Gun violence in the USA is a documented public health crisis. Publicly accessible data from Twitter posts can be used to rapidly capture and describe the public’s recent conversations about guns. Because these gun-related conversations change rapidly, it is important to provide regularly updated information on them. Twitter posts containing gun-related terms were obtained from January 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022. To understand topics of gun-related tweets (N = 449,492), topic modeling was performed with Top2Vec. Gun ownership control, concern about gun safety and its impact on children and schools, and the Second Amendment were major areas of the gun-related discourse on Twitter. Several identified topics in this study were a consequence of the study period, including “Discourse on Capitol Riots,” and “Wartime and Military Use of Guns,” with the latter topic containing conversations about the Russia-Ukraine War. Conversations around the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) on gun policies and pro-gun ownership perspectives were also part of the public discourse. The intersection between alcohol, substance use, and gun use was infrequently observed. Findings suggest that gun-related conversations in social media such as Twitter can inform public health researchers.

美国的枪支暴力是一场有记录的公共卫生危机。来自 Twitter 帖子的公开数据可用于快速捕获和描述公众最近有关枪支的对话。由于这些与枪支相关的话题变化很快，因此定期提供有关这些话题的最新信息非常重要。获取了 2022 年 1 月 1 日至 2022 年 6 月 30 日期间包含枪支相关术语的 Twitter 帖子。为了了解枪支相关推文的主题 ( N = 449,492)，使用 Top2Vec 进行了主题建模。枪支所有权控制、对枪支安全及其对儿童和学校影响的担忧以及第二修正案是推特上与枪支相关的讨论的主要领域。这项研究中确定的几个主题是研究期间的结果，包括“关于国会大厦骚乱的讨论”和“战时和军事使用枪支”，后一个主题包含有关俄罗斯-乌克兰战争的对话。围绕全国步枪协会（NRA）对枪支政策和支持枪支所有权观点的影响的讨论也是公众讨论的一部分。酒精、药物滥用和枪支使用之间的交叉很少被观察到。研究结果表明，推特等社交媒体中与枪支相关的对话可以为公共卫生研究人员提供信息。