Gun Violence and Public Life

Ben Agger, Timothy W. Luke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317258506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Schools, theatres and malls used to be safe havens. Marathons were triumphal, not tragic. Today, public life is risky. Citizens are on edge, either calling for gun control or purchasing personal weapons of self-defense. In this timely book, prominent US and international authors examine gun violence in public life. They offer the latest data and analysis on topics such as comparative gun homicide rates, the efficacy of gun control, risks associated with gun ownership, concealed-carry data and policy, media and gaming violence, gender and guns, and school shootings. New insights are developed from a comparative case study of Canada, a country in which gun ownership is common but with a much lower rate of gun violence. Neither demonising nor mythologising guns, the contributors provide evidence-based analyses that shed light on policy directions and personal conduct.

Chapter 1 Gunplay and Governmentality Sovereignty, Subjectivity, and Shootings in the United States

Timothy W. Luke

DOI: 10.4324/9781315634265-1

This chapter provisionally maps unexpected linkages between sovereignty and subjectivity through a critical analysis of mass shootings in the United States of America. These connections appear to be unavoidable, if not foundational, ties that must be untangled to gain critical insight into the deeper significance of gun violence in America and the seemingly impossible challenge of addressing more thorough and effective firearms regulation in the United States. Ironically, the Bill of Rights—or the first ten amendments to the US Constitution—plays a crucial role inasmuch as such legal principles, along with their supporting judicial enforcement, enable this imbrication of sovereignty, subjectivity, and shooting as normalizing and normative programs; as written, the Bill of Rights expresses America’s uniquely liberal order of governmentality.

The Second Amendment provides for a well-regulated militia as well as the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. The implements of war known as “arms” and the relation between those things and the men allowed to wield them are, first, essentially enshrined by this liberal republic as a foundational principle, and, second, substantially justified as individual and collective property rights to own, keep, and use a vast array of lethal things. As a quintessential question for governmentality, the role of weapons as “things,” which also serve as key implements for the male citizens most typically involved in questions of sovereignty, subjectivity, and shooting, remains one of tremendous conflict and complexity. Firearms, in relation to the men and women who keep and bear them as political subjects, cannot be untangled from the US regime’s mesh of power relations, especially given how firmly male subjectivity is anchored to personal and group rights to keep guns to inflict violence on others. Moreover, as Foucault hints, government emerges with its own finality in becoming able to manage in “a right manner of disposing things so as to lead ... to an end which is convenient for each or things to be governed” (Foucault 1991, 95). Arguably, the prevailing system of juridical rights, like the US Bill of Rights, is egalitarian in principle; yet, it has supported “the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms,” like the keeping and bearing of firearms, which can erupt in violent rampages as “the other, darker side of these processes” (Foucault 1979, 222). This chapter traces out a few of these conflicted complexities to explore the challenges of gun ownership and regulation in the United States.

I. Sandy Hook and the Spectacle of Gun Violence

Gun control in the United States once again became a front-burner policy issue after the December 14, 2012, shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That morning, using firearms purchased legally by his mother for target shooting, Adam Lanza shot his mother to death while she slept. He then drove a short distance to the elementary school where he shot and killed twenty children and six adult school staff members before turning his weapon on himself. The mass-media coverage of the incident turned up reports that Lanza’s mother, who grew up around guns with her family in rural New England, had pursued target shooting with her son in order to build a closer relationship with him as her family was disintegrating.

Although the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech had more victims (thirty-three dead and seventeen wounded), the Sandy Hook attack is the worst-ever mass shooting at a public K-12 school in the country (Agger and Luke, 2008; Kellner 2008). Moreover, the Sandy Hook shooting was particularly traumatic, as it came only five months after the bizarre shooting at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises movie in an Aurora, Colorado, multiplex, during which James Holmes allegedly killed twelve people and left fifty-eight wounded. The very young age of all the Sandy Hook student victims and the valiant yet failed efforts by six of the school’s administrators and teachers to protect them, the high number of their bullet wounds (three to eleven shots in each victim), and its tragic occurrence during the ordinarily cheerful holiday season combined to be a shocking circumstance. To have two such horrific incidents at two unlikely sites and times in a single year proved to be a catalyzing moment for many in both the general public and government who had been deeply opposed to the country’s existing gun laws. Coming only five years after the Virginia Tech massacre—thirty-three people shot and killed, seventeen others wounded—the Newtown school shooting left the impression from its many televisual mourning rituals (Kellner; Kimmel and Leek; Worrell, this volume) that no educational institution at any level in the United States would ever be safe from deranged gunmen. This crime immediately ignited a fresh nationwide debate over guns and their governance, and also about how to prevent such deranged subjects from mounting similar attacks in the future.

