American citizens own more guns and endure more gun-related violence than any other liberal democratic citizens in the world. While many political scientists have illuminated our understanding of American gun ownership, homicide rates, domestic gun violence, suicide, mass shootings, and the disproportionate power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), political theorists have been largely silent on issues of gun rights and regulations. In Do Guns Make Us Free? Firmin DeBrabander forwards the scholarly conversation by situating the gun rights narrative in liberal democratic theory and the rule of law.

Gun rights supporters insist that armed citizens serve as a Lockean bulwark against government tyranny, but DeBrabander counters that their gun-centric philosophy of individual and collective freedom masks a threat to democracy: the destruction of the rule of law and the creation of a “fragmented nation where increasingly alienated citizens are unable to assemble and credibly contest rulers with despotic designs” (pp. xiv–xv). Writing for multiple audiences, DeBrabander delivers an accessible discussion of freedom, guns, and the rule of law in twenty-first-century America. He is at his best when he deconstructs the logic of the citizen militia (as opposed to individual ownership) using Machiavelli or demonstrates the threats from government surveillance using Michel Foucault. Although DeBrabander’s analysis fails to convincingly demonstrate an inverse relationship between gun ownership and the rule of law or citizen engagement, his book helps launch a long-needed critical interrogation of the implications of gun ownership for wider issues of individual rights, freedom, state power, the rule of law, and the requirements of democratic citizenship.

Deftly synthesizing speeches, lawmaker interviews, newspaper columns, blogs, scholarly secondary works, and foundational political theory, DeBrabander demonstrates how gun rights supporters create and manipulate a powerful narrative of freedom in which individual gun ownership is grounded in the common law of self-defense and a precondition for constitutional rights of citizen engagement, such as speech, assembly, and press (pp. 1–2). Thus, gun rights become essential individual rights. Employing their version of Locke’s social contract, gun rights advocates argue that individual ownership of firearms also encourages limited government and enables collective resistance. By holding a “loaded gun” to the head of government, vigilant gun owners discourage concentrations of power and provide an armed threat of insurrection against tyranny (pp. 115–16). Rugged and self-reliant gun owners protect liberty, while the unarmed citizens remain “sheeplike, obedient, pliant [and] subservient” (pp. 100–101, 103–4, 159). The pro-gun narrative replaces limited government based on the separation of powers and elections with armed individual citizens with a permanent suspicion of government (pp. 61, 99, 116, 143). Employing liberal democratic principles of rights, freedom, and individuality, the pro-gun narrative insists that strong constitutional democracy relies upon unfettered gun ownership.

For Debrabander, political philosophers, Stoics, to Foucault, provide crucial tools for understanding that gun rights—powered by this narrative of freedom and tyranny prevention—threaten rather than strengthen constitutional democracy (e.g., pp. 63, 69–72, 101, 103, 246, 127). Using the language of Locke’s social contract, National Review columnists like Charles Cooke and David French ground the right to bear arms in Locke’s 1) labor theory of value, 2) right to punish offenders in the state of nature, and 3) right to dissolve tyrannical government (pp. 65–67, 88). Cato Institute fellow David Kopel writes that “in much of the world, the armed masses symbolize lawlessness; in America the armed masses are the law” (p. 199). If guns are the only effective check against government overreach, any effort to regulate guns serves as evidence of a tyrannical government seeking to restrict individual freedom and disarm dissent (pp. 61, 118, 169). The Tea Party has been particularly successful in using this rhetoric to recast political difference into tyranny: “Obamacare, cap and trade, stimulus, bailouts” are the work of “domestic enemies … in the walls of the Senate and the Congress” (p. 117, quoting Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for a Nevada Senate seat).

