Following the horrendous mass shooting of 21 children and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the U.S. Congress finally passed some “common sense” gun reforms expanding red flag laws and requiring stricter background checks, especially for those ages 18–21. Perhaps the recorded voices of 10-year-olds begging for help before they died could not be spun by National Rifle Association (NRA)-pocketed politicians?
But is this legislation really “common sense” and can it possibly make a dent in our nation’s fetish for firearms? Jennifer Carlson suggests a resounding no on both accounts. In her book, Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race, Carlson argues that only a reckoning with racial oppression’s role in protecting and promoting mass gun ownership can we meaningfully “advance public debates and public policy about the place of gun violence…in American Society” (p.180).
To help us reach this reckoning, Carlson gives us a grand narrative about the history and politics of firearms in the USA. She argues that guns historically occupied an important pivot point between formal and informal policing. While white plantation owners originally handled their own armed policing, increased rebellions and escapes by enslaved workers encouraged 19th Century white southerners to formalize militias and “slave patrols.” “Eventually,” writes Carlson, “these brutal slave patrols worked alongside, and to some degree became institutionalized as, some of the earliest public law enforcement entities in the United States, including the New Orleans Police Department in 1853” (p.28).
In the North, elite urban political machines deployed armed officers to regulate the political and social behavior of ethnic workers. In the West, General Washington ordered the obliteration of the Iroquois people; but eventually, posse comitatus legitimized the informal brutality whites used as they protected their stolen settlements and westward expansion. Carlson concludes “policing—whether in the North, the South, or the West—has been a project not just for the community but also of the community, with community defined narrowly in nativist, white settler and bourgeois terms” (p. 31). In other words, the history of policing and the way Americans talk about guns have always been shaped by white citizens’ need to maintain and expand power and privilege.
To examine the ideological underpinning of contemporary gun laws, Carlson uses the concept of Gun talk to represent the stock of prevailing “sensibilities about the proper place of guns in society” (p. 177). The production and mobilization of gun talk are primarily under the control of “brokers” who “shape the symbolic politics of legitimate violence and the practical access to legitimate violence with respect to firearms” (p. 177). Groups ranging from the NRA to local sheriffs and gun board administrators mold the politics and policies around firearms to protect and enhance a race-based system of legitimized violence—formal and informal—against non-whites. In chapter after chapter Carlson gives us local and state police officials who defend and reproduce the racialized system of law enforcement where police routinely stop, search, arrest, and commit violence against Black citizens.
Formal, state-driven police violence is justified through what Carlson terms gun militarism where an increasingly militarized police force sees themselves as warriors in combat. In fact, Carlson notes that many officers receive “warrior training” from the likes of David Grossman who teaches “fear-based killology” to police around the country. But gun talk also legitimizes informal violence perpetrated by armed, private (white) citizens who are not seen as “threats but assets to the state.” Carlson refers to the “good guy with a gun” image as emblematic of gun populism. Gun militarism and gun populism comprise the bulk of gun talk and, in the author’s words, help, “police the Second Amendment” by promoting, “visions of social order that reflect particular understandings of both what constitutes legitimate violence and how it should be distributed across society” (p. 15). Most importantly, these visions are implicitly and explicitly embedded in law-and-order activities steeped in racial and class bias.
It is a powerful and persuasive argument backed up by strong ethnographic and archival research. Carlson effectively examines the often-contradictory language of police officials and civic leaders in order to flesh out the sometimes-competing narratives of gun militarism and gun populism. Yet, together, they are both, “deeply embedded” in our nation’s “long historical legacy and ongoing policies of white supremacy and racial inequality, and they appear in contemporary discussions about gun policy as coexisting and mutually reinforcing forms of gun talk” (p. 178). To police the Second Amendment is to police the boundaries of race and class in America, guaranteeing that gun violence will remain an integral part of formal and informal everyday racism.
My reservations about the book are few. I would have liked a few more states included to cover the South and Northeast where I think the urban angle to racialized policing is even more apparent. I also missed any significant discussion of the corporate-driven economics of gun manufacturing and the role their lobbyists play as brokers. My biggest qualm was Carlson’s failure to link the book’s excellent analysis to any sort of political organizing or policy strategies for possible change. Carlson may be right that any alternative to Americans’ reductive and often downright silly debate about “common sense” gun laws and police reform must begin with a refusal to see such conflicts as isolated projects. Certainly, Carlson’s book is a must read for anyone interested in getting that conversation started.
