Abstract
Beliefs once limited to the extremes of the North American gun culture have become mainstream, while the US Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and a spate of right-to-carry laws have contributed to the proliferation of guns in public life. These changes in political discourses, legislative agendas, and social practices are indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of subjectivity, which is here defined as self-defensive. Such subjectivity is characterized by a pathological identification with the right of self-defense, which undermines the social conditions of individual freedom and renders subjects unable to comprehend the function of abstract rights within an informal normative order. Practically speaking, this raced and gendered subjectivity relies on extra-legal relations of domination for its reproduction. The rapid expansion of gun rights and the recent loosening of restrictions on self-defensive violence are argued to be responses to a perceived threat to these identity-constituting relations, rather than to the threat of violent crime, which has long been on the decline.
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Notes
Although my focus here is on the right to self-defense, renewed and aggressive efforts at the state level to limit access to the ballot box for racial minorities, the attacks on healthcare coverage of contraception, and the legislative maneuvering that is shutting down reproductive health clinics across the country are part of this trend to defend traditional social structures.
For a discussion of the pathological nature of self-defensive subjectivity in the context of Axel Honneth’s work, see Kautzer (2014).
National Gun Appreciation Day was, for example, inaugurated on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend. Larry Ward, chairman of the coalition supporting the new holiday, told CNN: ‘I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.’ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/gun-appreciation-day-leader-to-cnn-if-blacks-had-guns-they-never-would-have-been-slaves/.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) used by the FBI since 1998 flags potential buyers for any of the following reasons: a felony conviction, an arrest warrant, a documented drug problem or mental illness, undocumented immigration status, a dishonorable military discharge, a renunciation of US citizenship, a restraining order, a history of domestic violence, or an indictment for any crime punishable by longer than one year of prison time. FBI NICS Factsheet, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/general-information/fact-sheet. Private sales, most commonly online or at traveling gun shows, are often not run through the NICS. As of 2013, 33 states allow for the so-called ‘gun show loophole’ and therefore do not require background check on private gun sales, while the rest have varying degrees of restrictions. Only seven states require background checks on all gun sales.
‘NICS Firearm Checks: Top 10 Highest Days/Weeks’, www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/nics-firearms-checks-top-10-highest-days-weeks.
FBI NICS Operations Report 2008, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2008-operations-report/ops_report2008 and FBI NICS Operations Report 2013 http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2013-operations-report.
My recent advocacy for a ban on firearms on our campus elicited threats and public condemnations. One Colorado newspaper dedicated an entire editorial to denouncing me, ending with: ‘Shame on the fanatics who have created zones where mass murderers can operate safely. Shame on the rest of us if we allow them to create more. It’s time to reason, or, failing reason, to jeer this nonsense out of the public debate’ (Cole 2012).
The seven states that allow concealed-carry on their campuses are Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah, and Wisconsin (National Conference of State Legislatures 2014).
The Roman senators did not have auctoritas because they were senators, they had it because they were the rulers of powerful families. This is carried out beyond the law insofar as, for example, the household has been juridically determined as a space in which a private form of patriarchal domination is permitted.
The failure of grand juries to indict white police officers who killed unarmed black men—as happened most recently in the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York—is consistent with Du Bois’s argument, as is the racial disparity in public opinion about these grand jury decisions.
“This shift of attitude ultimately leads to the belief that my freedom and that of all others only extends as far as is allowed given the abstraction demanded by a legal perspective; my freedom thus cannot reach beyond the typifying descriptive borders of the law. Instead of individualized needs, we assert only universal interests; instead of routine norms and values, we resort to principles of legal conformity; instead of settling conflicts through communication, we immediately resort to judicial arbitration” (Honneth 2014, p. 90).
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Kautzer, C. Good Guys with Guns: From Popular Sovereignty to Self-Defensive Subjectivity. Law Critique 26, 173–187 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9156-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9156-x