This Is My Pistol You Can Touch It Now but Dont Ever Handle Again

Abstract

Building on literatures that examine why firearms are appealing and to whom and employing Weber'due south concept of "legitimate violence", this paper utilizes an online curtained deport forum to critically analyze how firearm proliferation is rationalized in the U.S. The analysis focuses on three specific examples of violence—the Parkland, Florida, and Philando Castile shootings, and stories of children who notice guns and shoot themselves and/or others. This work is a critical examination of the social construction of "legitimate violence" that deconstructs the discourses embedded in the "pro-gun" notion that the answer to gun violence is more guns.

Introduction

The last five years have witnessed three major developments in the social meanings of guns in the United States: considerably more than people are being killed and injured by firearms (Mervosh, 2018); there has been a significant increment in mass public shootings (Berkowitz et al., 2019); and at that place has been a rise in the number of public protests attended by heavily armed individual citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are white men. One of the largest such events occurred in Jan of 2020, when a oversupply estimated to be around 22,000 people swarmed the Virginia capital to protestation Democratic lawmakers' proposed gun restrictions. According to media reports, many of the attendees were draped in semi-automated rifles and armed forces-style gear, organized militias marched down streets, and a ubiquitous vivid orange sticker read "Guns Save Lives". The protesters gathered in Richmond from beyond the Us to voice their opposition to a range of gun control measures proposed by the land'due south lawmakers, including banning semi-automatic rifles, making background checks universal, limiting handgun purchases to i per calendar month, and the cosmos of and so called "cherry-red flag laws" that would permit the police to confiscate guns from someone considered threatening to themselves or others.

While these protests have their genesis in decades-onetime political antagonisms betwixt those looking for solutions to gun violence and those arguing that all gun control is fundamentally unconstitutional (Spitzer, 2015), placing them in the context of the recent and significant increases in gun violence suggests that we must find new ways to understand what motivates those who are opposed to policies that could save lives. Edifice on literatures that examine why firearms are appealing and to whom and employing Weber's concept of "legitimate violence", I critically analyze the discursive frames used to rationalize the proliferation of guns as a response to gun violence in the U.Due south.

Literature

The idea that any and all gun control policy must be resisted considering it represents a fundamental threat to liberty is part of what Horwitz and Anderson (2009) call an "Insurrectionist" conventionalities, according to which government must be kept in constant check by a heavily armed and vigilant citizenry. Such a view rests on a myth that the Second Amendment grants individuals the correct to own firearms for the purpose of violently overthrowing authorities, a position that is unsupported by the historical tape: "Neither the Second Amendment nor an inchoate right to armed revolution allows for trigger-happy opposition to the policies of a democratically answerable government, fifty-fifty if some citizens view those policies every bit tyrannical" (Horwitz and Anderson, 2009, p. 110). Equally the authors explain, the Second Subpoena was written not to empower individuals to resist government simply to give states the right to class authorities-organized, democratically controlled militias. ^{Footnote 1} Chiefly, the Supreme Courtroom's 2008 Heller decision—the first to interpret the 2d Amendment as granting individuals the right to comport artillery—does not preclude the land from enacting gun command laws.

There is a clear Insurrectionist thrust in the rhetoric used by "pro-gun" protesters, but Insurrectionism alone cannot explicate why an overwhelming bulk of them are white men or how they reconcile anti-authorities soapbox with an well-nigh obsessive deployment of the 2nd Amendment. Moreover, how do Insurrectionists sympathize gun violence, and why do they insist, despite robust public wellness evidence ^{Footnote ii}, that "guns save lives"? To accost those questions, one must consider the meanings that adhere to guns as tools of "legitimate violence" and white male authority.

