associations of tree species within ENA have largely been attributed to climatic and edaphic (soil) conditions. However, the rate and types of disturbance that have occurred within ENA forests post Euro-American settlement are increasingly being taken into account along with climatic and edaphic conditions in modeling the relative abundance of species within their respective ranges.

Determining what conditions lead to regional biodiversity and relative abundance of tree species is made all the more difficult by the propensity of species to have sporadic, disjunct, yet widespread distributions (Kentucky coffeetree, burr oak). Individual tree species may be present in a wide range of habitat conditions and specific niches that vary from region to region. For instance, the Kentucky coffeetree is found primarily in two confounding niches: dry, rocky bluff tops along major waterways and on the terraces of rivers and streams within bottomlands. These species highlight that while climatic factors are certainly a determinant of tree species richness, the biological traits and unpredictable distribution patterns of species show that other important mechanisms are likely at play.

Indigenous peoples of Eastern North America

Indigenous peoples have been present within the forests of ENA for at least 14,000 years. Indigenous cultures were horticulturist societies that practiced intensive agriculture and forest management within major river valleys of the temperate forest region, leading to the development of the Eastern Agricultural Complex, one of 10 independent centers of plant domestication on Earth. Cultures such as the Hopewell and Mississippians constructed massive earthworks including burial, ceremonial and effigy mounds, agricultural canals and reservoirs, lunar observatories  and  roads linking ceremonial centers. Long distance trade networks facilitated trade of goods such as ceramics and metal as well as crops. Indigenous forests management and silvicultural practices as opposed to solely foraging likely developed during the archaic period (4500 + years ago). Regular prescribed burning and human mediated dispersal occurring for thousands of years prior to the origin of the Eastern Agricultural Complex could’ve had hugely impactful effects on the ranges of many species. The value of wood products (dyes, foodstuffs, medicine, rot resistant timber,) would have incentivized Indigenous peoples to cultivate, disperse and exchange beneficial tree species. Any assumptions made about a species relative abundance or distribution, must take into account Indigenous management practices and ethnobotany. 

Scope of Study

This study examines the collective impact of 10,000+ years of Indigenous inhabitation and land management practices, on the distribution and relative abundance of tree species within the Eastern Temperate Forest Ecoregion. Indigenous management activities both favored and disfavored tree species depending on a species’ ecological characteristics such as fire tolerance, shade tolerance and primary dispersal methods. While extensive studies have found that Indigenous forest management alters the species composition of forests by promoting fire intolerant, mast producing species such as oak and hickory, few studies have holistically evaluated how Indigenous forest management and silvicultural practices would have impacted the relative abundance and distribution of tree species based on their ecological characteristics and their relative value to Indigenous peoples. A variety of data sources including archeological data, herbarium records, historical accounts, pollen records and witness tree data were used to reevaluate and reinterpret the distribution, relative abundance and specific niches of tree species whose range wide distributions show strong evidence of influence by Indigenous management activities. 

Findings and Conclusions

Results of the study indicate that the Indigenous peoples of ENA favored and disfavored species of trees depending on the ecological characteristics and relative value of a species to Indigenous peoples. The ranges of fire intolerant and relatively less useful species such as Eastern hemlock have likely been reduced in the lower Midwest due to historic prescribed burning regimes. The increased abundance of valuable species like the burr oak (which produces the largest acorn of any oak species in North America) and Northern Catalpa (which produces extremely rot resistant timber) within bottomlands and adjacent to major rivers is likely a product of Indigenous settlement patterns. Areas within ENA where Indigenous populations were highest will likely show the greatest evidence of their forest compositions being influenced by Indigenous peoples. Ignoring the possible impacts of Indigenous peoples on the modern biogeography of species prevents the development of a holistic and accurate assessment of a species’ relative abundance and distribution. In short, it’s very difficult if not impossible to explain the current and historic relative abundance and distribution of tree species without taking into account the history of Indigenous peoples within Eastern North America.

Ethan Iversen is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Since the turn of the 21^st century, attendance at arts activities across the country has been on a steady decline. In 2002, the National Endowment of the Arts reported that 76.3% of adults participated in the arts at least once a year. By 2022, that number dropped to 47.9%. Although the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have surely had an impact on arts participation levels since 2020, the trend is clear: Americans are participating in the arts less. Because a majority of US-based arts organizations are 501(c)3 nonprofits, they rely on cultivating and sustaining audiences for a majority of their revenue. In order to combat these attendance declines, organizations must take steps to understand and address the barriers and constraints that stop potential audience members from patronizing their events and programming.

The study of barriers to attendance must occur at the community level. Although some physical and logistical factors, such as the cost of admission or difficulty of access, serve as constraints to attendance that exist for all audience members, barriers to attendance are often very subjective and unique factors. The manifestation of barriers will look different for every arts organization’s constituency. My research about barriers focused on the IU student population and 13 different campus organizations. The artistic disciplines included in the study varied, from traditional arts activities such as theatre, classical music, and art galleries, to more mainstream activities, such as cinema and cultural festivals. Using a web-administered survey with questions gauging the experience of several different barriers to attendance, I collected data from 483 students on the IU campus.

The most prevalently reported barrier to attendance for IU students is a lack of knowledge about organizations’ events and programming. Despite the vastly reported awareness of campus arts organizations, with most students learning about campus arts organizations through official IU communications, a majority of respondents reported lacking information about individual performances and programs. 88% of respondents agreed that they would attend more events if they knew they were happening.

The other primary barrier to students’ attendance was the cost of admission. Although all 13 included organizations offer cost incentives to students, 85% of survey respondents agreed that they would attend more arts events if they did not cost as much. The experience of this barrier is no doubt increased by compounding factors, including the order processing fees associated with purchasing tickets online via Ticketmaster, IU’s primary ticket selling platform. If a student ticket to an event at, say, the Jacobs School of Music is $10, then Ticketmaster’s $8 processing fee nearly doubles the price of admission. For a student whose full-time job is their academic courseload, that extra fee may make the cost of attending arts events unaffordable.

While the fact that these constraints to attendance are so widely experienced is cause for dismay, the good news is that these barriers are well within an organization’s control. IU campus arts organizations that wish to increase student attendance levels can take action to combat the experience of these barriers. One such action would be to increase their marketing efforts toward the student population. In addition to merely making students aware of the organization’s existence, marketing and communications teams must provide information about their performance and program schedules so that students know about the events happening on campus. Further, organizations’ marketing efforts must focus on the unique advantages of their artistic discipline and emphasize the benefits of attendance. Furthermore, organizations can work to increase the cost incentives offered to students. Whether discounted tickets become free admissions policies or work is done to eliminate compounding cost factors such as order processing fees, creating more opportunities for students to attend events for free will help organizations increase their student attendance levels.

The current generation of college students faces a host of social and political challenges as they begin to transition into adulthood and leadership within American society. The events on campus of the past weeks alone demonstrate that we are living through unprecedented levels of divisiveness and unrest. While it is vital that students continue to use their voices and platforms to advocate for justice, they also need opportunities to experience joy and beauty. Arts of any discipline provide avenues to have these joyful experiences, and expanding access to them may help this generation to begin creating happier and more fulfilling lifestyles.

Rachel Petersson is a senior at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.