The
NRA propaganda clip embodied a kind of respectability politics conservative gun
sellers expected minority buyers to perform to be welcomed into the ambit of “responsible”
gun ownership. One of Carlson’s interlocutors, speaking to her in the middle of
the summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings, offered a portrait of the type of
new buyer conservative gun sellers found particularly attractive: “From
minorities, and from Black women, actually … [I hear] that a large number do not
support the Black Lives Matter protests or rioting or any of that,” he said.
“And that’s the greatest thing about gun ownership! Everyone can connect in
it—it’s a primal thing and a big jump in personal responsibility that carries
over into everyday life.” Gun sellers used minority buyers to promote an ethic
of individual empowerment, centered around the armed citizen and their gun, that
rejected protest and collective solutions to social problems. The
gun sellers Carlson interviewed were primed to respond to the summer’s
uprisings with a suspicion that very frequently curdled into conspiracism. An
unsettling number of Carlson’s interviewees responded to questions about the
protests with some version of “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but.…” One seller,
though he admitted that he didn’t “know a lot about Black Lives Matter,” told
Carlson that he could “smell it—how’s that? Does that work for you? I smell
what it is.” Another, faced with riots in majority-white Grand Rapids, Michigan,
pointed to the “synchronized manner” in which the uprisings sprang up—“that
just doesn’t happen in the Midwest outside of Detroit and Chicago”—and attributed
it to “some kind of underlying dark force.” These claims reflect a type of apocalyptic
paranoia that is and has long been a staple of pro-gun rhetoric: At an NRA
convention just after the Uvalde massacre, for example, one member told Politico that the school
shooting could have been produced by “forces someplace that somehow find
troubled people and nurture and develop them and push them for their own
agendas.”For
the people Carlson interviewed, conspiracy theories about Black Lives Matter
protests, the pandemic, and the 2020 election served a clear purpose. By
offering all-encompassing, unfalsifiable explanations for major events and
dividing the world neatly into friends and enemies, conspiracies allowed gun
sellers to avoid grappling with the converging crises of 2020 as members of a
small-d democratic public. In a sense, Carlson writes, gun sellers “use”
conspiracism in much the same way they “use” their firearms: Convinced that their
guns, and their guns alone, would give them protection, they were able to “circumvent
the urgent questions of collective action and of democratic deliberation”
generated by the protests and pandemic. “When you have uncertainty, you have to
have a guarantee,” said one of Carlson’s interlocutors. “And the only guarantee
in this country is the right to protect yourself.”
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