DeBrabander insists that the gun rights narrative fundamentally misreads Lockean liberalism because it fails to distinguish individuals in the state of nature (who lack a common judge and may execute justice themselves) from the subjects or citizens who—by the logic of the social contract—give up license and the power to executive the law in favor of a government of divided powers with a majoritarian legislature charged with balancing individual liberty and the common good (pp. 72–73). In addition, the gun rights narrative overemphasizes Locke’s right to rebel (p. 74) and fails to interrogate the democratic requirements for transfer of power, law, and force. The author effectively uses the work of Stanley Fish to tease out “who gets to decide that tyranny is imminent, and by what measures is the imminence of tyranny determined?” (p. 193). Even if Locke does not call for permanent armed vigilantes or daily revolution (pp. 196–97), DeBrabander underlines how this narrative uses liberal rhetoric to challenge gun regulation as a dangerous threat to vigilant democratic citizenship.

The gun rights narrative also supports and encourages Stand Your Ground laws, and DeBrabander insists that they, too, threaten the rule of law. Substituting a “responsible” armed citizen who will mete out justice at a crime scene or threaten the government when he or she determines tyranny undercuts Lockean liberalism’s promise of publicly known laws enforced by police and courts (pp. xv, 199, 202–3, 234). Instead of a limited, impersonal, and credible set of rules adjudicated by courts, government becomes the rule of men who defer to an “immaterial entity” or “invisible code” in the moment (pp. 201, 203–4, 209). Gun ownership is not a “magic pill that suddenly makes a person responsible,” and there is little evidence that the armed citizenry protects any right other than gun ownership (pp. 200, 116).

Although DeBrabander teases out Locke’s suspicion of self-love and strong passions when individuals adjudicate justice (pp. 71, 78), he misses the opportunity to push harder on racial prejudice and Stand Your Ground. Racial prejudice is essential for understanding the narrative of (white) men with guns standing ground against (black) men who end up dead (e.g., George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin). When Zimmerman served as police, judge, and jury before killing another citizen, he bypassed the due process afforded by institutions. Cynthia Lee’s work would have helped DeBrabander flesh out the meaning of self-defense and the rule of law (e.g., Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, 2003). Racially biased as American institutions (police, courts) may be, they are superior to the prejudices and emotions of one self-interested and passionate party.

While the author does a great service in flagging the attack on the rule of law, his claims would be stronger if he included a more thorough analysis of self-defense law, especially as it developed in the United States (e.g., Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat, 1991; Ian Shapiro, ed., “The Rule of Law,” Nomos 36 [1994]; Meir Dan-Cohen, Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality, 2002; Fiona Leverick, Killing in Self-Defense, 2006; and Boaz Sangero, Self-Defense in Criminal Law, 2006). In order to convincingly argue that liberal democracy dispenses with armed self-defense in favor of nonviolence, DeBrabander must provide a more rigorous analysis of Locke to determine how liberal democratic theorists connect freedom, preservation of life/material body, and lethal self-defense. National Review columnists may not adequately make the argument for a pro—self-defense Locke, but DeBrabander can use other works to create a strong rather than a straw man.

For example, Locke sanctions murder for self-preservation in political society (rather than the state of nature), framed in terms of liberty and preventing enslavement (a man can preemptively kill a thief even though his life is not threatened (Second Treatise, §17–20). Locke does fear tyranny—particularly an armed tyrant facing a disarmed populace (Second Treatise, §137). DeBrabander never references any of the fine secondary literature on Locke and freedom, or even the more specific scholarship exploring Locke, self-defense, and punishment (e.g., Andrew Dilts, “To Kill a Thief: Punishment, Proportionality, and Criminal Subjectivity in Locke’s Second Treatise,” Political Theory 40 [February 2012]: 58–83, and Dustin Ellis Howes, Freedom without Violence: Resisting the Western Tradition, 2016). In order to fully appreciate American exceptionalism regarding guns, DeBrabander might return to Blackstone, who 1) provides a critique of Locke’s lethal self-defense with an emphasis on the public good, and 2) requires threatened individuals to “retreat to the wall” and wait for the police as a fundamental requirement of the rule of law. American courts rejected retreat to the wall at the end of the nineteenth century—replacing it with a “true man” justification for standing ground—and that helps explain American exceptionalism in both the theoretical and practical arenas (e.g., Susan Liebell, “Stand Your Ground v. Retreat to the Wall: How American Gun Laws Undermine the Public Good,” presented at the Association for Political Theory Conference, 2014). In order to make the argument in the United States, DeBrabander needs to confront the nineteenth-century American acceptance of vigilante justice in lethal self-defense.

