New article: Carrying a gun as a type of care work

I have a new article out in this edited collection of papers delivered at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America conference. The whole book is free to download, and you should! There are lots of great essays in there, and since they’re conference papers, they’re short!

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. This happens in part through the “sheepdog” ethos. In the subset of gun culture devoted to carrying regularly, it’s pretty common to break down society into sheepdogs, sheep, and wolves. Wolves are dangerous, violent criminals; sheepdogs are caring protectors capable of violence; and the sheep are pretty much everyone else. Many carriers see themselves as sheepdogs.

This way of seeing the world gets preached in NRA training seminars and has made its way into popular culture. In American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood movie starring Bradley Cooper as the famous sniper Chris Kyle, there’s a dinner-table scene where Kyle’s father tells young Chris and his brother that the world is divided into these three types. It originates in the work of Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, prolific author and trainer of police.

My chapter analyzes the “Sheepdog” essay in Grossman’s book On Combat, and it evaluates the “sheepdog as care-worker” frame according to more rigorous theories of care ethics. Can this way of thinking about carrying a gun really be an ethical form of caring for others? Well, not really. It’s too identity-based and self-serving for carriers, and it almost completely ignores the wishes of the “sheep” (i.e. nearly everyone) to make any real claim to being ethical.

If that sounds interesting, give it a read. The article is covered under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. That basically means you’re free to read it or use it as long as any use acknowledges my authorship and isn’t for profit. Thanks!

image credit: The Spruce Pets