My entry into the forum regarding the controversies around the Campus Carry law (SB 11) approaches the issue from the viewpoint of emotion management. The possibility to carry a concealed firearm on campus and in university buildings, just like any other place, is part of a larger political debate and transformation in American gun carriers’ rationales for owning a firearm.Footnote 1 This transformation has occurred during the era of mass shootings, often euphemized as “active-shooter events,” where university campuses are locations that have captured wide media and political attention.Footnote 2 I examine active-shooter-event instructional videos that have been produced by cities, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and universities in order to explore the “social imaginaries” that they produce. Social imaginaries concern ways in which people “imagine” social existence, how they fit together with others, and what are normal societal expectations and their underlying normative notions; they are about the “repertory of collective actions” at people's disposal.Footnote 3 In addition to my examination of such videos, this forum piece also benefits from interviews and focus groups with faculty, students, and staff and a survey (N = 1,204) of undergraduates conducted by a research group studying Campus Carry from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives at UT Austin in 2018 and 2019 respectively.Footnote 4
Campus Carry is part and parcel of what David Yamane calls the “culture of armed citizenship,” which includes both attitudinal and regulatory shifts in US gun culture.Footnote 5 In this culture, in the 2010s self-defense overtook hunting as the primary reason for gun ownership. At the same time, the regulations for carrying firearms – either openly or concealed – and legally using lethal force have been liberalized.Footnote 6 Campus Carry is a continuation of this general trajectory in the United States. To connect this overall transformation to the Campus Carry issue, I first discuss notions of security in the everyday in connection with the concept of social imaginaries. Then I introduce the viewpoint of societal emotion management and how it has been used to turn terror into manageable fear with regard to other imagined threats. Finally, I discuss the imaginaries involved in the instructional videos on active-shooter events.
SECURITY IN THE EVERYDAY
The meaning of security is contested academically,Footnote 7 within high politics, and in public discourse alike.Footnote 8 With Campus Carry, too, there are multiple levels of political security discourses at play. The debates at UT Austin, for example, are connected to the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Concomitantly, there are competing gun and security imaginaries surrounding the opposing sides of the issue. Some of those interviewed at UT Austin had a keen sense that sides of the debate were informed by an overall “culture war,” where attitudes toward the gun issue are part and parcel of both conservative and liberal identities.Footnote 9
Security, too, is intertwined with identities, and means different things to different societies at different times, since the core fears of societies or social groups are unique and relate to vulnerabilities and historical experiences.Footnote 10 This means that articulations of security, being socially specific and historically situated, draw from both lived experiences and social imaginaries. Social imaginaries are about how “ordinary people” imagine their social surroundings that are “carried in images, stories, and legends,” as they are “shared by large groups of people.”Footnote 11 Indeed, while many people on campus have had experiences with violence – in the survey of UT Austin undergraduates, almost a quarter (24 percent) reported having been victims of violent crime off-campusFootnote 12 – for the large majority, their concerns relate to imagined scenarios.Footnote 13 Crucially, though, like with other security vernaculars, or localized security imaginaries, how Campus Carry is presented in relation to security is operative in the creation of a politics of fear, the reproduction of gendering and racialization practices, and the enactment of identities.
Given its contested nature, there are multiplicities of security even in everyday usage. Nevertheless, security offers a powerful sign or concept “for articulating support or opposition for political projects.”Footnote 14 This means that security has an “inherently political character,”Footnote 15 irrespective of the level on which it is explored. Interviews with faculty at UT Austin and the controversy around the bill show how one approach to security was imposed on campus through state legislation. Yet what the pro-gun groups and individuals saw as an increase of security was experienced as an increase of unease, insecurity, and outright fear by others. Indeed, according to the survey of UT undergraduates, 14 percent felt that Campus Carry increased their feeling of safety on campus, while for 53 percent it decreased their feeling of safety. Such variance in emotional responses to the issue makes it opportune to examine the controversy through the viewpoint of emotion management.