In a book centered on “freedom,” DeBrabander leaves the term largely undefined and insufficiently explored. In order to make more nuanced points about defending the individual’s body and the body politic, he might have used a primary text (e.g., Locke, Second Treatise, §22–23), a traditional framework (e.g., Isaiah Berlin’s positive/negative liberty), or important recent works (e.g., Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Self-Defense, War, and Punishment, 2009, or Nancy J. Hirschmann The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, 2003). Dustin Ellis Howes’s 2016 work, Freedom without Violence: Resisting the Western Tradition, would advance DeBrabander’s thesis because Howes reveals the extent to which Western liberalism believes that freedom is defended with violence and inextricably linked to sovereignty and provides DeBrabander with a richer argument for linking nonviolence and freedom (pp. 175–76, 212–13). Engaging with Robert J. Spitzer's claims regarding Stand Your Ground and the rule of law would have enriched the analysis (Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights, 2015).

Any analysis of freedom in liberal thought should consider gender, and this is a notable absence in DeBrabander’s work—especially given the NRA’s direct appeal to women. Focusing on stranger rape and assault, the NRA has appropriated the language of abortion rights and feminism to suggest that women may choose guns to defend themselves and stand as equals to men despite any differences in physical strength (see Mary Zeiss Stange and Carol K. Oyster, Gun Women, 2000; Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, 2006; France Winddance Twine, Girls with Guns: Firearms, Feminism, and Militarism, 2013; and Holloway Sparks, “Second Amendment Sisters and Passionate Patriots: The Affective, Democratic, and Gendered Politics of Anger in the U.S. Gun Control Debate,” presented at the Association for Political Thought Conference, 2015).

DeBrabander mentions that guns are described as equalizers (pp. 141, 142) and protection against domestic abusers (p. 146, citing John R. Lott Jr.’s More Guns, Less Crime, 1998). Using excellent work by Daniel Webster and Jon Vernick (Reducing Gun Violence in America, 2013), DeBrabander counters that the presence of a gun in the home is the strongest risk factor for female homicide victims (p. 153) and that courts often negate women’s testimony in self-defense/Stand Your Ground killings in the home (p. 85). For example, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot at her abusive ex-husband, and South Carolina’s Stand Your Ground statute exempts self-defense in the case of domestic violence.

The scholarly literature on gun rights, feminism, and self-defense would help DeBrabander interrogate how liberalism’s separation of the public and private maps onto gender and leaves violence against women in the private sphere outside the gun rights framework of self-defense and armed resistance. A new democratic narrative of guns should consider how the divide between public and private allows self-defense in public but denies it in private—where most violence against women takes place.

Writing about guns poses a serious challenge to any author, given the sheer size of the literature (academic and popular) on the subject. DeBrabander’s overreliance on one Washington Times article or a local police chief (e.g., 81, 89, 7, 61, 91, 148) could be offset in the notes with relevant scholarly articles, comprehensive studies, and popular books. One of the strengths of Do Guns Make Us Free? is the synthesis of popular works, but bloggers and/or journalists with a wide-ranging degree of credentials and expertise are juxtaposed with excellent historians and foundational political theorists. The reader needs more help negotiating the veracity and quality of sources.

The book opens with “We thought Sandy Hook would change things,” and the massacres in Orlando, Florida, and Dallas, Texas, massacres will remind the reader of the cycle of violence in the United States and the importance of this issue to American politics, political science, and political philosophy. In this book and his popular essays, DeBrabander insists that the armed society poses a grave threat to American democracy. He hopes that if the American people (what he calls the silent majority) understand the danger, they will push their representatives to pass new gun-safety laws. We need more work in political theory—especially scholarship that is mindful of the work done by other political scientists that focuses on the relationship between guns and democratic citizenship.