White male authority and "legitimate violence"

A growing body of scholarship has explored the caste to which whiteness and masculinity are implicated in the social meanings of firearms. In a context of economic decline in which it is increasingly hard to satisfy traditional notions of masculinity, some men are turning to guns (Carlson, 2015; Cassino and Besen-Cassino, 2020), objects that allow them to exist "good guys", figures who are noble, prepared, and willing to confront the globe's dangers to protect the innocent, especially women and children (Stroud, 2016). Elisabeth Anker (2019) argues that gun use has to be understood within a larger context of political and economic precarity beyond one's own economical well-existence. The U.s. is in what Anker (p. 22) calls an "era of 'waning sovereignty'" in which previous signifiers of American force are crumbling, provoking some to experience "confused and unprotected" and compelling them to seek "new promises of security". Guns represent a perfect antidote to this predicament, not only because they make people experience more secure against criminal offence—despite the empirical prove—but because they serve an important role in terms of identity for some gun owners, a disproportionate number of whom are white men. Equally defenders of dependent women and children, their patriarchal authorisation is legitimized, and in their defense against racialized others, they are able to fight dorsum against a culture that they imagine is degraded by the racialized/poor/criminal class (Stroud, 2016). To this extent, they are not simply defending themselves every bit individuals, they are likewise defending an American mythos of exceptionalism rooted in their conceptions of white male sovereignty. Every bit Republic of chad Kautzer (2015, p. 175) explains, co-ordinate to this formulation, "Freedom is identified with the right to self-defence and the right to cocky-defense is identified with possession of a firearm". As notions of popular sovereignty have always done in the U.S., this is a right that buttresses domination via race and gender.

Despite the Insurrectionist thrust in much pro-gun rhetoric, the state plays a central part in defining who is able to utilise guns to obtain freedom. Weber (1946, p. 78) argues in "Politics equally a Vocation" that "the land is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.eastward., considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authorisation claimed past the powers that exist". It is because the state maintains a "monopoly of the legitimate use of concrete force" (p. 78, accent in original) that political social club is maintained and autonomous processes tin be insured. Robert Spitzer (2015, p. 21) says that absent this arrangement, "politics rapidly devolve[s] into violence—precisely what occurs when regimes in the modernistic globe are shaken or toppled past violence without stable regime replacement or succession and when weak regimes lack the power to quell violence and mayhem within their countries". While this is true in full general terms, when considered in the specific and racialized context of the U.Southward., it is clear that "legitimate violence" is routinely used by the state to reinforce race and class hierarchies (Wacquant, 2009) and to deny people of color admission to democratic processes and institutions.

It is also the case that, despite maintaining a monopoly over legitimate violence, the land sometimes allows other institutions or individuals to have admission to the means of such violence, though "only to the extent to which the state permits" (Weber, 1946, p. 78). When the state grants admission to the means of "legitimate violence" to private citizens through liberalizing private gun ownership and the conveying of guns in public places, specially given the legal cover of stand up your ground laws (Calorie-free, 2017), gun employ in full general and curtained conduct licensing in particular represent a claim to state-sanctioned ability, to literally and symbolically beingness empowered by the land. Interviews with those who are licensed to behave guns brand clear that this status is function of what makes concealed carry appealing (run into Carlson, 2015 and Stroud, 2016).

Across its role in expanding the scope of firearm access and use, the state is too disquisitional in shaping the social meanings of firearms in other means. Jennifer Carlson's (2019) deft analysis of how chiefs of police view the significance of private citizens being armed in public suggests another mechanism by which the state is implicated in reinforcing race/class hierarchies. When chiefs believe that police are doing battle with people of color/"criminals with guns" while being supported by white men / "skilful guys with guns", one mechanism by which "the zone of capacities for legitimate violence among private actors get sanctioned by public actors" is exposed (Carlson, 2019, p. 639). These meaning systems take diverse fabric consequences, including the lost lives of people of color, many of whom are killed because they were thought to exist armed when they were not (east.chiliad., Stephon Clark), while others were presumed to be "bad guys" even when they were legally armed (due east.g., Philando Castile and E.J. Bradford). This article extends Carlson's endeavour to "racialize the Weberian presumption", past examining the racialized / gendered discourses that gun owners utilize to rationalize widespread admission to firearms, if simply by the "correct kinds" of private citizens. This analysis creates an opportunity to reconcile how "pro-gun discourse" can operate simultaneously through Insurrectionist rhetoric and a deep investment in the state, and continues the work of interrogating the cultural construction of "legitimate violence".