REHEARSAL, PREPARATION, AND EMOTION MANAGEMENT
I approach the Campus Carry issue here in relation to two aspects: (1) emotion management, and (2) planning, organization, and training as preparation. The former is “a strategy for the mobilization, administration, and control of emotional life,” which has three parameters: “cognitive standards, practical norms, and strategic controls.”Footnote 16 Emotions are not taken as individual in this approach, but rather a part of cultural artifacts, and “systems of the sensible” that produce “common senses” of what can be done, said, heard, seen, and so on.Footnote 17
Preparation is a form of rehearsal.Footnote 18 Rehearsals turn imagined calamities into embodied experiences without having to live through the threat the preparation is for. At the same time, rehearsals address real-world fears in a ritual-like manner.Footnote 19 In this sense, they can function as both emotion management and the transformation of terror into manageable fear, in order to habituate preparations and precautions into routines and embodied experiences.Footnote 20 For Campus Carry, two types of rehearsal and training are most prominent: gun training and active-shooter rehearsals.
Imagined scenarios are a vital aspect of preparing, and firearms training programs have a major socializing effect here.Footnote 21 This is particularly so for Campus Carry, since concealed carry – or, more precisely, acquiring a “license to carry” (LTC) permit – requires completing a course through training at a firing range. Often, however, the impression is that such training is not adequate. In the survey of UT Austin undergraduates, 63 per cent disagreed that training for an LTC in Texas is sufficient for gun safety on campus. The issue has also been present in the national media, for example on The Daily Show.Footnote 22 The discourse of arming teachers, which has even been promoted by President Trump,Footnote 23 was linked by an active-shooter response trainer on The Daily Show to a collectivized Dunning–Kruger effect.Footnote 24 This effect refers to the tendency of people who are least competent at a task to incorrectly self-assess themselves as high performers, as they are actually too ignorant to know otherwise.
When gun instructors provide their trainees with scenarios, attitudes, and imaginaries for when, how, and why guns should be used, the notion of preparedness is quite prevalent. As instructors like to say, “you can never be over-prepared for a gunfight.”Footnote 25 In such imaginaries, the cost of not being prepared is considered too high, and gun instructors present the world as a dangerous place where those who do not carry a gun are vulnerable. Not only that, but carrying a gun is presented as the only means for preventing “victimization,” taking responsibility for the safety of one's family, and preventing something bad from happening.Footnote 26 Indeed, carrying a firearm is viewed by some men as central to being a good husband and father, who is able to protect the family, to compensate for possibly reduced physical prowess, and to provide a sense of security in situations that make them feel vulnerable. In this way, carrying a concealed weapon works as a “totem of masculinity.”Footnote 27 While there are idiosyncrasies in how individuals imagine concealed carry, such elements are shared by many of those who carry for reasons of self-protection.
The imaginary aspect of using risks and costs as the rationale for carrying a gun for self-protection is quite striking when, for example, only two out of forty-six respondents in a sociological study of those who had obtained an LTC did so as a result being a victim of crime, but all of them carried guns for self-defense.Footnote 28 In the survey of UT undergraduates, of the 10 percent of respondents who owned firearms, about half noted self-defense (54 percent) or the defense of family (54 percent) as their reason for owning a gun. At the same time, only 30 percent percent reported having been a victim of a violent crime as a cause.
The respondents in Harel Shapira and Samantha J. Simon's study of people who carry concealed handguns pointed to a “general deterioration of morality” and an increase of violence or violent crime in society.Footnote 29 Yet it is not crime that has become more violent, it is news coverage which has become more graphic; even while the number of violent crimes has decreased, school shootings have gained very wide and extensive exposure.Footnote 30 This underlines how social imaginaries have a greater impact on attitudes toward – and rationales for – carrying guns than direct personal experience.
Indeed, in the gun classes studied by Shapira and Simon,Footnote 31 the instructor showed graphic videos of gun violence to emphasize the dangerous nature of the world. As with security discourse on higher levels of social aggregation,Footnote 32 identifying threats to the existence of something that is valued at the same time identifies vulnerabilities for those individuals who feel they need a gun for self-defense. Even though security promises confidence and protection, it may also bring about fear and unease in situations where threats may not have been given much consideration before.Footnote 33 At the same time, not taking the identified security measures produces a sense of vulnerability. The same seems to apply to some of those who carry guns at all times; for them, not carrying a gun elicits a keen sense of insecurity.Footnote 34 While one of the students at UT Austin who aimed to carry all the time stated that they did not feel insecure without their firearm, they also said they felt “naked” without it, and likened not having their gun to forgetting to wear a watch or leaving their wallet behind.Footnote 35
The rehearsal aspect of gun training also instills a sense that guns are tools and not dangerous per se. This is the purport of the slogan “Guns don't kill people, people do.” In fact, guidelines by the NRA stipulate that guns cannot be referred to as weapons during training at shooting ranges affiliated with the organization.Footnote 36 When combined with the need to be prepared in a dangerous world, the use of tools such as guns as means of self-defense becomes morally justifiable. When gun training instructs in lethal force, “bad guys” with guns are dehumanized as “sick” and the “good guys” are valorized as moral individuals.Footnote 37 Such a division provides for simulated scenarios where firearms provide “good guys” with the power, strength, and moral justification to defend the world against “bad guys.”Footnote 38
The gun discourse of the NRA draws from what Scott Melzer calls “frontier masculinity”:Footnote 39 guns are positively associated with masculine features such as self-reliance, rugged individualism, and a strong work ethic. Like in US foreign policy, features of a settler or frontier mentality are viewed as moral and honorable, and seen as producing strength, force of will, and masculinity.Footnote 40 To act in a strong, willful, and manly manner is considered the way to avoid danger and chaos.Footnote 41 In turn, publications by the NRA that report incidents where armed citizens have defended themselves against criminals produce an imaginary of a vigilant citizenry that is particularly masculine in its character.Footnote 42
The second relevant aspect of rehearsal concerns active-shooter drills and rehearsals, which have become prevalent since the 2000s. Indeed, the percentage of schools with plans in place for how to deal with a shooting incident has increased “from 79 percent in 2003–04 to 92 percent in 2015–16.”Footnote 43 In 2015–16, the drilling of students was also quite extensive: 95 percent of schools had drills for lockdown procedures, 92 percent for evacuation, and 76 percent for sheltering in place.Footnote 44 The prevalence of such rehearsals has evoked varying types of response: some view them as psychologically harmful in light of the still low likelihood of being involved in a school shooting, while others view simulation drills as reducing the number of fatalities.Footnote 45 A pro-gun instructor at UT Austin also reflected on the problematic effects of such drills: his military training instilled a need to have a drill in place for his students, yet he only gave instructions in class once and elected not to do so after that, in order to not make students feel as if they were under siege.Footnote 46
The school-shooting phenomenon has become such a prominent feature of US experience that during the 2020 Democratic primaries, presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg even spoke about himself as being part of the first generation for which school shootings became commonplace, compared to a second generation for whom such events are a routine part of expected school life.Footnote 47 In this situation, some UT Austin interviewees who opposed Campus Carry felt that their generation had the responsibility to fight for gun-free education.Footnote 48
VISUAL IMAGINARIES IN ACTIVE-SHOOTER-EVENT INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS
Emphasis on a vigilant citizenry has been one of the responses to the 9/11 terror attacks, both in the United States and elsewhere.Footnote 49 The “war on terror,” combined with mass shootings at universities, has resulted in the enhancement of surveillance, communications, and infrastructural technologies, as well as the securitization of campus policing.Footnote 50 Consequently, the effective militarization of campuses has relied on four security discourses: “(1) borders of legitimacy, (2) counter-terrorism strategies, (3) active-shooter response, and (4) crowd control.”Footnote 51 This militarization is quite evident in the active-shooter instructional videos produced by a number of universities.
