Loaded Politics: What Gun Politics Can Tell Us About U.S. Democracy
In early 2020, Vice News ran this headline to describe the sudden surge in gun sales in the United States: “Gun Lovers are Claiming a Huge ‘I Told You So’ Moment with the Coronavirus Outbreak.” The numbers themselves were telling — by year’s end, close to 23 million guns were purchased, with a sizeable portion going to first-time gun buyers. But what, exactly, did these numbers tell us? How did guns figure into the crises of 2020, which included a once-in-a-century pandemic, civil unrest and anti-racist uprisings amid police violence, and increasing instability in American democratic institutions?
During the first half of 2020, I interviewed fifty gun sellers from Arizona, California, Florida, and Michigan — four bellwether states that varied markedly in terms of their pandemic responses, their gun laws, and their political cultures. I wanted to understand what 2020 looked like from the vantage point of the gun counter, including how these people understood the coronavirus and the gun purchasing surge COVID appeared to ignite, how they wrapped their heads around the political, economic, and social dynamics unfolding around them, and, more broadly, how they made sense of it all with respect to American society and American politics. Their voices helped put into focus the political orientations advanced by the conservative gun rights movement — led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) — since the 1970s and how this movement has shaped the political lives of conservative Americans.
Conservative politics is not just about substance; it’s also about style. During my interviews, I recognized a style of politics that centered on armed individualism, hardened partisanship, and a brand of anti-elitism that encouraged conspiracist thinking. The gun sellers with whom I spoke extolled gun ownership as self-reliance — a bulwark against the tyranny of both too much and too little government. They celebrated armed individualism in the face of what they perceive as government ineptitude. Aaron (all names are pseudonyms), a California gun dealer, illustrated: “This is an individual right, and the Supreme Court affirmed that, Number 1. And Number 2…police don't have an inherent duty to protect you. By default, it falls on the individual.” For him, the right to bear arms was connected to his right to keep his business open during 2020’s lockdowns: “I don’t believe the government should have the right…to just decide at random” which businesses stay open and stay closed. For Aaron, if government has neither a duty to protect individuals nor a right to decide who has access to firearms and who does not, then individuals could turn to one thing for security: the gun. He was enthusiastic, even prideful, about the broad swath of people coming into his store to exercise the right the Second Amendment enshrined: "For the first time, regardless of your demographic, regardless of your background…everybody is…looking at the future and realizing, 'Shit. I’m not necessarily guaranteed anything tomorrow.'"
Like Aaron, Robert, from Florida, emphasized the right to self-defense as, in his words, “the only guarantee.” As he said, “I’ve been using the word ‘fake news’ for a while now, for both sides of the aisle. And I think that [fake news] has caused the uncertainty, and when you have uncertainty, you have to have a guarantee, and the only guarantee in this country is the right to protect yourself.” For him, the only sure thing was the Second Amendment, and that’s exactly how he could stitch together the armed individualism, partisanship, and conspiracist thinking that threaded through my conversation with him. For Robert, the Great Gun Surge of 2020 allowed him an opportunity to mock the opponents of gun rights as they crossed the political aisle en masse to buy firearms: “We’ve had a lot of people openly expressing the fact that they are in disbelief that they’d ever be purchasing a firearm, and here they are!...I’ve had people say ‘I’ve been voting against these things [guns] for my entire life’ and blah blah blah!...[Or they’ll say] ‘What do you mean a three-day wait?’ I tell them [sarcastically], ‘this is common sense gun control, isn’t it?’” Though they prized the newfound demographic diversity of gun buyers, gun sellers often chided new gun owners’ political diversity, linking up the “liberal mindset” with a lack of preparedness, irresponsible gun ownership, and general political ignorance. Steven from Florida quipped, “for some reason, they don’t look at real science.” Arizona’s Ron explained, “I feel that the left, or the liberals, are more selective on what’s gonna immediately benefit them.” Transforming partisanship from a mere matter of policy preference into a much deeper antipathy, the gun sellers I interviewed often treated their partisan opponents as irresponsible, ignorant, or even unworthy of civic engagement and political voice.
