Guns As Civic Technology
What mutual lethal threats make of us
We have trouble talking about guns. No one really argues the positive case for gun culture, except as limp paeans to recreational hunting or target shooting. More common justifications are either procedural or negative: they fall back to textual justifications for the right to bear arms, or they argue that owning guns are necessary as a hedge against the gun violence that itself only exists because of guns themselves.
This trouble arises in part because we have no clear picture of what they are. Are they just machines for doing things, like a power tool? Or a dark object in which we have trapped otherworldly destructive power? There is an entire genre of videos where ‘liberals try shooting guns for the first time’ and are interviewed to see whether their political (or personal) positions have changed after the experience. The videos show individuals grappling with internal contradictions: shooting guns is a thrill, but they are also deadly. Guns are just physical mechanisms, but they are also imbued with an inhuman power.
So too do gun enthusiasts find themselves convulsed by internal contradictions about the meaning of the gun. Many take pains to emphasize just how banal the gun is, a mere object like any tool and a fun recreational mechanism. And yet the singular passion that gun culture arouses tells a different tale. No power tool or mechanism inspires political movements, major sales shows, aggressive and violent protectionism, cringe-worthy truck stickers, or status-seeking behavior like guns do.
Are guns mechanisms? Talismans? Devices?
Neither of these opposing poles really capture what guns are. We would be better served by talking about the gun like we talk about devices: tools which are not merely physical objects but are systems, ways of life, powerful objects that shape how we view ourselves, others, and the world. In this light, a gun operates in the same way that smartphones change the way we interact socially and cars change the physical layout of cities. These relatively small objects have enormous, epochal impacts.
Calling a gun a device lets us defuse the internal conflict revealed in both gun enthusiasts and gun skeptics: the gun is an object, yes, but with important physical, social, and spiritual characteristics. These characteristics are not necessarily intrinsic to the object, but they emerge from the way the device interfaces with human nature and culture.
The right to bear arms
If we analyzed guns as technologies—personal devices—with civic implications, what would we find it made of our society? There is an obvious civics lesson embedded here: the Second Amendment establishes the right to bear arms, intended as a lever by which a civic body can pry up tyranny and maintain the integrity of their government. It is a technology which once arguably did shape and maintain a civic body.
Of course, that is how it started. Conditions have changed since the Bill of Rights was written. These changes makes reading the Second Amendment like opening a time capsule, where “well-ordered militia” invites comparisons to weirdos in the woods of Idaho. It seems far-fetched, in our age of a large and professional standing army, to argue that the presence of guns in the United States forms an actual hedge in this day and age against any but the most tyrannical of hypothetical overreaches.
But I am not interested at all in the constitutional argument about the proper way to interpret the Second Amendment. Its text no longer circumscribes the impact guns have on civic culture. Whether jurisprudence has interpreted it correctly or not, the Second Amendment has made the gun a wholly individual and personal birthright, a technology for citizens to relate not to their government but to each other. This does achieve equal standing for us all, but in a new kind of world altogether. What kind of world is that?
Think of the gun as an actual device
It might help us think about the gun as a device by imagining it as a literal device. Let us say that, sometime in the future, it became possible to build a keyfob with a button that, when pressed, would instantly kill anyone you were looking at. Imagine that these became widely purchased and were, by their design, essentially invisible. Instantly and without warning, you could be struck dead by anyone who had you in their line of sight. Would this change how you moved through the world?
You might take the cautious route and just not go out anymore. After all, it would be safest to stay out of the line of sight of everyone, if anyone could be a lethal threat. You might not engage in riskier social behavior—confronting an abuser, trying to calm an irate customer, intervening in an aggressive situation turning violent—because the stakes of the outcome would be much higher: you might just die, instantly.
You would be much more vulnerable to implicit threats, as well. A keychain is relatively small and generic. If someone looks you in the eye, their hands in their pockets, and tells you to give them your money, you'd probably just do it. You'd also be distrustful of your neighbors. Are any of them carrying one in their pockets when you see them on a walk? You'd even read into eye contact, people-watching, or anti-social behaviors a new existential threat. Ultimately you might get one yourself as a kind of ward against others who might have one. The only way to stop a bad guy with a keychain is a good guy with a keychain.
If you are inclined, you might object to the particulars of this analogy, as all analogies falter under the weight of additional comparisons. But I challenge you to articulate a substantial difference between this horrific imaginary keychain and the gun that is a difference of kind, not of degree. What I mean is this: you might argue that this keychain differs categorically from a gun because this device is always lethal without exception, unlike the gun, which can miss or inflict a non-fatal injury. But that is only a difference in degree of lethality. Certainly, many gunshots are not lethal. But that is really only a technical limitation measured on a sliding scale. Gun manufacturers will, absent regulatory constraints, continue to improve the lethality of firearms, because lethality is what they are for. A difference of kind would be to say "guns are not fundamentally lethal, but the keychain is." But it would only be appropriate to say "at this point in history, guns are not as lethal as the keychain is." The exception is a technical, not categorical one—a “gun of the gaps” argument.
