It would be accurate to say that Thomas’s decision lacks humanity, in the sense that there are no humans present in his reasoning. And this makes sense, because it turns out that removing humans from the semi-auto/bump-stock/auto equation is the way to make his argument work logically.

We can think of guns as a pollutant in the US for the same reason we can similarly define noise, light, and carbon dioxide: all were once part of a relatively stable, not overly disruptive environment but have increased to a degree that massively changes our lived experience and, in some cases, cause great harm.

I have a new article out in this edited collection of papers delivered at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America conference. My chapter talks about how carrying a gun in public gets defined as a type of care work. Care work like nursing or teaching, parenting or elder care, is usually associated with women or femininity, but I’m arguing that carrying gets coded as care work for men.

If your version of liberty is a life awash in firearms, then what you really mean by “freedom” is “risk.” But this semantic switcheroo is not simply a matter of being uninformed about the dangers of firearms; it’s also about being more scared of threats to your identity than threats to your life.

Viewed properly in their full context, these opinions are soaked in blood, yet death is omitted from their pages. There are no bullet wounds. No dead children. No husbands standing over their dead wives with a hot gun in their hands. No mass shooters taunting their hunted victims. There are, in short, no bodies. Like an efficient mob hit, the court’s majority opinion has hidden them.