According to Ben Brucato and Luis A. Fernandez, the first campus security discourse does not concern “crime” as such but produces a divide between “criminals” and “law-abiding citizens,” which legitimizes the state authorities’ power of intervention and reproduces racial and class hierarchies by turning matters of jurisdiction into symbolic geographical and socio-hierarchical boundaries, with the campus serving as a container with a legitimate inside and a class- and race-coded, potentially criminalized outside.Footnote 52 The anti-terror discourse has been an aspect of the overall militarization of US law enforcement, which includes the use of surplus military vehicles and battle gear.Footnote 53 The various drills and alert systems (many universities have named these in accordance with their sports teams, like the Buckeye alert system for Ohio State) that have been put in place to deal with active-shooter events can be viewed as a form of emotion management: mundane drills are thought to turn uncontrollable terror into a manageable fear.Footnote 54 This is also one of the explicit purposes of active-shooter instructional videos.Footnote 55
As Cold War civil defense was resurrected as “homeland security” in the US during the “war on terror,”Footnote 56 it included active-shooter drills. Homeland security is also reminiscent of civil defense in how the Department of Homeland Security has produced pamphlets and even instructional videos for how to respond to “active-shooter events,” which “can occur anywhere at any time,”Footnote 57 just as civil defense films warned of an atomic attack.Footnote 58 While preparation for a nuclear blast was summarized in the easily remembered slogan of “Duck and cover,” the analog for active shooter events is “Run, hide, fight.” Such mnemonic tools become generational markers, as noted by a UT Austin faculty member who felt that they themselves had studied in a utopian moment in between the atomic scare and school-shooting-drill generations.Footnote 59
The current slogan features prominently in two active-shooter rehearsal videos produced by the City of Houston (on a DHS grant)Footnote 60 and by the Department of Homeland Security itself.Footnote 61 At the end of 2019, the first of these had had over eight million views on YouTube. The video is distributed, for example, by the FBI, which also publishes reports on active-shooter events,Footnote 62 provides training for law enforcement officers, and shares instructional videos on how to respond to an active-shooter situation.Footnote 63 The video suggests that a regular day at the office may sometimes “resemble an action movie,” because sometimes “bad people” (in this video, a tactical-shooter-looking and sporty white, middle-aged man) with different motivations do “bad things” (like indiscriminately shooting people Terminator-style with a pump-action shotgun). Reminding that you need to be prepared for the worst, as your survival may depend on whether or not you have a “plan,” the video offers three things that you can do: run, hide, and fight. It continues in more detail: get out of danger and call the authorities. Hide if you cannot escape. Barricade yourself, remain silent, and cover behind large objects. Fight if your life is at risk. Act with aggression with improvised weapons (e.g. a chair or fire extinguisher) to disarm the assailant and commit to taking the shooter down no matter what. Victims are chosen randomly, events are unpredictable, and they evolve quickly. First responders, armed and equipped military-style, are there to stop the shooter rather than help the injured, even though help is on the way. Your actions can make a difference for your safety and your survival. Be aware and be prepared. The three key things you need to remember to survive are: run, hide, fight.
The DHS also produced its own instructional video, which is stylistically less like an action film and does not show the assailant, first responders, or casualties (and had only 135,000 views on YouTube at the end of 2019). It shares many elements with the previous video, though. In the imaginary of the DHS, “active-shooter events,” where individuals often kill others indiscriminately, can occur anywhere and at any time. Such events are considered to be unpredictable and able to evolve quickly. Therefore everyone has to be prepared and know what they will do if faced with a worst-case scenario – no matter who they are or what their capacities may be. Preparedness is necessary to manage emotions, because “freezing” in emergency situations is a natural human response but the worst thing to do in an active-shooter situation. Instead, the video notes, the ideal response is to keep one's emotions in check and calmly inform the authorities; the last resort is to run, hide, and fight. Those who manage to escape should indicate their status to the police by keeping their hands up and empty (so as not to be confused with the active shooter). Those who have to hide need to prepare to fight for their life. When taking action to ensure their survival, they should not stop fighting with improvised weapons, together with others, until they are completely certain that they are safe. Those who are responsible for organizations are encouraged to plan and train for such worst-case scenarios, since “training may mean the difference between life and death.”Footnote 64 While armed individuals can attack anyone, anywhere, at any time, the imaginary does not include armed responses by those targeted, but, rather, by police authorities. Civilians should train, plan, and build infrastructures for informing and raising alarms about attacks to increase “resiliency,”Footnote 65 but this does not mean stocking up on firearms.
A number of universities have followed this trend by producing their own videos.Footnote 66 Some have adopted the national model of “Run, hide, fight,” which is a registered trademark of the City of Houston, and follow the same script in their videos. Even those who diverge from the model itself use the same slogan and give more or less the same instructions. These videos are more dramatic, though, and, unlike the DHS video, or the original Houston video, they break the fourth wall. These videos portray how campus police are quick to respond and are highly armed. They instruct students not to let strangers onto campus, and to “say something if you see something.” Suspicious, concerning, or violent behavior, both on campus and online, should be reported. In all of these videos, the assailant is shown as a white male in his twenties, armed with either a semiautomatic rifle or a pistol; with one exception, he also appears to be a fellow student. Fighting is presented as a last resort, and it should be done with improvised weapons to incapacitate the shooter. In the videos where this is done, the instructions are to place the attacker's firearm in a trashcan or under some other object. In addition, people are directed to raise their hands and to hold nothing in them when encountering first responders.