In applying Weber'due south concept, information technology is useful to accept upwards his question "When and why do [people] obey"? (p. 78). He explains that obedience is achieved not past force but past iii "inner justifications" that serve every bit the country'south "bones legitimations of domination" (p.78). These are: the authority granted by "heroism or other qualities of individual leadership", which he calls "charismatic authority"; "domination by virtue of 'legality'… based on rationally created rules" (legal authority); and "the dominance of the 'eternal yesterday'… exercised by the patriarch" ("traditional authority") (pp. 78–79). When one considers the role of the law and armed forces in compelling obedience to the land, it is articulate that all three legitimizing frames are routinely deployed to glorify these institutions and thus legitimize the various forms of violence they enact. Tradition / patriarchal dominance and charisma/heroism are offered equally cover in the confront of criticisms, while domination via legality is on poignant display in the wake of police killings. ^{Footnote three} What remains unexamined are the discourses used to rationalize access to the means of "legitimate violence" among individual citizens. What roles if any exercise the legitimizing frames of charismatic, legal, and traditional authority play in justifying widespread access to guns? How might these discourses likewise serve to justify domination?

Methods

The analysis that follows utilizes an online gun forum that I visited routinely as part of a larger project on curtained carry that was completed in 2015. During that earlier research, I spent a great deal of fourth dimension on the site as a way to acquire more than virtually the values, norms, and assumptions that shape gun ownership and what I came to retrieve of as the "curtained carry worldview". This was a disquisitional supplemental information source ^{Footnote 4}—indeed, an boosted ethnographic location (Hallett and Barber, 2013)—that informed the larger qualitative project, and I have regularly returned to it over the years equally a way to stay up-to-date nigh how forum members respond to gun politics, including their reactions to gun violence cases. Every bit public debates around gun regulations have grown more heated, and especially so after the Parkland, Florida high schoolhouse shooting, forum members' commitment to a central paradox—that the only solution to gun violence is more than guns—demanded further investigation.

Participation in a politically-oriented online forum allows one to engage with like-minded others in a "discursive performance designed to express a political identity" (Marichal, 2013). While such a source is useful in examining how people engage in and reproduce politicized soapbox, it is unclear whether and how they might live these identities offline. However, the extent to which someone does or does not really embody these discourses "in real life" is much less theoretically relevant in this instance than examining the online performance itself. In the same vein, what some might consider a weakness of a forum analysis—that nosotros cannot always know the race, grade, or gender of the poster—is irrelevant in examining what particular racialized/classed/gendered discourses attain, in this example: whether and how they serve to rationalize the proliferation of private gun ownership every bit a form of land-sanctioned domination.

The following analysis applies Weber'southward justifications of legitimate violence to three specific cases of gun violence discussed in the online forum: the way that Broward County Sherriff Scot Peterson responded during the Parkland shooting; the events that led to the Philando Castile shooting; and cases when children discover guns and accidentally shoot themselves or others. This analysis is guided by the following research questions: What discursive frames are used to rationalize gun violence such that firearms are offered as the answer to gun violence? What exercise such cases reveal well-nigh the forms of domination supported by private citizens' having widespread access to the ways of "legitimate violence"?

Rationalizing gun violence

Heroes volition protect us

Merely as heroism legitimizes the capacity for violence past the constabulary and the military and thus compels people to submit to domination by the country, a similar dynamic is at work with respect to firearm buying and curtained behave among private citizens, where heroism is taken to be a central element of what makes "skilful guys with guns" different from regular people. As a respondent in an earlier written report (Stroud, 2016) explained in referring to "good guys" as "sheepdogs": "They're always going effectually protecting the sheep because it's in their nature. They're the heroes…the ones that practise what has to be done". The hero frame works well in hypothetical scenarios where one tin can imagine storming into danger and saving the twenty-four hour period, but what happens in real life?

1 of the nearly sensational facts to emerge from the Parkland shooting is how Scot Peterson, the on-site Broward Canton Sheriff's deputy and merely armed person at the school, responded when shots first started. A detailed business relationship of the shooting by the South Florida Sun Sentry ("Unprepared and Overwhelmed", 2018) reveals that Peterson established a position outside of an adjacent building and failed to approach the sound of gun fire, despite undergoing agile shooter training in which officers are taught to quickly approach the audio of gun fire so that they may "face the shooter" (Oppel and Sinha, 2019). Peterson has since been roundly criticized and in June of 2019 was charged with eleven counts of neglect of a child, culpable negligence, and perjury—the first time a law enforcement officer has ever been held criminally liable for a failure to adequately answer to a mass shooting (Burch and Blinder, 2019).

