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Teaching undergraduate students, mentoring graduate students, and generating publishable research are distinct tasks for many political scientists. This article highlights lessons for merging these activities through experiences from an initiative that sparked a series of collaborative-research projects focused on opinions about crime and punishment in the United States. This article describes three collaborative projects conducted between 2015 and 2017 to demonstrate how to merge undergraduate teaching, graduate training, and producing research. By participating in these projects, students learned about social-scientific research through hands-on experiences designing experiments, collecting and analyzing original data, and reporting empirical findings to a public audience. This approach is an effective way to engage students and generate research that can advance professional goals.

What are the predictors of the five types of policy regimes on campus carry across the 50 U.S. states? This study explores the roles of problem environment, gun culture, state policy liberalism, region, and racial politics to answer that research question. We argue that morality policy, the role of region in the adoption of public policy, and the southern subculture of violence are useful theoretical lenses for examining campus carry. We find that the problem environment-measured as gun murders per 100,000 population and the violent crime rate on college campuses-is negatively related to the adoption of campus carry policy regimes, while the gun culture (measured as gun purchases per capita and the total number of gun-related interest groups) is positively related to the adoption of campus carry. State policy liberalism is a significant predictor of the type of policy regime adopted across the states, and the interaction term of percentage minority population and the South is a powerful predictor of adopting campus carry. The findings highlight the extant significance of the role of region, but it is conditioned by racial politics in the case of campus carry. Morality policy suggests that the rapid spread of concealed carry on college campuses may have hit a ceiling.

Objective This article explores the factors that influence gun purchases in the United States with particular attention to regional differences between the South and non‐South. Methods We use data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Instant Criminal Background Check System to conduct a time‐series cross‐sectional analysis of monthly firearm background checks, a proxy for gun purchases, in each state from January 1999 to May 2020. Results Throughout the data series, average gun purchases in the South dwarf those in the non‐South. Spikes in gun sales are positively associated with Democratic presidencies, Christmas holidays, mass shootings, and news coverage of mass shootings. Gun purchases have also spiked nationwide in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, though most notably in the South. Conclusion Our findings speak to the powerful role fear plays in motivating gun purchases, the magnitude of political polarization in the United States, and the regional distinctiveness of the South.

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