Libtard gungrabbers and #PewPewLife: Multiple realities in a political issue-centric forum

The image-sharing social media platform Instagram has become a site for political discourse that combines visual and textual elements. These political conversations often take place in the form of memes or popular graphic sentiments intended for redistribution. Scholars have identified memes as markers of subcultural knowledge that may be used to reinforce beliefs and norms, define social boundaries and disparage outgroups. Gun rights activism in the United States has intensified in an increasingly partisan environment. We examined memes shared via Instagram to popular gun culture hashtags between June 2016 and February 2018. Insofar as memes act as vehicles for subcultural beliefs and values, here they may be seen as representing multiple realities from the perspective of Second Amendment enthusiasts: descriptions of their perceived reality, justifying the need for guns and conservative political positions; the construed reality of what the meme creators and sharers believe to be liberal attitudes; and the aspirational reality of a world that offers unobstructed support for their priorities. In other words, these memes can collectively be said to represent both the truth about the world, as seen by these users, and cultural messages to set power differentials and identity boundaries with Others.