The response to the Parkland incident on the pro-gun forum was swift—the first post appeared merely as news of the shooting was breaking—and closely followed: the initial thread ^{Footnote five} ultimately consisted of 304 replies and was viewed just nether 20,000 times; in total there were at least a dozen divide threads devoted to Parkland. The first eleven posts more often than not focused on updates to the number of dead and wounded and expressions of sympathy, but the 12th, appearing just four hours after the shooting, stated, "One instructor that was ARMED could have stopped it quickly". A couple of hours later another read, "One time once more, evidently no armed school staff. When volition they learn? Oh, they had a sign up? That works". These sentiments exemplify the mutual pro-gun position that the merely solution to school shootings is having more armed security officials and/or teachers on campus (precisely how many would be enough is a topic debated later on on the forum).

In the months that followed discussions about Parkland stayed agile and conversations ranged widely. When news of Peterson's deportment emerged forum posters unleashed a barrage of criticisms against him; ane of the primeval stated, "Scot Peterson is an enabler, a coward, and a liar", while another said, "He wasn't a adept guy with a gun, he was just a guy with a gun". In response to a question about how sheriffs are trained, i forum member wrote, "To heck with training. A human –A Existent Human being—protects the innocent. They don't come up much more innocent than school children". A post that appeared in June of 2019, following Peterson's being charged, said, "If you are not someone who runs to gunfire, but runs away, that's just the way God and life made you. Pretending to be the one who will run to gunfire, and having the world see that that is a lie is a fate worse than anything". It included a screen image of a tweet written past a Parkland victim'southward brother that showed Peterson's mug shot and text that read "[Scot Peterson] allowed seventeen people to exist murdered on his spotter. He lied afterwards and had no remorse for his inaction. Retweet for the earth to encounter this coward". Shaming Scot Peterson for not having the courage and bravery to run toward danger—for not being homo enough to salvage the day—is critical for those who see arming "good guys" every bit the answer to gun violence; by focusing on his failures, the fantasy that armed heroes can relieve lives remains intact. This was evident in one of the almost violent anti-Peterson tirades to announced on the forum:

Lamentable, sickening, infuriating, no…That doesn't come close to describing information technology. I can't express what I want to say on hither without violating several forum rules. I knew there was a litany of incompetence, but I had no idea information technology was an epidemic. As a sometime [law enforcement officer], I am appalled, at the inaction, of the Coward County [Sheriff'due south Role]. I tin can't believe the pure cowardice of the deputies, and school security monitors. Some schoolhouse teachers and coaches, reacted properly, and are heroes, only so many lives could have been saved, if there had been at least one person [who] had acted, to finish it before information technology started. Just instead allow'due south arraign the gun, a ceremonious rights organization, or the Constitution itself.

The ceremonious rights organization referenced in the final line is presumably the NRA, which (incorrectly) refers to itself as "the oldest civil rights organization in the land" (Hargis, 2017). This post is the near explicit to frame gun violence every bit a problem best remedied by armed heroes acting in defence force of the innocent and not as a problem rooted in the wide availability of firearms.

It is impossible to know the exact consequences of Scot Peterson'south failure to rush to the sound of gun burn and enter the building where the shooting occurred, but according to the timeline of events provided by the Dominicus Sentinel, nine students were killed within 2 minutes of the shooter's inflow on campus, and it is unlikely that Peterson could have engaged him any sooner than iii or four minutes into the event, when he was on the tertiary floor and firing into a crowd of students and teachers; by that point twelve people had been killed. For the families of those who died on the third floor, the what-ifs of Peterson'southward inactions are likely maddening, but focusing on his failures to be a hero—including somehow safely and effectively engaging a shooter who was firing into a crowded hall—besides serves a crucial function in directing criticisms away from a number of critical questions: Why was a young man who had a history of making threats about shooting his classmates able to buy a semi-automatic rifle with thirty-round magazines? Why did constabulary enforcement accept few available legal tools to put him on a "no buy list" or to remove his guns when he was known to be unsafe? Why is it that the only moment when a legal intervention was possible was when the shooter arrived on schoolhouse grounds armed and ready to kill? The condemnation levied against Peterson decontextualizes gun violence and bolsters the "good guy with a gun" narrative co-ordinate to which order simply needs more armed heroes, a discourse that affirms and fifty-fifty celebrates patriarchal protectionist forms of violence (Stroud, 2016), to say naught of its potential bear on on students of color, who are already unduly harmed by subject field and policing in schools (Rios, 2011). Legitimizing and encouraging the proliferation of firearms while rationalizing gun violence as inevitable rests on a central fallacy and a dangerous solution: since in that location is nix that can exist done to prevent these cases, all that we can hope for is to have plenty armed heroes with the backbone to shoot back.

