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Summary
Summary
An urgent look at the relationship between guns, the police, and race
The United States is steeped in guns, gun violence--and gun debates. As arguments rage on, one issue has largely been overlooked--Americans who support gun control turn to the police as enforcers of their preferred policies, but the police themselves disproportionately support gun rights over gun control. Yet who do the police believe should get gun access? When do they pursue aggressive enforcement of gun laws? And what part does race play in all of this? Policing the Second Amendment unravels the complex relationship between the police, gun violence, and race. Rethinking the terms of the gun debate, Jennifer Carlson shows how the politics of guns cannot be understood--or changed--without considering how the racial politics of crime affect police attitudes about guns.
Drawing on local and national newspapers, interviews with close to eighty police chiefs, and a rare look at gun licensing processes, Carlson explores the ways police talk about guns, and how firearms are regulated in different parts of the country. Examining how organizations such as the National Rifle Association have influenced police perspectives, she describes a troubling paradox of guns today--while color-blind laws grant civilians unprecedented rights to own, carry, and use guns, people of color face an all-too-visible system of gun criminalization. This racialized framework--undergirding who is "a good guy with a gun" versus "a bad guy with a gun"--informs and justifies how police understand and pursue public safety.
Policing the Second Amendment demonstrates that the terrain of gun politics must be reevaluated if there is to be any hope of mitigating further tragedies.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A professor of sociology and government offers a study of gun laws and their racial implications in three states. Though sometimes overly academic, Carlson's account points to an important social problem: The Second Amendment right to carry a firearm is unequally applied to members of different ethnic groups. In particular, African Americans, such as Philando Castile, may be authorized to carry concealed weapons, but that fact did not keep a white police officer from gunning him down at a traffic stop. "The proliferation of guns," writes the author, "disproportionately harms African Americans who are feloniously killed, injured, and traumatized by them at rates that exceed manyfold those of other racial groups in the United States"--and that especially includes state harassment, usually by police. Carlson demonstrates in an argument that centers on Arizona, California, and Michigan that police officers and leaders tend to support gun rights, and far more so than the public; in particular, they oppose widespread bans. This seems a curious stance given that an armed society is certainly more lethal than an unarmed one, "but police nevertheless appear willing to live with the consequences of a widely armed society." This is generally as true in "gun-restrictive" California as it is in "gun-lax" Arizona. In the West, Carlson ventures, a tradition of law enforcement being used in the service of ethnic oppression--mostly of Hispanics and Native Americans--has translated into oppression of all minorities. This has not lessened in the least with the arrival of Donald Trump, since he "represented the populist stitching together of hard-knuckled policing with gun rights patriotism," earning the support of the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Rifle Association. Ultimately, Carlson writes, "structural racism intersects with gun policy to aggravate, rather than ameliorate, vulnerabilities facing communities of color." No one who reads this will doubt that the Second Amendment has particularly deadly dimensions in minority communities. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| A Note to Readers | p. ix |
| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction An Armed Society Is a Policed Society | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 Gun Politics in Blue | p. 24 |
| Chapter 2 The War on Guns | p. 57 |
| Chapter 3 Never Off Duty | p. 86 |
| Chapter 4 When the Government Doesn't Come Knocking | p. 106 |
| Chapter 5 Legally Armed but Presumed Dangerous | p. 143 |
| Conclusion Our Gun Talk | p. 171 |
| Appendix A Methodological Approach | p. 182 |
| On Gun Militarism: Discarded Lives | p. 197 |
| On Gun Populism: Shame on Us | p. 199 |
| On Reform: At the Pinnacle of Privilege | p. 201 |
| Appendix B Procedures for Protecting Research Subjects | p. 204 |
| Appendix C Interview Guide | p. 205 |
| Notes | p. 209 |
| Bibliography | p. 237 |
| Index | p. 263 |