2025 Theses Bachelor's

The Exportation of American Gun Culture: A Survey of Korean University Students

Shin, Yvin

The United States has a unique gun culture represented in and promulgated by its entertainment media. Fictional entertainment media can impact public opinion by shaping perceptions of reality or giving cues about normative behavior, and such media could be used to transmit tenets of American gun culture to overseas audiences. This study examines whether such exportation occurs by surveying South Korean university students and evaluating whether their media consumption habits impact their perceptions of guns. South Korea’s state of sociopolitical discontent could render its youth receptive to the specific portrayals of guns in American culture, which depicts them as tools for power, respect, and extralegal justice. Students’ selection of major and year in college both impact their level of agreement with gun culture, such that respondents are more pro-gun if they chose to major in English language and literature and if they’ve spent a longer time in college. However, these relationships are not necessarily causal and my main results are primarily inconclusive, as the agreement with American gun culture in both departments begins to converge across class years.