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

Published: 04 May 2020

Brandon Hunter-Pazzara
Palgrave Communications volume 6, Article number: 79 (

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Introduction
In May of 2016, nearly 4 years after the murder of Trayvon Martin and 3 years after the controversial trial that acquitted George Zimmerman, Zimmerman successfully auctioned the weapon he used to slay Martin. Reports eventually confirmed that the gun sold for $250,000 to a woman looking to purchase the object as a present for her son. Commenting on the depravity of the sale, Leonard Pitts Jr. connected it to the gruesome tradition of whites taking the body parts of lynched African Americans as souvenirs (Pitts Jr, 2016). “Trayon Martin,” Pitts Jr wrote, “was thing-ified” and “his murder commodified” by the sale of the weapon. Where a culture of whiteness drained Martin of his humanity, it was that same culture that transformed the gun from an object into an icon of self-defense and freedom—for those who enjoy white privilege. It simultaneously represented the terrifying power of whiteness and yet was indicative of a gun culture rooted in a racialized fear of people of color.

In response to tragedies like Martin’s murder, the racial bias of police and white gun owners is under increasing scrutiny from the public. These two groups, while distinct in certain ways, remain entangled by the use of their firearm and the social permission both groups inherit from the founding of the United States to use their weapons against people of color. The entrenched and systemic nature of this violence tends to be overshadowed by scrutinizing the individual conscious or unconscious racial bias. From this perspective, these shootings are the result of racial bias and it is this bias that structures and determines behavior. Focusing on intentionality leaves unquestioned the systemic ways in which guns find themselves in the hands of whites, how their use causes harm to people of color, and the way that harm is justified as self-defense. In this essay, I turn towards an analysis of the gun, exploring its “social life” and attending to the material ways guns produce social relations. A focus on the objects that cause racial harm builds on critical studies of race that emphasize the systemic nature of racism and racial privilege but does so by taking into account the material nature of that privilege and the distinct role of objects in these relationships. Following the work of Latour (2005) and Bennett (2010) I want to take guns seriously, treating them as co-constitutive of racial violence, or in Saldanha’s (2006) terms, as part of the “immanent process” in which bodies, objects, places, and events intermingle to produce racial gun violence. The gun, this paper contends, is not merely an inert object used by racist officers and white gunowners but is an active component that structures the relations that lead to racial gun violence in the United States.

For the purpose of this essay, I use the term racial gun violence in a narrow way to describe the use of guns by police officers and whites against people of color in the context of self-defense. Certainly, racial gun violence includes more than claims of self-defense to justify one’s use of a firearm against people of color. Mass shootings in which the assailant specifically targets people of color, as happened in an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019, is obviously another form of racial gun violence. Further, the persistent neglect of gun violence in poor communities of color constitutes a systemic form of racism rooted in sentiments that naturalize the existence of gun violence in these communities. This essay contends that at the heart of these various instances of gun violence is the weapon itself, which is not simply a neutral tool used to cause harm, but an object shaped by and shaping of race, racism, and racial violence.

Attending to the role of objects in society is a central theme in the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and I draw from two conceptual developments in his scholarship; the first relates to the understanding of the social processes that produce and distribute objects and allow for particular social relations to come into being, that is, objects’ “social lives” (Appadurai, 1986) The second, is a newer concept that builds on the previous idea and emphasizes the agentive nature of objects in shaping, constraining, and advancing human action—objects conceived as both “mediants” and materiality (Appadurai, 2015).

More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0464-x