Yet, within months, if not weeks, the media’s initially favorable narrative in support of gun control—during which reporters, news anchors, or writers depicted how anomalous this shooting incident was in historical terms— gradually fell by the wayside. In turn the media’s daily coverage returned to stale mass-media scripts about legislative gridlock stalling efforts to broaden gun controls (Luke 2008, 1–28). As Schildkraut and Muschert (this volume) recount, those narratives adeptly began rehearsing old rhetorical routines on the already well-worn stages devoted to these policies all across the mediascape. These routinized scripts stretch back at least to the August 1966 shootings at the University of Texas at Austin, perpetrated by Charles Whitman: tremendous shock over its actual occurrence, heartfelt declarations about its sensational exceptionality, near-universal denials about its normality, ardent calls to immediate corrective actions, growing equivocation over which specific public-policy action to take, and then fading to more general inattention punctuated by intermittent brief moments of notice here and there. Soon, the tragedy largely fades from public notice as fresher news stories with “larger bleeds for bigger leads” capture the attention of editors, reporters, and audiences. Subsequent frantic efforts by survivors are then launched to form organized action groups to combat the building lassitude, but finally a gradual normalization of the event occurs to the point of most people not remembering what happened, even as the organized interest groups struggle to keep the issue alive.

Plainly, the violent deaths of so many small children during the holidays accentuated this tragedy; this horror kept more awareness of the event lingering longer than in other cases. In general, however, it could be said that holiday cheer more or less dampened the attention that had been given to this violent criminal news story. Interest in the Sandy Hook shooting spiked again about a month later, around the second anniversary of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), as Congress reconvened in January 2013. Renewed interest led to some committed legislators feverishly working the halls of government in Washington, DC, to leverage support for new gun-control bills. Much more intensive lobbying by the National Rifle Association (NRA), local sportsmen’s groups, firearms-industry political action committees, and other citizens’ networks, however, led to the bills’ growing obstruction, irrelevance, and finally defeat on the Senate floor on April 17, 2013.

Despite all the death-centered drama surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting, and President Obama’s strong vocal support in favor of the new gun-control bill’s passage—which he made in good faith during many trips around the country in 2012 and 2013—it appears in too many ways that the prevailing wisdom of the NRA has gradually come to define the lessons of the Newtown shooting for many Americans: Resonating through decades of TV crime dramas, epic Western films, and international cinema conventions, this simple interpretation of reality was articulated by the NRA’s executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, when he said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” (Washington Post, December 21, 2012). The unspoken, but openly signaled, subtext of this message is that “the good guy” also must have a really good gun, which could include a no-nonsense paramilitary home-defense shotgun or an assault-style semi-automatic rifle that would stop the bad guy dead in his tracks. In its coverage of Rep. Giffords’s 2011 shooting, even the esteemed Wall Street Journal pumped up the mystique of “rampage guns,” like the Glock 19, as “the weapon of choice for good and bad guys” (Fields 2011, A5). Such sloganeering is regrettable, but its common circulation is open recognition that there are deeply rooted rhetorical traditions rooted in, as Welch (this volume) argues, Americans’ basic “right to rebel,” which underpins the United States’ deeply normalized acceptance of deadly gun violence.

II. Governmentality and Guns

A critical discussion of gun violence and its place in the public sphere of the United States of America, especially in the wake of so many high-profile mass criminal shootings since 2007, would seem to raise few doubts about the necessity of more stringent gun controls. Yet as the fast and furious reaction by the shooting public in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting—which helped the bipartisan defeat of tougher new laws in April 2013—reveals, this assumption has proven to be mistaken. Much of the public’s reaction has unfolded in far more complex ways, which illustrates how the previous foregone conclusion of the need for more gun regulation is quite misplaced.

