The Good Man Shooting Well: Authoritarian Submission and Aggression in the “Gun-Citizen”

ABSTRACT

In the two decades since Bruno Latour imagined the “gun-citizen” as an emergent combination of human and object, the number of US civilians carrying firearms daily has increased fivefold. This essay analyzes discourses of “carry culture” and argues that within it good citizenship comprises the twinned acts of submission to the gun and aggression toward othered groups, defining carry culture as fundamentally authoritarian. The essay further argues that carriers’ submission to their weapons is a corrupted form of care, prompting rhetoricians to reconsider what constitutes ethical relations with objects. Viewing guns in these ways reveals carrying, despite gun culture’s preoccupation with “freedom,” as physically and mentally constricting and puts forth the idea that firearms carried in public are dangerous whether or not they are ever fired.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• care
• guns
• materiality

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jacqueline Rhodes and two anonymous reviewers for their generous guidance and feedback.

Notes

¹ For all quotes in this essay, italics are reproduced from the original source unless otherwise noted.

² Open carrying of firearms is legal in every state, although the practice is rare and often done “as a form of political protest” rather than as self-protection, as is most often the case with concealed carrying (Cook and Goss 107).

³ Rhetoricians have primarily focused on violent tragedies and responses to them. See Boser and Lake; Eberly; Frank; Gunn and Beard; Goodnight; Hogan and Rood; Lunceford; and Smith and Hollihan. One recent exception is Collins, who examines gun carriers’ rhetoric as a kind of “identity work” (738).

⁴ Adorno et al. published their landmark study, The Authoritarian Personality, in 1950. For a concise summary of reactions to it and major work since, see Stenner 2–7.

⁵ Roberts-Miller says demagoguery is not always dangerous but rather something in which we all engage. Demagoguery becomes dangerous, she says, when the powerful use it to dehumanize the less powerful, and when it takes hold as a dominant form of public discourse. Similarly, scholars of authoritarianism have argued recently that a preference for certainty and a tendency to feel threatened should not be thought of as necessarily dangerous, using the terms “fixed” and “fluid” to denote worldviews previously discussed as more and less authoritarian (Hetherington and Weiler Prius).

⁶ Adorno et al. lends strong support to the submission/aggression thesis, listing these paired traits as key characteristics of the authoritarian personality (228, 230–34). See Altemeyer for more recent work on this pairing. See Roberts-Miller (26–28, 58) for an exploration of domination and submission within demagogic rhetoric.

⁷ For key insights from the vast literature on guns and masculinity, see Carlson 95–102, 150–54; Melzer 25–69; O’Neill; and Stroud 15–16, 28–54.

⁸ See Asen for a delineation of citizenly rhetoric.

⁹ A “shoot house” is a firing range and training facility laid out like a home, used to train law enforcement and military in close-quarter shooting and combat but also made available for civilian use.

¹⁰ Pyke, who was at the demonstration, disputes Carlson’s claim that protestors cracked his door.

¹¹ See Light, especially 155–75, for the origins of SYG laws.

¹² Also see Melzer 157–61 for misperceived conflations of race and criminality within gun culture more broadly.