The vicious downward spiral
The imaginary keychain-acculturated society is a grim one. Every step you could take to protect yourself, to find some locally optimal way of existing in this world, would only accelerate you and your fellow citizens toward a more violent, more distrustful future. I have written at length about vicious and virtuous cycles: cycles which provide the momentum for their own spin until the system in question arrives at some higher or lower level. Guns are an engine of a particularly vicious spiral because they do two things simultaneously: they lower civic trust, and then create the solution to their own problem.
If some people have guns, more people will want guns to protect themselves, project lethal force, and to re-establish themselves in an implicit civic hierarchy of dominance. When they get guns, the next tranche of fence-sitters will jump over and join the ranks, seeking comparative power equality. This entails a devolution of trust. At least part of the motivation for the purchase of a gun is to catch up in the zero-sum arms race of a post-civic culture in which individual autonomy and domination are the only surefire way to render yourself invulnerable. It is, in other words, the law of the jungle: a kind of freedom achieved only for an individual through domination and the tacit threat of violence, a kind of freedom which is no positive vision of freedom at all.
What is the endgame of gun ubiquity?
What I am describing here is not hyperbole. It is actually the ideal society described by gun rights advocates. Their solution to gun violence is to arm more people, as evidenced both by their legislative proposals and their public pronouncements. It is this exhausting, trust-draining spiral that they want to ride to gun ubiquity. Even in the best-case scenario, guns are reactive hedges against violence; they almost never prevent murder, but only react to it once it has been attempted.
To go further and claim that preemptive uses of good guys with guns can keep the gunfire brief and minimize (but never eliminate) murder by gun is to place an impossible burden on the ordinary citizen. Faced with the uncertainty of an evolving situation, primed to be on high alert and distrustful of even ordinary circumstances, but reluctant to take irreversible action without clear proof, how could you expect them to respond? They have been vested not with the tacit assent of the governed or given legally-framed monopoly rights to the just exercise of deadly force in common defense. Instead, they are a citizen who made a simple purchase and maybe, if we're lucky, was carefully evaluated for mental fitness before doing so.
A civic body cannot abide the vigilantism that would be required with a fully armed and low-trust citizenry. The defense of others is a noble and heroic act. But the technical culture of a society armed with ubiquitous deadly force is one in which natural and pro-social impulses toward noble and self-sacrificial heroism metastasize into a violent and sinister distrust.
We don’t trust each other
Our society cannot survive “fully armed” and “low-trust”. Trust is a vital component. Consider how a technologically-mediated social experience can warp our understanding of our selves and our relationship to others. This tends to occur with our relationships inevitably unless they are built in the real world first and foremost, not mediated by disembodied digital interaction. Likewise, the gun as a technology reshapes our social environment, but only when there is not much other substance to constitute it. Absent a thick and trust-filled society, guns occupy useful interpersonal roles: to project power, to render oneself autonomous, to earn some status. But they do so in an environment denuded of the ordinary, but receding, decencies of a civil society.
An advocate for guns might point out that guns have followed by necessity the erosion of trust-filled societies, not caused it. They are half right: there are plenty of social ills which have eroded trust between neighbors. They are sociological, technological, economic, spiritual, or some unholy amalgam. But are guns the right prescription for what ails us, or just another techno-political destabilizer accelerating our downward trajectory? Some argue for the civic usefulness of guns, claiming that it is the Second Amendment that is the keystone to the rest of the Bill of Rights, the First among them. But this rings hollow with the human experience. Trust-filled and rights-laden civil societies are not internally maintained at gun-point, propped up by the constant threat of violence. Such a society would be one devoid of liberty and shot through with fear.
Likewise, one might object that a low-trust society requires guns. Low-trust societies, after all, are ‘natural’ in a fallen world, and guns are therefore an unfortunate necessity. I might suggest an inversion: only a high-trust society can survive guns. If it is true that this drain-circling, low-trust equilibrium is a feature of human nature, then the angels of our better natures ought to have us abstaining from making guns like an alcoholic maintains sobriety.
The ubiquitous possibility of deadly force destabilizes a citizenry. It laces ordinary social encounters, ones that might ordinarily end anywhere between a roll of the eyes and a brawl, with the threat of lethal force. It is an agent in the erosion of trust. It is a device with physical, social, and spiritual consequences. If anyone could be carrying the means to end your life at any time, every interaction carries with it the subtext of a lethal threat. Every neighbor and fellow citizen would project an autonomy hard-won by the implicit threat of violence, not a common cause or mutual interest.
Advocates for gun culture must make the case that the technical and material culture that guns are constructing in the United States by their ubiquity is affirmatively good, just, and free—better, more just, and freer than a society without them would be. Retreating to procedural or historical arguments about the necessity of the firearm to the American Revolution, or of the individual applicability or the legal breadth of the Second Amendment, or of the tautological necessity of more guns in a world with some guns, is to elide the more fundamental question: right now, what are guns good for?