Foucault argues that government “has a finality of its own,” and therefore “it can be clearly distinguished from sovereignty” (1991, 94). Sovereignty should direct the rulers—aristocratic or democratic—toward realizing some common good, collective welfare, and lawful order. Consequently, “what characterizes the end of sovereignty, this common and general good, is in sum nothing other than the submission to sovereignty. This means that the end of sovereignty is circular: the end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty” (Foucault 1991, 95). Curiously, in a constitutional republic like the United States, the sovereign, however, is “the people,” and their moral agency as political subjects is rooted in always remaining armed and ready to be dangerous. Their “common good” is to ensure obedience to the law for themselves and their officials, thus the circularity in their sovereignty claim underscores that the primary aim of a sovereign people must be, as Machiavelli would say, retaining their popular sovereignty. Indeed, to keep and bear arms, if the citizens are well informed and fully trained, is regarded in the republican tradition as an integral part of the citizenry’s retainer for service in pursuit of security and sovereignty.

Governmentality, therefore, entails a considerable measure of “implementality” to the extent that finding the right disposition between people and things requires finding some practicable mix of specific multiform tactics to train people and order things—albeit in particular age, class, ethnic, gender, and racial orderings—that will, in effect, secure the peace of well-governed states. Given that the material things in question here are guns, military units, and armed services, most of “the people” (whose right disposition as moral subjects, or ethico-political actors, is becoming accustomed to, produced by, and/or put into effect here) are young men.

In this regard, the Second Amendment is, on the one hand, a multifaceted writ of implementality inasmuch as it is conceptualized abstractly to provide individuals and groups with lethal implements of war. Those provisions are put into effect with definitive planned procedures, which can carry out the self-defense of the sovereign to assure its own security, label the specific articles of lethal equipment to be mobilized in pursuit of these goals, and protect those same deadly instruments needed as tools or utensils of power to accomplish the work of being empowered by becoming armed. When operationalized concretely, however, guns are closely linked by military training, paramilitary organization, and collective policing to disciplinary practices, or “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical” (Foucault 1979 , 222) directed at identifying and training warriors, who are still mostly male subjects. As material markers of actual current, or future potential, mobilization for armed struggle, guns then have brought their own gendered “infra-law” into “the infinitesimal level of individual lives” as they also operate “as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands” (Foucault 1979, 222). Nonetheless, as Agger, Kellner, Kimmel, and Leek (this volume) assert, there are, historically and institutionally, major age, class, gender, racial, and regional biases in which specific subjects, like young males, are mostly engaged as subjects with these tactical preparations, either to follow scrupulously the “infra-laws” of organized disciplinary practices or to succumb savagely to disorganized and spontaneous “infra-lawlessness”; both states are made possible by being armed.

The origins of “implement” as a concept come into English from Medieval Latin’s implèmentum, or an item of stock, which follows from the Late Latin implère, meaning to fill, fill up, or bring to fullness. These semantic streams are rich, because they signal how weapons might reveal the individual yearning and collective need to satisfy an enduring existential lack as effective agents (Glynos 2001, 197–198). Indeed, the insecure feelings and non-sovereign anxieties of “being unarmed” that follow from a lack of the necessary equipment, tools, or utensils to put into action some definite plan or procedure are centrally in question here. Remarkably, to maintain “a Free State” in the United States, the Constitution names “arms” as the instruments, tools, or devices most suited to serve this purpose for its loyal sovereign citizens. General implementations of legal guarantees, or formal liberties to outfit or equip citizens with such specific deadly implements, are arrayed at the same time with multiple structures of rigid disciplinary practices to ensure the orderly observance of various laws and rules in the full layeredness of this peculiar implementality. Indeed, the “technologies of the self” and “technologies of society” (Foucault 1988) immediately complement each other. The Second Amendment is an exemplary case of how “the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty,” while the disciplinary practices of militia organizing, collective drilling, and gun bearing “provide, at the base, a guarantee of submission of forces and bodies” (Foucault 1979, 222). The liberal art of government thus constantly seeks to assure freedom by identifying the open dangers that “risk producing the opposite” (Foucault 2010, 69).

