Overview

"Guns have never been as prevalent in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns either highlight the gun as just a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended; eventually, whatever progress these debates foster in the public conversation tend to halt altogether once the old cliché, ""guns don't kill people; people kill people"" is trotted out. These gun control and gun violence discussions take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. What happens if we reset the conversation and admit that guns, and not the people behind them, kill people?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 law, science studies, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as an object with agency. In approaching guns from a technological 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 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 fresh 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 and broadening the scope of these perennial debates."

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9780190842925

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Reviews

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 * 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 * 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 *

Author Information

EditorsJonathan 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. ContributorsElizabeth 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.

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