Person:

Light, Caroline

“Just before the lie-in at the Capitol… someone came running up to me to tell me there were hundreds of guys with guns there already. I remember walking through them, all of us, giving our speeches fighting for strong gun laws to stop the carnage and save lives and then lying down in protest. They surrounded us with their guns. They heckled and laughed. At victim families from the largest mass shooting in American history.”

• Abby Spangler, first session of Virginia state legislature following Virginia Tech massacre, winter 2008

This interdisciplinary essay, co-authored by an immunologist/gun reform activist and a cultural historian specializing in gender and critical race studies, combines firsthand narrative testimony and oral history with social scientific research on gender intimidation to address the politically silencing consequences of armed intimidation from “gun rights” activists. With an eye to the suppression of female voices demanding gun regulations, we unpack the asymmetrical costs of “debate” when only one side can credibly threaten deadly consequences for their opponents’ political organizing. Many discussions of our nation’s debate over guns – and their increased circulation in public spaces – take for granted the existence of an even, two-sided debate. By supposing even organizing conditions, many have downplayed or altogether ignored the emotional toll and political constraints upon predominately female gun control activists, whose organizing must include threat assessment of predominantly white, male gun enthusiasts’ hostility, as well as their implied and direct threats. While the mainstream media has noted an “enthusiasm gap” to explain the success of gun rights activists in defeating broadly popular gun control policies, the disparity is often attributed to an asymmetrical depth of feeling regarding firearms policy between gun control and gun rights activists. We argue that the so-called enthusiasm gap must be reevaluated to consider stark imbalances in access to safety and unfettered freedom of speech, and the impact of fear and trauma on political organizing by those who publicly challenge armed gun rights activists.

This essay looks beyond the chilling effect of firearms in public spaces; we interrogate the rhetorical power of gun rights activists’ menacing presence on social media and their often implied threats to activists’ safety. We illuminate the strategies gun control activists deploy to monitor, assess, and diminish perceived safety threats and explore the opportunity costs inherent in these time and energy-consuming safety strategies. Using first-hand testimonies from a wide range of gun control activists over the past decade, we dissect the ways in which gun control activists often downplay the full impact of safety threats, since full transparency may deter others from engaging in public gun control activism. Finally, we explore parallels between gun enthusiasts’ deployment of gendered and racialized anger through their public display of guns, and the coercive control tactics used to manipulate and curtail autonomy in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). Our research shows that gender and race intimidation constitute a powerful yet hidden-in-plain-sight strategy tacitly coordinated by the gun lobby and gun rights activists to silence the voices and temper the demands of their political opponents.