A good procedure will keep y'all alive

The state'south capacity to exercise domination via legality happens whenever bureaucratic or other legal process arguments are used to rationalize state ability, for instance in the thought that the criminal justice system is a fair arbiter of right and wrong. "Rationally created rules" are used to legitimize the killings of unarmed people and, in rare cases, even those who are legally armed, every bit happened when Philando Castile—a legal curtained carry holder—was killed by police officeholder Geronimo Yanez during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb in the summertime of 2016. Reactions to this case on the forum are instructive for what they reveal well-nigh how some posters understand and manage the risks associated with carrying a gun in public, and they provide a fascinating and tragic example of how important colorblindness is in rationalizing firearm proliferation.

The first thread related to Castile'southward decease was posted the day after news of the shooting was released and independent very fiddling information, only a link to a news report and a notice that a concealed deport holder had been shot by a police officer during a traffic stop. The next three responses agreed that the situation seemed problematic, and yet well-nigh implicitly supported the officeholder. One affiche wrote, "I actually hope there's another side to this story. If not, information technology looks bad". By the fifth post, the focus turned to describing how someone with a concealed conduct license should interact with law enforcement and pleas that people non jump to conclusions nigh what happened. The eleventh post stated, "Race does appear to be a factor here", and "I hope this piece of garbage thug in uniform gets a murder charge for what he did". A fence ensued as various people said that this poster was jumping to conclusions; he subsequently explained that though there are many skilful police force, at that place are besides many who are not well-trained or capable:

[The] ugly truth is that because of affirmative activeness, reduction in standards and degradation of proper training protocols to cater to said reduction in standards, people who have no business organization being a Law Enforcement Officer end up with a task they are not prepared to handle.

In blaming affirmative action for Castile's death, this affiche manages to turn what originally seemed to be a concern nearly racial injustice into a diatribe against affirmative activity that relies on racist soapbox which presumes that an officer of colour was unqualified for the job. The poster's main concern is not justice, but audio process.

In a dissever thread on this same topic, the conversation focused nigh exclusively on how Castile erred past not responding appropriately to the police officer. One affiche wrote:

The biggest effect here appears to be a miscommunication betwixt the officeholder and the commuter. Here is my take: The officer gave two commands—to produce the license and non to accomplish for the gun. He didn't know where either of those items was located in the vehicle. The driver understood and believed he was complying considering he reached for his driver's license, which in this case was manifestly well-nigh his gun. When the officer observed the gun, he believed the commuter was attempting to depict it and he responded with (an atrocious lot of) mortiferous force. Here are my suggested takeaways to avert a similar situation:

1. i.

   Practice not keep identification on the same side where the gun is holstered.

2. ii.

   When advising the officer you are armed, tell him where the gun is and where the identification is.

3. 3.

   Do not reach for ID with the hand that's on the same side as the gun.

4. 4.

   Keep hands on the steering bicycle and do not motility until yous are certain that both you and the officer have the same understanding of what you are most to practise.

With both hands on the steering wheel, engine off, keys on the nuance, and if after night with interior light on, say, 'Out of respect for your rubber, I desire you to know that I am lawfully carrying a handgun in a chugalug holster behind my right hip. My identification is in my left rear pocket. How would yous like me to go along?' When I am sure I understand his response, I motion but the left hand slowly to withdraw my wallet and I accept the license out of it with hands held loftier in full view at steering bike level. I've never had whatever problems when post-obit this practice.

The site ambassador—an NRA board member and the unambiguous patriarch of the forum—offered his marking of approving replying, "Excellent post". Other responses focused on a separate legal process business organization: that Castile was ineligible for a concealed carry license considering he was, according to one poster, an everyday user of marijuana.

