The Lives of Guns

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, and Austin Sarat

Investigates technologies of guns, how guns are made, and who guns are made for
Examines the technological challenges that are involved in fashioning firearms of various kinds as well as new technologies for fashioning lethal weapons, and what worlds those technologies will or could open
Features contributions from scholars and public intellectuals from a range of disciplinary backgrounds

The Lives of Guns

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, and Austin Sarat

Description

Guns have never before been as important in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns focus on either the gun as a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended, with most debates deadlocking on the ultimate role of humans in causing gun violence—that, as the cliché goes, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." And yet for all this attention, too much of the discussions on gun violence and gun control take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects.

The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from science studies, law, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as a technology and thus as an object with its own power and agency. In approaching guns from a tech perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these specific objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for—and against—them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together a great breadth of perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues, ultimately broadening our conception of what counts as an issue in these debates.

The Lives of Guns

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, and Austin Sarat

The Lives of Guns: An Introduction
Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, Austin Saratrat
Section I: The Political Life of Guns
Chapter I: Mobile Sovereigns: Agency Panic and Gun Ownership
Elizabeth Anker
Chapter II: Radical Printings: Future Gunsmithing and the Politics of Self-Manufacturing Firearms
Andrew Poe
Chapter III: Counting Up AR-15s: The Subject of Assault Rifles and the Assault Rifle as Subject
Timothy Luke
Section II: The Social Life of Guns
Heather Hayes
Chapter V: Dum-Dum Bullets: Constructing and Deconstructing 'The Human'
Joanna Bourke
Chapter VI: The Death of the Unarmed Assailant: On Racial Fears, Ambiguous Movement, and the Vulnerability of Armed Police
Franklin Zimring
Section II: The Private Life of Guns
David Yaname
Chapter VIII: How to Use the Bathroom with a Gun and Other Techniques of the Armed Body
Harel Shapira

The Lives of Guns

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, and Austin Sarat

Author Information

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Assistant Professor, Amherst College, Edited by Andrew Poe, Assistant Professor, Amherst College, and Edited by Austin Sarat, Associate Dean, Amherst College

Jonathan Obert is Assistant Professor of Politics at Amherst College.

Andrew Poe is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Amherst College.

Austin Sarat is Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or editor of more than 90 books

Contributors:

Editors
Jonathan Obert is Assistant Professor of Politics at Amherst College.

Andrew Poe is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Amherst College.

Austin Sarat is Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and Hugo L. Black Visiting Senior Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law.

Contributors
Elizabeth Anker is Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College.

Heather Hayes is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Whitman College.

Timothy Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as Program Chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech University.

Harel Shapira is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University.

Franklin Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Director of Criminal Justice Studies at Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Lives of Guns

Edited by Jonathan Obert, Andrew Poe, and Austin Sarat

Reviews and Awards

"For those frustrated with the terms of the contemporary US gun debate, this book provides respite beyond the binary thinking of guns kill people/people kill people. Spanning sites as diverse as concealed carried guns, police firearms, military drones, and hollow-point bullets to unravel the social life of guns, the essays are at turns politically pressing, theoretically illuminating, historically grippingand often up-close and personal. The volume is a must-read for anyone in search of a fresh vocabulary for understanding how guns transform ourselves and the social settings in which we move." - Jennifer Carlson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona, and author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline

"The Lives of Guns is a theoretical book with tremendous practical relevance. It centers guns and gun paraphernalia in the production of violence and culture in the US. The meticulous factual details and conceptual insights herein will inspire new, probably more effective, methods for addressing the social ill of gun violence. Lawyers, activists, police, public health workers, and others will benefit from learning how particular kinds of ballistic weapons and their accessories shape both particular settings and particular actions taken by gun users, manufacturers, and sellers." - Heidi Li Feldman, Professor of Law, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center

"This book does something remarkable: it strikes out in a new direction on the gun issue. Guns and similar devices that result in destruction arent just passive devices or simple tools, say the authors; guns have a moral agency, aside and apart from their human handlers, that reaches from interpersonal relations to the authority of the state. The new thinking reflected in this volume will be a welcome addition to serious writing on the role of guns in America." - Robert J. Spitzer, Distinguished Service Professor, Political Science, SUNY Cortland and author of Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights