Johnston develops many significant insights in assessing the different chapters of our 2014 book, Gun Violence and Public Life, whose chapters highlight the convoluted ties between firearms with domestic violence, ordinary citizenship, drug economies, youth gangs, masculine identity, and police violence. As he notes, each of the authors sees no quick remedies for these entrenched challenges. Gun violence and public life, however, now is a more pressing issue. During a presidential election year, the winning male Republican Party candidate cynically opined that the losing Democratic Party candidate, if elected president would appoint Supreme Court Justices certain to impose stricter gun controls or abolish in toto the right to bear arms, and then labeled them “Second Amendment people.” Asserting these people were his voters, he mused if maybe some were ready “to do something” to prevent this outcome. After such crudely veiled incitements to would-be assassins, it is very important to rethink the politics of guns in American democracy.

Johnston’s response to our book’s appeal to reconnect gun ownership, training, and use to “a broader commitment to and enactment of democratic life” merits more consideration. Oddly enough, it is one, on the one hand, that the Trump’s “Second Amendment people” also might endorse, while, on the other hand, it also could have made other citizens’ desires to demarcate, fearing Trump’s victory, “safe spaces” on university campuses, at community centers or in health centers irrelevant. To think about firearms in starkly political terms, Chapter 1 of Johnston’s book might provide a strong start inasmuch as he asserts all Americans should participate in a “Dionysia USA” in Washington, D.C. Among its many possible events, such a civic festival could pivot, in part, on films. In watching and then debating together John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or George Stevens’ Shane, citizens might learn to accept the difficult, and unavoidable, connections of armed violence with truly democratic freedoms. If such collective rituals existed, then the politics of Ferguson, Missouri, Orlando, Florida or San Bernardino, California, to name only a few places in America today, could be quite different.

Since the Great Recession, and its unevenly managed recovery by corporate, bicoastal elites under both Presidents Obama and Bush, many ordinary working class, rural, religious, underemployed gun owners in “flyover country” have felt forgotten. Often dismissed as “deplorables” in America by Hilary Clinton, and categorized as “clingers” to “guns and faith” in the face of globalization by President Obama, many gun-owners live in the same zip codes where Presidents Bush and Obama heavily have recruited American service men and women to fight the long war on terror. As America’s constitutional republic, according to some on both sides of the partisan divide, erodes in the tides of consumerism and globalism, serious political contradictions arise here. Many upper middle class suburbanites, who are not gun owners, docilely applaud recruiting gun owning deplorables to maintain “the American way of life,” which is increasingly beset by post-truth discourses, stagnant incomes, and corporate privilege. No longer one nation with liberty and justice for all, the USA is split between urban elites, pushing knee-jerk American patriotism as “support our troops” citizenship, and less advantaged rural and inner-city citizens volunteering for military service as first, or life-long, careers. For others, gun ownership is being reduced to a public health issue, like tobacco smoking, soda consumption or drunk driving. Both books suggest that these trends express a superficial complacency about guns and public life, since the phenomena are more complex. One way to shake more awake, as the Trump presidency begins, would be to repoliticize the practices of collective service, personal sacrifice, and armed violence, which Johnston as well as Luke and Agger strongly support.