Gun sellers’ sardonic take on new gun owners as ill-informed stood in contrast with their own thinking: they were profoundly skeptical. They emphasized that they performed their own “research,” refused to sheepishly follow the mainstream media, and questioned experts of all kinds — whether from the media, science or government — a set of predispositions that fall under what political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead label “the new conspiracism.” Robert in Florida, for example, casually questioned whether 9/11 was an “inside job.” He wondered whether the coronavirus came from a “Wuhan lab” with “an American scientist, American backers, American funding.” He concluded by saying, “the possibility for a conspiracy is extremely large. The thing is, people who were conspiracy theorists five, ten years ago are now right.” Extending the conspiracist thinking inherent in the “slippery slope” argument against gun regulation, they transformed anti-elitist attitudes about government, science and the media into a skeptical individualism that situated them as uniquely qualified knowers precisely because they refused the facts they believe the elites were forcing them to accept.
Talking with conservative gun sellers across the U.S. during 2020, I found they made sense of their political realities by drawing on the kinds of political rhetoric and ideological sensibilities that the NRA had long promulgated as part of its defense of gun rights. The NRA’s lobbying power has often been cited as one of the primary reasons why the U.S. lacks many of the gun restrictions shared by Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia. As political scientist Matthew Lacombe examines in Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force, since the 1970s the NRA has mobilized identity — specifically, the gun owner — to cultivate investment in gun politics as conservative politics and then transformed this investment into political engagement potent enough to shape the gun policy agenda at large. As Lacombe disentangles, this identity work has entailed more than just celebrating gun owners: in addition to valorizing gun owners, it depends on denigrating anyone who opposes gun rights and asserting the threat of rights infringement in any attempt to regulate or reform gun policy, no matter how small. In other words, the NRA framed gun rights as a “package deal” comprised of armed individualism, rancorous partisanship, and conspiracist thinking — something that helps explain why Trump, an endorser of conspiracy theories like birtherism, could appeal to the NRA and its base despite his lackluster record on gun rights. The NRA hasn’t just influenced what democracy does in terms of passing gun policy, as the organization’s power is typically framed. It has also helped reshape how democracy feelsfor people invested in gun politics — and how they go about navigating their everyday political lives.
Despite this deep alliance between the views of the NRA and the gun sellers I interviewed, the dealers weren’t simply regurgitating NRA’s talking points. Rather, the political perspectives they offered — armed individualism, conspiracism and partisanship — appealed because they spoke to fundamental issues in democracy, particularly multiracial democracy as it has taken shape in the U.S. Armed individualism curbed the core tension between public welfare and individual prerogative within democracy by situating the gun not just as a primary means of personal protection but also as a key vehicle for political empowerment, circumventing collective responsibility with an appeal to individual rights that resonates as inclusive even as it often bolsters traditional social hierarchies along the lines of race, class and gender. (Hence, the pro-gun mantra, “God created all men, but Samuel Colt made them equal,” or the NRA’s self-description as “longest-standing civil rights organization.”) Conspiracy thinking is a populist response to the fact that, despite its flaunting of popular sovereignty, democracy remains haunted by the division between the elite and the people. And partisanship spoke to an inherent contradiction within democracy: it is a political system that aims to bring different-minded people into political consensus — one that, paradoxically, promises to protect our shared rights by honoring the differences in how we live, what we value, and what we believe. Gun sellers used armed individualism, conspiracism and partisanship to make a statement about the relationship between Americans and their guns. But these political sensibilities did much more than that: they also created expectations regarding relationships among citizens — and the kind of democratic politics that bound them together. Specifically, they threatened to exacerbate already-deep fault lines within American politics by undermining shared truths necessary for the democratic process to thrive (a symptom of conspiracism) and justifying the denigration of political opponents — turning them into enemies and opening the door for anti-democratic exclusion and subordination (partisanship). What’s left is a narrow, negative freedom: the freedom to be left alone (armed individualism).