Most of the campus-specific instructional videos have been produced by universities where guns are not allowed in campus buildings due to either state legislation or university policies. Not even universities that have Campus Carry legislation in place provide instructions for what to do if one is carrying a concealed firearm, however. This may be a major issue, lest an innocent bystander be misidentified as an active shooter, reported to the authorities, or even come under fire from other concealed-carriers or the police.
UT Austin posted the Houston video on its YouTube channel in 2017. It provides stark contrast on a channel that mainly consists of Longhorn videos and instructions on how to survive finals rather than active-shooter events. The University of Denver has produced its own intro and ending, but the main instructions are in the form of the Houston video (Colorado implemented Campus Carry in 2012). Georgia Southern University has created the only video where a student has a gun (Georgia implemented Campus Carry in 2017). Even here, however, the instructions call for using improvised weapons; when the armed responders arrive, a woman places her pistol on the ground as a responder points a gun at her. While people are not instructed to use their guns, this split-second appearance of the gun nonetheless implies an armed student body. This is not stated by the police officer narrator, though, who merely explains that officers may ask you to drop anything you have in your hands and to raise them up.
The Florida State University video is the most striking in how it deploys action-movie style with dramatic music and shaking cameras. It also breaks the fourth wall with fleeing, hiding, and fighting students, campus police first responders, staff, and even the president of the university providing campus-specific instructions, model behavior, and warnings about typical shooter tactics. Everyone on campus needs to know how to run, hide, and fight with improvised weapons: “Being prepared is the best line of defense,” as is vigilance. Other videos are less dramatic, as in the case of Central Michigan University, which features an officer explaining how bad things can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and proclaiming how the police want you to be prepared to survive any violent encounter. While this video emphasizes preparedness, some universities underline their police force, and even evoke their sports team to maintain a sense of community and unity among potential victims.
CONCLUSIONS: COMPARING THE CONCEALED-CARRY AND TRAINING-VIDEO IMAGINARIES
Active-shooter exercises are rehearsals, but there have been several instances of evacuations during alert situations, and even actual active-shooter events. While most school students only engage in mimetic acts in rehearsals, the possibility of an event is real and not purely imaginary: “From 2000 to 2017, there were 37 active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools and 15 active shooter incidents at postsecondary institutions.”Footnote 67 Indeed, the DHS action plan video examined here and other materials the DHS has published draw from attacks that have actually occurred, including survivors, and emphasize how developing a “tailored” active-shooter-event emergency action plan empowers “you to build resilience for your community, organization, family, and home.”Footnote 68 The message is that you have to be prepared, and “you have to be an active participant in your own security.”Footnote 69 Many campus videos similarly note how rare – but real – active-shooter events are.
The underlying idea of rehearsals and drills is that “technical skill and moral discipline lead to emotional self-control.”Footnote 70 In this sense, concealed carry can also be viewed as a form of emotion management, albeit not in the form of a government program but on an individual or family basis. Practice and training can turn terror to fear when everyone else is a potential source of unease. Carrying a firearm is viewed as the way to prevent bad things from happening, anywhere, and at any time, irrespective of how frequent actual instances of violence are in specific places and spaces.
In this way, a concealed-carry imaginary shares some of the features of the imaginary of the DHS, but there are distinct differences, too. Following the DHS, the world is considered to be a dangerous place, which requires preparation for “worst-case scenarios.” For concealed carry, however, the aim is not planning for running, hiding, and fighting with improvised weapons, but fighting with one's own firearm.Footnote 71 Refusal to be a victim is a key feature. Interestingly, while the DHS recommends that people should not hold back when defending themselves until they are “safe,” the power of guns to kill and maim in the process of self-defense is not part of the concealed-carry imaginary; instead, the use of the firearm is considered to be a legal and rightful act. “Stopping a rampage” is a neutralized label for killing someone in a chaotic situation.
Like the active-shooter videos, the pro-Campus Carry discourse securitizes the campus as a place where violent things can happen to everyone, at any time. In this line of thinking, individuals thus need to have the possibility to protect themselves with guns, because the authorities are not there to immediately protect them. This general imaginary has been instrumental in bringing about the Campus Carry legislation that imposes “security” in this manner, including in university buildings.