Protocol when interacting with the police force is a regular topic of conversation among concealed firearm holders for proficient reason: most people recognize that being misperceived as a "bad guy with a gun" is a grave adventure. Just in their colorblind emphasis that a adept process will keep one safe, these posters failed to engage with the way that race shapes who is perceived as a criminal and how this affects both individual citizens and the police. This is on display not only in the long procedural list detailed above, which suggests that police only come across drivers every bit threatening if they fail to take specific steps, it is also articulate in the many posts written by people who contend that the single well-nigh important mode to avoid a mortiferous interaction with police is to follow all traffic laws and not exist pulled over in the get-go place, indicating their deep investment in legal process, and their ignorance about the fact that black drivers are much more than likely than white ones to be pulled over by police simply for "driving while black". The whiteness required to be seen as innocent and nonthreatening is ignored, and instead, a focus on process rationalizes the shooting decease of a legally armed black homo who was pulled over for a broken tail light. Any criticism of the police, ambivalence about concealed carry every bit a practise, or outrage over the injustice of Castile's expiry are resolved by focusing on how his own procedural failures are to blame. The fundamental injustice of a system that absolves someone of killing at indicate-blank range an innocent person whose only crime was a minor traffic violation is buried under the justification that a ameliorate process would have kept him safe. This focus legitimizes racialized domination and obscures ane of the gravest social consequences of firearm proliferation: that black men are unduly harmed from interpersonal gun violence (Armstrong and Carlson, 2019). Moreover, it allows forum members to evade a central question: whether firearm ownership in general and concealed behave in detail is, in practise, a right reserved for white men.

Fantasies of patriarchal command

The 3rd of Weber's legitimizing frames, that of tradition "exercised past the patriarch" (p. 79), is evident throughout various levels of the country: from the wildly disproportionate over-representation of men at every level of authority (e.one thousand., in politics, the military, the police), to early laws that defined only country-owning white men every bit citizens, to contemporary legislation that places limits on a woman'due south ability to make decisions about her own trunk. In each of these examples it is clear that patriarchy—a cultural system in which men and masculinity are privileged and which is "organized around an obsession with control" (Johnson, 2014, p. 6)—is central to the state'south capacity to dominate. The connectedness betwixt firearm ownership and patriarchal authority has already been discussed with respect to "good guy heroism"—in the idea that a "existent man" protects the innocent, for case—just its employ is even more than stark in reactions to cases when children find unsecured guns and accidentally shoot themselves or others. Forum posts reveal the extent to which patriarchal authority is seen every bit a resource that will go on people safety but is instead a discursive tool that is employed to rationalize both gun violence and male authorization.

A primal feature of the concealed carry worldview, something required to justify introducing more guns into public spaces, is that there is no such thing as an blow. Thus, unintentional shootings are referred to as "negligent discharges"—a euphemistic manner of ensuring that people, and never guns, are blamed when something bad happens. Stories of negligent discharges appear with some regularity on the forum, and responses indicate that they serve every bit important opportunities for members to criticize devil-may-care behavior and to define themselves as exceedingly competent gun handlers who always maintain total control over their firearms by comparing. But when children find guns and shoot themselves or others patriarchal authorisation takes on a distinctively aggressive, fifty-fifty violent cast.

Threads on this theme, which have appeared on the forum an average of four time per year since 2016 ^{Footnote 6}, consistently contain a small handful of responses by people who advocate for condom storage and criminal prosecution of the developed who owned the gun, while others insist that the real upshot is that children lack respect for parental authority. A typical example of the latter is a reply to a post from April 2019 which contained a link to a story about a four-year-quondam boy who had retrieved a handgun from the console of his female parent's car and shot his half-dozen-twelvemonth-old sister in the caput, killing her. The sole reply read:

I do not empathize this!!! I never childproofed my guns, I gun proofed my children! Both my daughter and my son were taken shooting at [four years old] and shown what a gun does to things like jugs filled with water, etc. They were given a strict alert to not so much equally put one finger on my guns or they would go the worst spanking of their life! When my girl was nearly five…in an obvious claiming to me, put her index finger and touched the grip of my 1911! At that point I pulled my belt off and wore her out! She never e'er did that again. When my son was most seven years old he showed an inordinate interest in his mother'south .38, so I took him out shooting. I brought fifty rounds for him to shoot. He shot ten rounds and tried to telephone call it quits—I told him, "oh, no, you got 40 rounds to go!" I made him shoot all fifty rounds! After that he really had no interest in that pistol!