Freedom is constantly being fabricated, and it can get out of control. A provision for well-regulated militias, juridical rights to keep and bear arms, and at times specific requirements for citizens (who are young, male, and often rural in their distribution) to procure the arms, ammunition, and other accoutrements needed for collective defense, paradoxically must mobilize certain disciplines to enforce many greater controls. Even though the murder rate in the United States has declined from 10.2 per 100,000 people in 1980 to 4.7 in 2011 (see Young, this volume), the perception that property crimes, violent assaults, and rampage murders are frequent events helps anchor these anxious neoliberal directives about individuals’ maintaining their armed sovereignty and security. It is a difficult balancing act, but the American population at large remains very well armed and quite docile. Even though criminal elements and disturbed individuals occasionally abuse how firearms are kept and borne by committing unlawful armed acts, the infra-laws of disciplined gun ownership “are a set of physico-political techniques” (Foucault 1979, 223) put to use for the common regulation, procedural ordering, and disciplined conduct of modern political subjectivity in the United States. Moreover, the violent violations of these disciplinary practices always serve the larger logic of strong social control. New, atrocious incidents of violence or looming zones of threat only deepen the legitimacy of “the people” still keeping and bearing arms under these fluidly organized conditions of state recognition and regulation.¹

There are many unexpected, occluded, or inarticulate questions about guns and their owners that are left unspoken whenever this debate begins. Yet these questions must be studied openly no matter how contradictory they remain or how hard they are to answer, because these silences and shadows are full of critical issues tied to the implementality of firearms in the United States. Many liberals scoff at gun owners who hold tightly to their assault-style weapons, asserting that today’s civilian populations are powerless against the latest high-tech military forces. At the same time, even the United States, with all of its military might, has not decisively prevailed in a total victory against such irregular forces equipped with such small arms in any war it has fought since Vietnam. Sometimes these contradictions are collective anxieties or individual fears about some existential void of personal security, but at other moments they are brimming with the fears swirling around in the communal politics of the moment. Firearms and their implementalities can be pitched into these voids, and they become potently productive power points, anchoring the subjectivity of citizen shooters—both good and bad.

Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panther movement from the 1960s once noted during the 1960s, “violence is as American as apple pie,” and the very existence of an American public sphere ironically began with, directly rests upon, and cannot be easily disconnected from the readiness of Americans to willingly bear arms or engage in gun violence. In many ways, the Panthers’ brazen but lawful measures to arm themselves during the 1960s in Oakland and other big California cities ignited the initial contemporary efforts to introduce gun controls in the United States. These first forays, ironically, were backed by right-wing Republicans during California governor Ronald Reagan’s first term in office. While the laws were hotly debated, and then passed only in part, they failed to limit the Panthers or other Californians from gaining legal access to guns. From 1521 as Spanish settlers organized in New Spain in the Southwest, to 1607 at the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, to 1614 at the Dutch Fort Nassau on the Hudson, and the founding of New France and Quebec City in 1608, European settlers came to current territories of the United States as invading colonists. The invaders used violence and guile to dispossess Native Americans of their lands to make them European colonies, kill or maim those who resisted, and then reduce the surviving Native American residents to become their docile subjects. Likewise, these colonial regimes promulgated decrees to regulate gun ownership and bar groups of surviving Native Americans, slaves, black freedmen, and indentured servants from bearing arms. The most ruthless and relentless devotees of this gunplay-driven model of governance—after global wars from 1618 to 1763 left most of North America under English dominion—were the citizens of original thirteen American colonies, and the republic that they founded in 1787.

Next, American sovereignty, subjectivity, and shooting actually mutually reinforce each other, once one looks at the foundational practices and principles of the United States from its violent beginnings in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1781). Apart from recent sensationalized high-profile criminal shootings, American identity as a nation-state constitutionally and culturally rests, to a considerable degree, upon maintaining an armed citizenry ...