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ABSTRACT
The warrant of the dead refers to an explicit or implicit claim that the dead place a demand on the living. The living are called on to act and the dead are invoked as justification for that action: since they died, we should do X. Seeing this rhetorical move as a warrant is useful because the connection between the dead and the requested action of the living is often assumed rather than argued outright. This essay examines how, why, and to what effect President Barack Obama used the warrant of the dead in his gun control rhetoric since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. By extending, expanding, and intensifying memories of the victims of gun violence, Obama used the warrant of the dead to try to establish sustained concern for those victims and thus sustained commitment to gun control. Yet Obama’s effort to transform gun control supporters into gun control activists proved largely ineffective. Examining this partial rhetorical failure offers rhetorical scholars important insights about the warrant of the dead, the gun debate, and, more generally, the challenges of public argument and deliberation in an era of fleeting engagement.
Acknowledgements
Laura Michael Brown, Rosa Eberly, and Bill Keith provided helpful feedback at different stages of this project. I also thank Mary Stuckey and the two anonymous reviewers for their help developing this essay.
Notes
1 Barack Obama, “Statement by the President,” The White House, April 17, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/17/statement-president
2 Although researchers point out that a “constellation of specific factors” contribute to gun violence, public discourse on both sides relies on this either-or logic. Douglas Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 139.
3 Craig Rood, “The Racial Politics of Gun Violence: A Brief Rhetorical History,” in Was Blind but Now I See: Rhetoric, Race, Religion, and the Charleston Shooting, eds Sean Patrick O’Rourke and Melody Lehn (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming).
4 J. Michael Hogan and Craig Rood, “Rhetorical Studies and the Gun Debate: A Public Policy Perspective,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (2015): 364.
5 Two exceptions are Sara Hayden, “Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3(2003): 196–215; and David A. Frank, “Facing Moloch: Barack Obama’s National Eulogies and Gun Violence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (2014): 653–78.
6 Kristin A. Goss, Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6–7.
7 Goss, Disarmed, 7.
8 Goss, Disarmed, 108–12; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 124.
9 Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, updated edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and William Keith and David Beard, “Toulmin’s Rhetorical Logic: What’s the Warrant for Warrants?” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 1 (2008): 22–50.
10 Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Zone Books, 2006).
11 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “National Eulogies,” in Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73–103.
12 Thucydides, “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” Accessed October 7, 2016. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html
13 Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 263.
14 George W. Bush, “Address to Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks,” American Rhetoric, September 20, 2001. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911jointsessionspeech.htm
15 Charles E. Morris III, ed., Remembering the AIDS Quilt (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).
16 Al Gore, “Columbine Memorial Address,” C-SPAN, April 25, 1999. http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4090707/al-gore-columbine-memorial-service
17 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” The White House, January 16, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/16/remarks-president-and-vice-president-gun-violence
18 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting,” The White House, September 22, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/22/remarks-president-memorial-service-victims-navy-yard-shooting
19 The White House, “Now is the Time: The President’s Plan to Protect Our Children and Our Communities by Reducing Gun Violence,” The White House, January 16, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/wh_now_is_the_time_full.pdf
20 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 2 (1982): 146–57.
21 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
22 Mary E. Stuckey, Slipping the Surly Bonds: Reagan’s Challenger Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 103.
23 Jeremy Engels, The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 3.
24 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 28–29.
25 Frank, “Facing Moloch,” 665.
26 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Reducing Gun Violence—Hartford CT,” The White House, April 8, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/08/remarks-president-reducing-gun-violence-hartford-ct
27 Frank, “Facing Moloch,” 666.
28 Campbell and Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency, 80.
29 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 32.
30 Butler, Precarious Lives, 20; emphasis in original.
31 Kevin A. Kepple, Janet Loehrke, Meghan Hoyer, and Paul Overberg, “Mass Shootings Toll Exceeds 900 in Past Seven Years,” USA Today, December 2, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/21/mass-shootings-domestic-violence-nra/1937041/
32 Thomas B. Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 467–87.
33 Rood, “The Racial Politics of Gun Violence.”
34 Tim Wise, “Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege,” TimWise.org, December 17, 2012. http://www.timwise.org/2012/12/race-class-violence-and-denial-mass-murder-and-the-pathologies-of-privilege/
35 Sharon Lafraniere, Daniela Porat, and Agustin Armendariz, “A Drumbeat of Multiple Shootings, but America Isn’t Listening,” New York Times, May 22, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/us/americas-overlooked-gun-violence.html?_r=0
36 “In Gun Control Debate, Several Options Draw Majority Support: Gun Rights Proponents More Politically Active,” Pew Research Center, January 14, 2013. http://www.people-press.org/2013/01/14/in-gun-control-debate-several-options-draw-majority-support/
37 Nate Silver, “The Gun Vote and 2014: Will There Be an Electoral Price?” FiveThirtyEight, April 23, 2013. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/the-gun-vote-and-2014-will-there-be-an-electoral-price/
38 Goss, Disarmed, 7; emphasis in original.
39 Robert Draper, “Inside the Power of the N.R.A.,” New York Times, December 12, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/inside-the-power-of-the-nra.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
40 Obama, “Statement by the President,” April 17, 2013.
41 Obama, “Statement by the President,” April 17, 2013.
42 “In Gun Control Debate, Several Options Draw Majority Support.”
