Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke have compiled an impressive collection of essays on gun violence and public life in America, including mass shootings with assault rifles (which make a small contribution to per annum gun killings in the United States but garner enormous attention). Given that guns are such a fraught topic in American political discourse, it is no small feat to assemble 11 well-crafted essays free of unproductive passion and polemic. The decision to avoid Second Amendment politics may be one reason for the success of the volume. Why get bogged down in the seemingly endless claims and counterclaims of the gun-control debate when, as things stand, the Second Amendment, with or without regulations, is here to stay?

Diverse and creative in their approaches, the essays in the collection treat guns and gun violence as symptoms of larger phenomena and reject monocausal analyses. Thus, while individual measures like an assault-weapons ban can lower gun violence, as Matt Qvortrup’s essay (p. 30) demonstrates, such success does not necessarily hold true with other kinds of guns, especially those used by criminals or in suicides. This makes it critical to focus on the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts within which gun violence erupts. Bill O’Grady, for example, explores (pp. 48–49) comparative homicide rates in the United States and Canada, which also has a high rate of gun ownership, and raises interesting questions about America’s distinctively violent origins and history, which in turn suggests that the U.S. record of nearly continuous warfare since its inception could be a relevant explanatory factor, as Ben Agger suggests (191, 201).

Complementing this line of thought, Douglas Kellner (p. 94) highlights “the masculinist military, sports, and gun culture; ultramasculine behavior in the corporate and political world in a predatory environment of neoliberalism; school bullying and fighting; general societal violence reproduced by media and seen in family and everyday life.” What Kellner calls ultraviolent masculinity constitutes a veritable ticking time bomb that will periodically explode until new conceptions of manhood emerge (pp. 94–95). Likewise, Mark Worrell portrays (pp. 110, 111, 114) the United States as a purveyor and celebrant of violence, which effectively means that it has earned the mass killings and killers from which it suffers. If anything, it is surprising that the country’s gun and violence problems are not worse.

Robert L. Young explores (p. 120) America’s widespread public support for gun ownership and the death penalty as “reflections of a generally punitive orientation that is rooted in anger rather than fear” at what is deemed to be a “dangerous world,” which also brings the question of gender roles into play (p. 126). James Welch, IV, looks at the epic narrative role that guns have played in America’s founding and refoundings. Resistance, endless enemies, and threats to liberty form a deadly dynamic that lends itself to affirmations of violence (pp. 134, 146, 153). Michael Kimmel and Cliff Leek also note that gun violence is a male problem. Women occasionally commit gun violence but it is so rare as to be irrelevant: “Maleness alone doesn’t cause aggression, but adherence to traditional ideas of masculinity may well enable it” (p. 180).

Agger concludes the volume (pp. 185, 189, 193) by noting that “it is men who kill” and that “most gun homicides” involve poverty, crime, and drugs, which makes it imperative to address the economic and gender conditions that enable, even encourage, violence (pp. 190, 201). At the same time, Agger argues that any effective response to gun violence “begins at home” (p. 192). These essays, admirably, are not designed to reassure readers with cocksure proposals to end America’s gun and violence problems; they are designed to make us smarter about them—and in this task they succeed. Where does this leave us?

What if, rather than sidestep gun politics, the once-dominant understanding of the Second Amendment as a right anchored in “a well regulated militia” were taken seriously for its political possibilities, that is, for a reconceptualization of masculinity for which several of the essays call? Do not get me wrong. Despite what the National Rifle Association (NRA) wants to believe, there is no evidence that arming citizens deters crime. But this is not the NRA’s bedrock Second Amendment defense. It claims that the Second Amendment is the condition of possibility of the Constitution and Bill of Rights—in short, no guns, no freedom. Not only is there no evidence for the claim that our basic liberties depend on guns; there is every reason to doubt, even mock, it.

In this century alone, the Constitution and Bill of Rights have been treated routinely with contempt by government at the national, state, and local levels. The Rehnquist Court usurped the 2000 presidential election and delivered it to George W. Bush. In 2003, Bush launched an illegal, illegitimate war in Iraq (based on lies), killing hundreds of thousands. In 2004, Michael Bloomberg unleashed a compliant New York Police Department on democratic citizens enacting their political rights on the streets of New York during the Republican National Convention. Barack Obama has ordered the assassination of American citizens in disregard of their due-process rights. The National Security Agency under both the Bush and Obama regimes has rendered privacy meaningless. Nationwide, Republican state legislatures, backed by the Supreme Court, have disenfranchised voters by race, class, and age, turning the right to vote into a privilege exercised by some at the expense of others. Militarized police forces across urban America kill black citizens with impunity and then attack them when they dare to protest the daily violence to which they are subjected. This is a partial list of grave constitutional crimes against democracy, and not a single well-armed citizen came to the defense of his or her country and its freedoms, thanks to the Second Amendment.

Nevertheless, as Luke notes (pp. 7–10, 13–14), the United States was founded on productive gun violence, and Kellner concedes that “there are times when being strong, independent, self-reliant, and even aggressive can serve positive goals and resist oppression and injustice” (p. 100). What, then, might it mean to take the Second Amendment seriously politically? What if gun ownership did not revolve around personal security and consumer rights? What if it were deprivatized and the civic obligation “to resist potential tyrannical acts by higher government authority” (p. 13) were privileged? What if the very idea-cum-desire to purchase a gun were rewired to a broader commitment to and enactment of democratic life? Would Rehnquist and his four coconspirators have felt unaccountable and beyond citizen reach in their homes at night? Would Bush have been able to dismiss hundreds of thousands of armed democratic citizens in the streets of the nation’s capital who tried to stop his criminal Iraq war? Would police consider the nation’s cities free-fire zones if citizens were potentially prepared to fire back in self-defense? Would state legislatures feel free to strip people of the right to vote if they had good reason to believe that no peaceful election would then take place? Given the role that warped expressions of masculinity play in gun violence, what if affective energies were redirected toward forms of democratic contestation that, in the last resort and under extraordinary circumstances, might also entail a credible threat of force?

Gun ownership would otherwise be considered a sign of democratic weakness, even cowardice, and disrespect. This recaptured republican conception would involve a distant relationship between identity and gun ownership. Luke suggests an apt sensibility—at least in terms of political mythology: “in a constitutional republic like the United States, the sovereign … is ‘the people,’ and their moral agency as political subjects is rooted in always remaining armed and ready to be dangerous” (p. 5). It is precisely this agency that has long been lost in the United States, the occasional assertion of so-called land rights in western parts of the country notwithstanding. The American people have been unduly docile since the end of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Yes, there have been promising and courageous signs of democratic rebirth of late—in the streets of Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri, as well as in American prisons—but these resurgences have been badly overmatched by police who can safely take for granted their superior firepower and relative invulnerability. American governments do not consider the people themselves as a force, let alone a potentially armed political force, to be reckoned with, which means that police unthinkingly deploy their own militarized units against them without fear of reprisal—not even political reprisal. Until American democracy disarms at home—which will require a simultaneous disengagement from imperial adventures abroad—American citizens may need to recover the spirit of the Second Amendment in their democratic arsenal.

Admittedly, Agger and Luke’s volume does not directly address these kinds of issues, though it does seem to point in their direction. Guns and the violence they engender tend to be thought of exclusively as problems to be solved, rather than as potentially solving problems for democracy. If guns and violence are not going away anytime soon, as all the authors seem to agree, perhaps it is time to think of them, partly, in overtly political—not just public—terms.