Most Americans today — liberals and conservatives — believe that democracy is in crisis. The recent hearings from the January 6th Select Commission reveal an orchestrated attempt by Donald Trump to undermine the integrity of the United States’ electoral process from 2020 into 2021. Listening to everyday conservatives — such as the people I interviewed who were on the frontlines of the unprecedented gun sales of 2020 — suggests that this crisis is not simply one of top-down capture and institutional collapse, but also the result of a bottom-up culture that shapes how many Americans engage democracy. The gun sellers I interviewed may have been part of a group the NRA could mobilize to block gun restrictions, but their politics ranged beyond shaping specific gun laws. From the ground up, they built a conservative political culture that centered on the right to keep and bear arms — and reworked what it means to “do democracy” in the process. Interestingly, very few of the gun sellers I interviewed mentioned the NRA as a powerhouse within gun politics, perhaps because they didn’t have to. The NRA had already shaped the terrain of American democracy, and now it was up to them how to till this political soil. The NRA didn’t create the conditions of our contemporary democratic crisis on its own, nor has it compelled gun rights proponents to, without thought, regurgitate its talking points. Those explanations are too simple. Frankly, they underestimate the depth of democratic crisis currently unfolding in the U.S. Rather, this is a crisis not just of our political institutions but also of our political culture.
Although the solutions to the current crisis in U.S. democracy are often debated as a matter of top-down institutional reform (think: campaign finance reform, expanded protection of voting rights, the end of the filibuster, the expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court, and more), our political institutions are only as good as the political culture that sustains them. And our political culture has become increasingly defined by our incapacity to see one another as equals, a propensity to dismiss our shared losses as individual misfortunes, and a basic disagreement on what constitutes political reality in the first place. Though I studied a group of conservative gun sellers, I can see these trends across the political spectrum — albeit in very different forms (I am no fan of “bothsidesing”). Unfortunately, the spaces for productive political engagement — especially through engagement with people who disagree with us — have shrunk dramatically in recent decades as public education has become defunded and censored, social media has arrested our attention spans, and we have increasingly sorted ourselves into political siloes.
Some have already concluded that this country’s political system is beyond repair. Beyond the trends laid out above, there is good reason to feel this way. U.S. democracy’s promise of justice, equity, and freedom has long been a broken one for marginalized people, and inequalities and systems of domination — particularly white supremacy — have indelibly marked U.S. democracy since its beginnings. Repairing the foundations of U.S. democracy will require recognizing, and reckoning with, how the U.S. political system falls short of its ideals, especially as the U.S. becomes more diverse and more unequal. To do so, we must focus our efforts not just on how democracy “happens” from above, but also how democracy is “done” in our everyday lives. An inclusive, robust, and representative system that earns the mantle of “popular sovereignty” requires civic engagement that enhances political equanimity, encourages our capacity to treat one another (and ourselves) with civic grace, and foregrounds our shared vulnerability. Amid deep trust and partisan animosity, those rare realms for deliberate conversation that suspend political divisiveness — such as the America in One Room project, the Make America Dinner initiative, and perhaps even your local college classroom — become crucial arenas that remind us how to share political space with those around us and develop the civic capacities to do so, thus deepening what sociologist Andrew Perrin calls our “democratic imaginations.” Reckoning with the crisis of U.S. democracy requires, it turns out, a reckoning with ourselves.
About the Author:
Jennifer Carlson is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Government & Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research examines the significance of guns in American society, including gun politics, gun law enforcement, and gun violence. Her forthcoming book entitled Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy will be published in May 2023 with Princeton University Press. In addition to her award-winning scholarship, she is a frequent contributor to national debates about guns in outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, and The Atlantic.