These two new books both seem to be aimed at expanding perspectives on gun policy. The first, despite its title, is principally concerned with the evolution and interrelationship between public and private violence. The second is very much focused on the gun as a totemic American object. Both books make important and valuable contributions.
Governmental control of the use of force is an indispensable attribute of governance. Yet the American governing tradition has been characterized by a dual system in which police power has been exercised both by governmental entities—the military, including militias, and state and local police agencies—and by private entities, running the gamut from vigilante groups and privateers to the Pinkerton agencies. In the modern era, think private detectives like Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled Sam Spade and private law enforcement entrepreneurs like bounty hunters (yes, even Dog the Bounty Hunter).
In The Six-Shooter State, Jonathan Obert examines how and why this dual law enforcement system arose. Both public and private security systems existed simultaneously early in the country’s history, for the obvious reason that the existing governmental order lacked the resources, skills, expertise, and maturity to assume exclusive police power. As public and private enforcement entities grew, they typically worked together in a manner that made “coercive enforcement appear as though there really was no distinction between public security and private effort” (p. 8). Obert refers to this as the “coupling” of power. Predictably, such private involvement was especially important in the most lawless areas of the young nation: the South and the western frontier. In the process, a “jurisdictional decoupling” (p. 7) often occurred between public and private.
Obert attributes this key shift to major developments in the nineteenth century, including the market revolution and the Civil War, which caused social and rule instability. Underdeveloped local systems of governance often could not respond effectively to the rapidly changing social dynamics of the developing nation, which in turn led to decoupling. This bifurcation helps explain the contemporary American contradiction whereby a large public police bureaucracy exists simultaneously with a seemingly contrary tradition of private self-defense values of individualism and self-reliance and suspicion of governmental authority—especially law enforcement. Even as public and private policing matures, the “divide between public and private violence” continues to “blur and unsettle” (p. 16)
The heart of Obert’s analysis is a series of deep case studies, mostly from the nineteenth-century Midwest. Chapter 2 lays out his theory of institutional change as it shapes the coercive environment. Chapter 3 is a detailed look at two Illinois counties from the 1840s where the public–private dynamic played out in different but instructive ways. In Chapter 4 the author turns to Chicago to apply his analysis to that large and rapidly growing urban area. Chapter 5 examines militia activity in the post–Civil War South, focusing on Louisiana. Chapter 6 examines Western gunfighters who often functioned in both public and private law enforcement capacities on both sides of the law. The final chapter examines the legacy of jurisdictional decoupling.
Obert’s analysis falters when he extrapolates his findings to the modern era. It overstates the extent to which modern private law enforcement activities are either significant or necessary to effectuate societal order. The evolution of the old militia system illustrates the systematic elimination of any private militia activity with respect to organization, law enforcement, or policing. Indeed, every state in the country outlaws any kind of private or paramilitary activity. Obert also misunderstands the founders’ feelings about militias, asserting that they would have recoiled at the integration of the militias mentioned in the Second Amendment with a “powerful military bureaucracy,” seeing that integration as the essence of “the tyranny of a powerful, coercive state” (p. 239). In fact, Alexander Hamilton extolled the select militias in the Federalist Papers, just as the Constitution gave nearly exclusive control over the militias to the federal government. The “tyranny of a powerful, coercive state” that many founders feared was of a large, professional standing army controlled by the federal government—even as the Constitution granted Congress that very power. The founders would have been shocked by the United States’ large, permanent standing military force, but not by how the militia system evolved into the modern National Guard.
In his discussion of the 2008 Supreme Court ruling, D.C. v. Heller, Obert correctly notes that it embraces the republican-based idea of personal gun ownership for self-protection in the home. But it is an authority granted by the government, which does not imply any right to exercise public authority in the manner of a posse or vigilantes. And Obert’s conclusion that the controversial Heller decision has generated “plenty of heat and no light” (p. 253) that “has gone nowhere” (p. 254) because it has not occurred in the context of his state formation analysis is one that cannot be sustained by any fair reading of the extensive debate over the ruling. In the modern era, private values survive—individualism, suspicion of government, belief in privatization—but the previously vibrant system of private violence is vibrant no more.
The Lives of Guns is predicated on a plain but useful conceit: that guns are not merely “passive object[s]” but rather “have their own ‘lives’” (p. 1) or agency. As the editors correctly assert, guns (and other implements of destruction) are transformative, both in social terms and in their practical effects.