This poster believes that children can be "gun proofed" by a strict father willing to enact violent bailiwick, and he is proud of the fact that he "wore out" his daughter with a belt considering she defied him; information technology is notable that information technology is he, non his wife, who fabricated their son shoot well past the point of being bored, even though the child showed interest in her gun. Men employ guns to affirm that they are "family defenders" and and so tin merits the patriarchal right to rule their families (Stroud, 2016), and posts of this type suggest that this is truthful non only when they imagine defending their families from criminal offense but also insofar equally fathers tin establish that they, like their guns, are powerful, dangerous, and must be respected.

Some forum members emphasize the importance of locking up guns or utilizing a trigger lock, only the most mutual posts are by people who say that they leave their guns loaded and accessible because they want their firearms readily available at all times. When rationalizing this latter strategy, most posters invoke cornball memories from their youth when guns hung on the racks of pick-upward trucks or their homes had shotguns propped upwards in the corners of rooms. The lesson from these narratives is that at that place was a time when children had respect for dominance and left guns solitary, just at present they accept no respect in general, and particularly so when information technology comes to firearms. ^{Footnote 7} This is evident in a response to a post focused on a news story of 2 children, four and half dozen, who died in separate shootings when they found guns in their homes: "I doubt kids are whatsoever more curious than we were but [we] were taught never to touch a gun without dad! This was reinforced with a belt!" In reply, some other poster said, "So true … we did a lot of crazy things as kids but there were certain lines you didn't cantankerous … As a 47 year-erstwhile man, I can still hear leather clearing chugalug loops anytime I think of Dad'south chugalug … to this twenty-four hour period it still makes me cringe!" According to this logic, when children notice and handle guns, this indicates a failure of patriarchal authority to adequately terrorize children into obedience and the incredibly unsafe exercise of leaving them loaded and unsecured—guns that tin exist stolen (a central way that criminals gain access to firearms used in other crimes ^{Footnote 8}), used impulsively (as happens in most suicides and domestic violence homicides ^{Footnote 9}), or in this case, fired by children—is rendered unproblematic. Such a position is used not merely to legitimize patriarchal domination only to celebrate information technology, and to blame non guns or unsafe storage practices but the loss of paternal authority when children die.

Word

Applying Weber's justifications of domination to an analysis of how "pro-gun" advocates on an online forum ^{Footnote ten} discuss gun violence makes clear that the aforementioned discourses that rationalize "legitimate violence" by the state serve to prop up white men with guns. Indeed, this is how Insurrectionist rhetoric can rest aslope statist claims: the state is of import insofar equally it enables their status as wielders of legitimate violence and equally morally superior "good guys", both of which contribute to their belief that they are undeserving of whatsoever forms of restriction or regulation. If "freedom is a gun" (to paraphrase Kautzer), information technology is less because of what the gun can do in a material sense and more because of how it allows one to construct an identity as not being submissive to the state, which would otherwise maintain a monopoly on legitimate violence. When "armed heroes" fantasize about existence able to act in a moment of terror rather than rely on the state to come up to their rescue, they are placing themselves in the position of "sovereign subject", as being uncontrolled by outside forces. When an armed white man tells a police officer during a traffic finish that "out of respect for [their safety]", he will non keep until the officer fully understands that he is legally armed and will thus expect for clear directions, he is leveling the ability dynamic inherent in near police interactions: they are equals considering he too has the land-sanctioned correct to carry lethal forcefulness. And when a male parent demands submission to his ability in his dwelling house as a means of keeping his children "safety", he is teaching everyone around him—including those who read virtually his actions on the forum—that patriarchal violence and dominance are important for order. If "freedom is a gun", it is not because of what the gun tin practice, it is considering of what it feels like to live in a nation where the state grants i access to the means of legitimate violence.

