Why bring a gun to a germ fight?

As photos of armed protesters flood the news this morning, I can’t help wondering what people in other countries must think. The protests in Michigan’s statehouse are, of course, against governor Gretchen Whitmer’s social distancing orders, but onlookers unfamiliar with U.S. gun culture might reasonably wonder what guns have to do with, well, any of this. And even for us here in the U.S. the sight is perplexing. If people are protesting for the right to reopen their business, or go back to work, or eat at a restaurant, why in the world would they strap a military-style weapon – or any weapon – to themselves?

My professional training is in rhetoric, the study of how words and other symbols lead to actions in the world – basically, persuasion. Over the last couple of years I’ve been studying gun culture, so I’m interested in, among other things, how guns function as symbols that communicate certain ideas. And its that angle that I think helps explain these arrestingly weird images of men bringing guns to a germ fight,. 

It’s easy to dismiss these armed protesters as cranks or extremists, as privileged whiners used to getting their way, or as political agitators stirred up by the president’s call to “LIBERATE” states. But it’s important to look at the larger decisions we’ve made as a country that make these protests possible, even likely. Of course there isn’t just one cause, but the one I want to focus on is the way we’ve slowly turned public services into private responsibilities. There are lots of examples, from education to consumer protection, but the relevant one here is safety from violent crime. Where keeping citizens safe from violent crime was once seen as the purview of collectively supported government, now individual citizens are encouraged to be their own police, by organizing their own neighborhood watch patrols, maintaining their own private armories, and carrying guns in public, whether concealed or openly. 

In short, the gun has become a symbol of the powers the state has given over to private citizens. A gun isn’t just a tool you shoot things with, it’s a symbol to be waved in public whenever government is seen to exceed its authority. A gun – especially a big, showy, military-style gun – is way of telling government it doesn’t have the powers its representatives think it has, because those powers have been slowly ceded to individuals.  

So in Michigan, where Governor Whitmer’s social distancing orders strike many as illegitimate government overreach, openly brandished guns are a way of saying to the state, “Sorry, you gave up that kind of power a long time ago.”

And it makes a degree of sense. On the one hand, government has told you for years that you literally have life and death powers over your fellow citizens through your right to carry weapons in public and “stand your ground.” On the other hand, you can’t drive or go boating for a while, maybe a long while, we actually don’t know how long, and you probably just shouldn’t leave your house at all. 

“Oh yeah?” many people say – and out come the guns. 

One interesting angle to all this is that there’s an element to these protests that isn’t anti-government at all, but pro-government – or, maybe more accurately, “co-government.” Most people who carry guns regularly don’t think of themselves in opposition to police, but in partnership with them. If you read the literature of the concealed carry movement, as I’ve been doing for a while now, you find current and ex-cops who want civilians to carry, and civilians who hold police in the highest regard. Carriers are often people with a deep-seated belief in order and hierarchy who see certain parts of government, like police, as legitimate authorities they are happy to defer to. Helping police carry out their mission of maintaining order is seen as an honor and a serious responsibility. 

This has several effects, many of them bad, some of which play out in the recent protests in ways that strike observers as highly distasteful and dangerous. One is an extreme “us-them” orientation that smacks of authoritarianism, or even fascism. When carriers align themselves with police, they align against people they see as “criminals” and consider it their duty to defend society against them. Sociologists like Scott Melzer, Jennifer Carlson, and Angela Stroud, to name a few recent examples, have shown that mainstream gun culture’s ideas of criminality are racially coded, with “good guys” most often seen as white and “bad guys” as non-white. And the ability to carry a gun in public, as well as the ability to get away with shooting someone, largely skews white. 

Aligning with police and carrying legally also gives many carriers a feeling of moral superiority that’s reflected in their “good guy vs. bad guy” language. Carriers see themselves as part of the “thin blue line” maintaining a social order that could easily slip into chaos, an idea constantly reinforced in gun-culture literature. All of this simplifies social morality to a dangerous degree. It spreads the idea that good and evil are quickly and easily identifiable, and that good has a right to eliminate evil. It’s a children’s book version of how the world works, only brought to life with live ammo. 

Luckily, none of these protests have resulted in bloodshed (though it is possible they are spreading the virus). And while it makes sense to see armed protesters as emissaries of a dangerous worldview, it’s also important to see them as part of a bigger trend in which the collective of government offloads its responsibilities onto private companies and citizens. This virus is exposing the consequences of that trend in many, many ways, from a fragmented and underprepared health-care system to a dangerously sluggish federal response. The visibility of military-grade weapons is, sadly, part of this trend, too.