43 Obama, “Statement by the President,” April 17, 2013.
44 See, for instance, Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 113.
45 Obama, “Statement by the President,” April 17, 2013.
46 Engels, The Politics of Resentment, 3.
47 Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting,” September 22, 2013.
48 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” The White House, June 26, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/26/remarks-president-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementa-pinckney
49 Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being,” New York, September 18, 2016. http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html
50 Obama, “Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” June 26, 2015.
51 Wayne LaPierre, “NRA Press Conference, December 21, 2012,” New York Times, December 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/21/us/nra-news-conference-transcript.html
52 Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr., Persuasion and Social Movements, 5th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2007), 96.
53 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 222.
54 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, 115–20.
55 Ned O’Gorman, “Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric: Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38, no.1 (2005): 27.
56 Michele Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2010): 269. Also see Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (2011): 139–65.
57 Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away,” 269–70.
58 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, no. 2 (1995): 226.
59 George W. Bush, “President Bush Offers Condolences at Virginia Tech Memorial Convocation,” The White House, April 17, 2007. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070417-1.html
60 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil,” The White House, December 16, 2012. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/12/16/remarks-president-sandy-hook-interfaith-prayer-vigil
61 Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on the School Shooting in Newtown, CT,” The White House, December 14, 2012. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/12/14/statement-president-school-shooting-newtown-ct
62 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric.
63 Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting,” September 22, 2013.
64 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Fort Hood Memorial Service,” The White House, April 9, 2014. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/09/remarks-president-fort-hood-memorial-service
65 Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shootings at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon,” The White House, October 1, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/01/statement-president-shootings-umpqua-community-college-roseburg-oregon
66 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Memorial Service for the Fallen Dallas Police Officers,” The White House, July 12, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/12/remarks-president-memorial-service-fallen-dallas-police-officers
67 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 115.
68 Obama, “Remarks by the President on Reducing Gun Violence—Hartford CT,” April 8, 2013.
69 Obama, “Statement by the President on the School Shooting in Newtown, CT,” December 14, 2012.
70 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics Reports—Deaths: Final Data for 2010, 61, no. 4 (2013). http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf
71 See, for instance, Rood, “The Racial Politics of Gun Violence.”
72 Monica Davey, “In a Soaring Homicide Rate, A Divide in Chicago,” New York Times, January 2, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/us/a-soaring-homicide-rate-a-divide-in-chicago.html
73 Peter Slevin, “Chicago Grapples with Gun Violence; Murder Tolls Soars,” Washington Post, December 21, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/chicago-grapples-with-gun-violence-murder-toll-soars/2012/12/20/b16601fe-4a1e-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html?utm_term=.1abdfdee7045
74 Ward Room Staff, “Chicago Was Nation’s Murder Capital in 2012,” NBC Chicago, September 3, 2013. http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/chicago-fbi-homicide-report-224396461.html
75 Mike Bostock, Shan Carter, and Kevin Quealy, “A Chicago Divided by Killings,” New York Times, January 3, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/02/us/chicago-killings.html?ref=us&_r=0
76 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the State Of the Union,” The White House, February 12, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address
77 George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea (New York: Picador, 2006).
78 Kennerly, “Getting Carried Away,” 287.
79 Obama, “Remarks by the President at Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil,” December 16, 2012.
80 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
81 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
82 This fits with what Goss describes as the “child-protection frame.” Goss, Disarmed, 62.
83 Craig Rood, “Rhetorical Closure,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2017): forthcoming.
84 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Gun Safety,” The White House, March 28, 2013. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/03/28/remarks-president-gun-safety
85 Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting,” September 22, 2013.
86 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
87 “State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year after Newtown,” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/10/us/state-gun-laws-enacted-in-the-year-since-newtown.html?_r=0 December 10, 2013
88 Mary E. Stuckey, “Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the Instrumental Effects of Presidential Rhetoric,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, eds Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 294.
89 LaPierre, “NRA Press Conference, December 21, 2012,” 1.
90 Charlton Heston, The Courage to Be Free (Kansas City, KS: Saudade Press, 2000), 232.
91 Obama, “Statement by the President,” April 17, 2013.
92 Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shootings at Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Oregon,” October 1, 2015.
93 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Mass Shooting in Orlando,” The White House, June 12, 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/12/remarks-president-mass-shooting-orlando
94 Richard A. Lanham, “Decorum,” A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 45–46.
95 Craig Rood, “Rhetorical Closure.”
96 LaPierre, “NRA Press Conference, December 21, 2012,” 6. Emphasis in original.
97 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
98 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
99 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil,” December 16, 2012.
100 Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 10.
101 Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Memorial Service for Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting,” September 22, 2013.
102 Obama, “Remarks by the President and the Vice President on Gun Violence,” January 16, 2013.
103 Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control, 123.
104 Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xii.