Elisabeth Anker’s leadoff chapter explores the core belief among many gun owners that gun ownership and especially gun carrying vest them with a feeling of personal sovereignty. And thanks to the combined recent spread of relaxed concealed carry laws and heightened “stand your ground” laws, individuals at times have exercised such semi-autonomous power, as George Zimmerman’s 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida dramatized. Unfortunately, Anker gets two important things wrong: Zimmerman did not mount a “stand your ground” defense at his trial, although the recently changed Florida law was important for the way it constrained or altered the behavior of police and prosecutors and even the jury instructions, all to Zimmerman’s benefit. Second, it is not true that “more people than ever own guns” (p. 21). Gun ownership in the United States has been gradually declining for decades, although the average number of guns per owner has skyrocketed.
Andrew Poe’s chapter is one of the first significant analyses of the personal production of 3D self-printed plastic guns. Although the technology is still relatively primitive and unreliable, one truism about technology is that it improves as costs decline. Poe draws out the prospect of how privately produced firearms, made without serial numbers, could fundamentally transform the relationship between citizens and the state with respect to the use of violence and the state’s traditional monopoly over the use of force. Poe’s analysis is both persuasive and disturbing.
Timothy W. Luke’s chapter on assault weapons parses one of the most important symbolically fraught firearms, the AR-15 assault rifle. With one exception, Luke’s narrative is an exceptionally skillful and insightful account that interweaves technological changes with symbolic and marketing considerations. Luke’s one disputable claim is his insistence that civilian versions of military assault rifles are not in fact assault rifles, a term he (and others) insist is inappropriate because they fire only in semiautomatic mode, whereas the military versions can fire either semi- or fully automatically. To support his claim he says that the civilian versions were intentionally named “Modern Sporting Rifles” and sold with low-capacity magazines. But the gun industry’s rebranding was just that—a marketing ploy. The absence of a fully auto fire mode for civilian weapons is just and only that. Whether civilian or military, assault weapons are still configured to lay down spray fire.
Weaponized drones represent a different instance in which technology allows for the detachment of the destructive device from those who control it, but where, unlike a cannon or mortar or gravity bomb, the explosive charge is guided directly to its target from a very far distance. Detachment, control, and precision have all made such weapons seductively appealing, as Heather Ashley Hayes notes. With the operators safely removed from harm, drone use has skyrocketed in the last decade, as have casualty figures, including of many innocents. Part of the “social life” of drones is their accompanying sound, which has had a terrifying effect on daily life in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The social life of bullets is the subject of Joanna Bourke’s chapter—specifically, a roiling controversy at the turn of the twentieth century over “dum-dum” bullets, which expanded on hitting their targets, magnifying their destructive capabilities. Oddly, the fierce debate over these bullets overshadowed the introduction of far more destructive weapons and devices. This fascinating historical account finds that the bullets were fetishized as independent actors.
Renowned criminologist Franklin E. Zimring analyzes police shootings of unarmed African Americans to address two key questions: why they face an unusually high risk of death at the hands of police and what might be done to reduce this death toll. Zimring offers five remedies.
I bet you did not know that concealed carrying of guns is now a “lifestyle.” The old gun culture that centered on hunting, sporting, and recreational gun uses has been eclipsed by a Gun Culture 2.0, claims David Yamane, in which armed citizenship focuses on self-defense, bringing together gun marketing and the ideology of personal self-defense.
Harel Shapira brings in the role of the body in human behavior to dissect the gun experience with respect to how people hold, shoot, and carry guns. Even loading a gun has become highly ritualized.
Both of these books seek to think outside of the box. That in itself is a worthy enterprise, especially for an issue as intractable as this one. Obert’s contribution in The Six-Shooter State is not quite as successful as his sometimes breathless analysis suggests; still its central analysis is important in understanding the interrelationship between public and private policing and what it reveals about state power when it collides with a fierce counter-belief that government power is better exercised when it is in private hands. The Lives of Guns is and will be important if it moves forward the new research and new thinking it touts, and sometimes achieves, about guns in America. Political science has come late to the study of gun policy, but these works show that it has much to offer. Just when you think there is really not much more to say, along comes writing like this.
