Mobile Sovereigns: Guns in Public

• In Event: Politics and Political Theory in the Space of Appearances

Abstract

There are more guns in the United States than there are citizens. Most gun owners state that they own guns for "protection", yet having a gun does not make a person safer; in fact, people are much more likely to die by gunshot if they own a gun. What explains, then, the feeling of security that gun ownership confers, and the more general rise in gun ownership across the United States? Gun ownership, I will argue, has become a way for people, especially white men who make up the vast majority of owners, to feel as if they are personally sovereign over many of the precarious economic and political experiences that shape their daily lives. The last few decades have been called an era of uncertainty in the US, when longstanding political, economic and social structures, initially created to support a flourishing citizenry, have been eviscerated, leaving people feeling isolated and vulnerable. Gun ownership, I suggest, carries the implicit promise of counteracting increasing economic and social insecurity by rehabilitating a violent fantasy of individual sovereignty. This fantasy changes the groundwork of politics: it alters the nature of sovereign power, violently scrambles the boundaries of the political, and diminishes the space of appearances necessary for free political action.

Gun ownership in an era of concealed carry and Stand Your Ground laws -- which enable guns legally in public space if they are hidden, and allow them to be used with less consequence -- challenges the idea that our current era is only one of waning sovereignty. It is, rather that the concept of sovereignty changes; gun carrying envisions a different type of sovereign power, one that is mobile and without predetermined boundaries except the range of a bullet and the movement of the carrier’s body. Gun ownership confers a fragmented and mobile sovereignty that constantly alters the political boundary of an individual’s final authority. Carrying a gun produces a portable sovereignty without a fixed territory or known borders, setting up an evershifting and unpredictable range of individual control over life and death unknown to others who may enter it. The circumference of this gun-configured sovereign sphere traverses traditional demarcations of public/private and personal/political. Personal sovereignty becomes the space in which one has the lawful capacity to do violence if one feels under threat, whether in public or in private.

Two reconfigurations of the political arise from mobile sovereignty. First, gun carrying in public, while understood as a practice of freedom, instead narrows the spontaneity of political action by altering the space of appearances that, according to Hannah Arendt, makes true political freedom possible. Concealed carry is premised on the invisibility of the gun, so that the boundary of the mobile sovereign power to kill or let live is unknown to others who may be walking through it. Guns in public modulate the space of appearances precisely by not appearing, and thus suffuse the political with unseen -- but felt -- possibilities for violence at any moment. Their invisibility narrows the free and spontaneous action of political subjects; no one knows whether guns are present, and this preemptively truncates what is spoken, what is performed, and how or whether one enters public space. Second, gun carrying makes the capacity for harm in public the very condition of sovereignty. Within the mobile sovereignty of contemporary gun ownership the harm principle, so crucial to liberal theory, is reconfigured: individual sovereignty does not stop if one harms another. Rather, individual sovereignty is now marked by the very capacity for one to harm another. The mobile sovereignty of gun ownership, therefore, invests in violent performances of sovereign power that contract free action and divest in the shared public spaces that sustain the groundwork of politics.

Author

• Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University