The possessive investment in guns: towards a material, social, and racial analysis of guns

In the midst of public attention to the question of racial gun violence both at the hands of vigilantes and police, this essay draws from anthropological theory on object–human relationships to reframe our understanding of racial gun violence. Following Appadurai’s (1986, 2015) attention to the “social lives” of objects and the way that objects function as both “median and materiality,” this essay argues that the demand for self-defense has altered the meaning of firearms and produced a system in which racial gun violence is normalized. Formed in three parts, the first develops a theoretical framework for thinking about the role of objects, in this case guns, in the production of social relationships. Doing so, this essay argues, allows us to take objects seriously as actors that work to produce moments of racial gun violence, as well as understand how these patterns of gun violence are the result of the mass production, distribution, and racialized marketing of the gun for the purpose of self-defense. In the second section, I utilize this framework to trace the legal, marketing, and engineering shifts that have resulted in the expansion of concealed carry laws, the development of a highly racialized marketing strategy that ties gun ownership to self-defense, and the production of smaller and more powerful pistols which now dominate the gun market. This new era of guns in American life builds from a longer history in which the gun remains central to the maintenance of the American racial order. Yet, the gun in this sense is not simply a signifier of race, but as this essay maintains, is both a material component shaping the bodily practices and cognitive capacities of gunowners, and a billion-dollar industry that has lobbied successfully to make guns more accessible and to make their use, for whites, less accountable under the law. In the final section, I undertake a rereading of the murder of Trayvon Martin, focusing on George Zimmerman’s murder weapon and the role it played both in the killing of Martin, and in sparing Zimmerman from conviction. By focusing on the role guns play in instances of racial violence and inequality, this essay demonstrates how new materialist scholarship can chart new pathways for understanding this important and timely issue.