When Weber wrote most the relationship between legitimate violence and the state, he was focused on identifying the terms under which a population submits to authority; however, he too provided a theoretical frame for making sense of another form of domination: that which occurs when the means of violence proliferate and inflict on a population heightened levels of injury, decease, and terror. We are living in what might be called "the era of the mass shooting", when a bulk of high school students worry that such an upshot might happen at their schoolhouse (Graf, 2018) and children every bit immature as five are taught to set for such violence by singing nursery rhymes with lyrics well-nigh locking down their classrooms (Christakis, 2019). Meanwhile, the white male gun suicide rate has increased significantly in recent years (Metzl, 2019), immature black men die at extremely high interpersonal gun-violence rates relative to other groups (Armstrong and Carlson, 2019), and cases of black men'south and women's being injured and killed by the police show no signs of slowing (Zimring, 2019). Equally a club, we are not but being dominated by the state, we are also being dominated—though unevenly—by the proliferation of the means of legitimate violence.

Given the seeming intractability of the nigh visible and vocal segment of gun owners, it might seem that at that place are few gun owning allies in the search for meaningful reforms that could save lives; however, non merely is information technology unclear to what extent these beliefs are shared by gun owners broadly, but this anti-reform position is not commencement and foremost about guns—it is instead an assertion of patriarchal white domination. Afterwards all, in that location is no reason that a gun owner's identity should be threatened by gun command laws. Indeed, if firearms were harder to access, stringent preparation was required to conduct them in public, rubber storage laws existed throughout the country, and legal processes existed for removing guns from those who are threats to themselves or others, it would be possible both to craft policies that would reduce gun violence and to maintain the terms by which some gun owners—even those who come across themselves as "good guys with guns"—understand their ain identities. For such a shift to be possible, there must be as great an investment in commonwealth and justice equally there is a commitment to firearms every bit symbols of liberty, and a much greater willingness to have the fact that in addition to being protected by guns, we can also be, and too often are, tyrannized past them.

Data availability

The online forum analyzed in this paper is non identified to protect the users' identities.

Notes

1. Ironically, amongst the explanations articulated in the Federalist Papers in support of the Second Subpoena is that such militias would be necessary for quelling insurrection (Horwitz and Anderson, 2009).

2. Having a firearm in the dwelling significantly increases the odds that a person volition die by suicide or homicide (Anglemyer, Horvath and Rutherford, 2014); there is a much greater risk that a person will feel an accident, suicide, set on, and/or homicide than there is a likelihood of e'er using a gun in self-defense (Hemenway, 2011); and, though the enquiry is mixed, the most comprehensive analyses show a link between the rise in curtained bear and an increase in violent crime (e.1000., Donohue, Aneja, and Weber 2018).

3. The police are rarely charged with crimes in such cases—even when suspects are shot in the back—and when they are charged, officers are near never convicted since investigations typically make up one's mind that the police followed department process or juries find the officer's rationale for use of force credible (Kindy and Kelly, 2015).

4. Ane of the nearly of import respondents in the larger project was a moderator on the forum who informed me that while forum rules prohibited me from soliciting for interviewees, they would be willing to sit for an interview.

5. On online forums whatever member can create a post on a specific topic identified with a bailiwick line, and other members can and then reply to each other within that thread.

6. The forum posts include cases of children who are severely injured or killed and then represent a tiny fraction of the 86 unintentional deaths by firearm that occur on average each year amidst children age ane to seventeen (Fowler et al., 2017).

7. Of course children take died in accidental shootings for as long as guns have existed, merely how these cases are understood in the culture—beginning every bit blameless accidents, now equally failures of parental authorization—has changed (run into Carlson and Cobb, 2017).

8. See Donohue, Aneja, and Weber, 2018.

9. See Hemenway, 2011.

10. A example report approach that looks at just ane data source and uses it to investigate iii examples might mean that these claims practice not apply to other online forums, particularly those where "pro-gun" people with progressive politics, including commitments to racial justice, might gather. Future research should consider such spaces and should clarify whether Weber's "inner justifications" operate in similar ways on those sites.

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   Angela Stroud

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Stroud, A. Guns don't kill people…: skilful guys and the legitimization of gun violence. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7, 169 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00673-x

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• Received: 21 August 2019

• Accepted: 17 Nov 2020

• Published: 08 December 2020

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00673-x

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