The Internal Frontier: American Gun Culture and Police Militarization
American exceptionalism is a term that is supposed to denote a set of core values in American life. The late sociologist Seymour Lipset defined it as a clutch of beliefs unique to the American situation: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics. American exceptionalism is often referred to or deployed by government officials to validate US policy, foreign and domestic. It operates as an incantation that is supposed to pre-empt critique and quell any second thoughts about the relative moral or strategic value of a given policy. That is to say, it is conceived as an unqualified social good — one of those self-evident truths about the superiority of the American way of life. I’d like to offer another view of American exceptionalism, which concerns the American way of death.
The United States is exceptional when it comes to gun violence in comparison to other affluent societies. The US is the world leader when it comes to mass shootings, defined as four or more victims either injured or dead. On average 96 people are killed daily in the US in gun homicides, suicides, and accidents. 1,600 children each year are killed by guns. About 50 women in America are shot and killed each month by an intimate partner — many, many more are injured. According to the gun reform group Everytown for Gun Safety, 1 million American women living today have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. 4.5 million American women alive today have been threatened by an intimate partner with a gun. In 2020, nearly 20,000 Americans were killed by firearms and an average of 329 people a day were injured by them. The NY Times has reported that since 1970 there have been 1.45 million gun deaths. That number exceeds all the deaths combined from every US military engagement, including the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At a global scale, in 2020, there were approximately 122,000 people killed in combat in the various wars around the world. On average, about 182,000 people are killed annually by firearms outside of wars. The hand gun and light rifle are the true weapons of mass destruction.
Why is the richest society in the world also exceptional in the bloodletting it permits amongst its citizenry? One answer could be gun availability. Of the 875 million privately held firearms in the world, Americans own about 300 million. That is to say, Americans own 34% of the world’s guns while only making up 5% of the world’s population. However, as criminologists and demographers have shown, there is no causal relationship between gun ownership and violence. While America has more guns per capita than any other country, both Israel and Switzerland have higher rates of individual gun possession. The major difference, of course, is the high degree of gun regulation in both countries as opposed to the US. So, there is some truth to the oft-repeated claim by the NRA — “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” What the NRA, of course, neglects to say is that while guns don’t cause violence — they are a means of violence — guns do make violence more immediate, lethal, widespread, and destructive. Gun rights advocates also do not go a step further and ask, “If it’s people who kill people and the American people seem to be killing each other, should they really have more tools to do so?”
What I’d like to pursue, in a very loosely sketched form, is an argument about the cultural origins of gun violence in America and its global ramifications. I want to suggest that a lot of gun violence in America derives from a conception of armed citizenship that is peculiarly American. The conception relies on an ideological vision of the American past that blends myth and history. Its effects are clear: a contemporary American society awash in guns. This has the corollary effect of further militarizing US law enforcement agencies that are in an arms race in the American streets. Furthermore, due to the global influence of the American security apparatus and the prominence of Americans weapons manufacturers in the global gun trade (35% of market share of small arms and light weapons), the dialectic of both legal and illegal gun distribution to citizenries and police militarization is a global phenomenon.
So, where does this insatiable desire to buy guns, shoot guns, collect guns, sell guns, wear t-shirts that say you do all these things, and take pictures of yourself and your family with guns come from? It’s a complicated story, but I want to focus on one strand. There is a classic essay in the canon of American historiography entitled, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Published in 1893 by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, it has been described as the most influential article in American historical writing. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” as it has come to be known, argues that unlike European state formation, which featured military conquest and incorporation of other developed states (e.g. the French king Louis XIV defeats the Duke of Burgundy, and so Burgundy becomes part of France in 1678), American state formation was characterized by a drive to and progressive annexation of the “wild” West. “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the dominating American character,” argues Turner. He goes to note, “In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave — the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”
Let’s set aside the obvious cultural chauvinism that underpins and animates this understanding of the “savage” West. What I am interested in is how a sort of frontierist ideology is adopted and mobilized by contemporary American gun enthusiasts and their political lobby. So, what are key features of this frontier mentality? According to Turner, “the frontier is productive of individualism…The tendency is anti-social. It produces an antipathy to control, and particularly any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.” Combined with pragmatism, inventiveness, and a “nervous energy,” the frontier produces the exceptional American national character: rugged individualism. What I am suggesting is not that Turner’s thesis is necessarily demonstrably true. Rather that the image it conjures of the American settler mastering the flora and fauna of the “Wild West,” including the Native Americans — especially the Native Americans — all by his lonesome, flinty-eyed and armed, is the one promoted by the contemporary pro-gun movement in America.
The NRA’s image of the gun owner is overwhelmingly male — though there is also a concerted media campaign to persuade American women of the value of gun ownership. Nevertheless, the image trades on what I’ll call frontier masculinity.
Men — real men — are men with guns. Or, better put, men are made real by the sovereignty over self provided by firearms. A popular pro-gun rights bumper sticker sums up this viewpoint:
Why this is so seductive is that it is honest about the emotional power of holding and firing a gun. Having a lethal weapon confers power. The argument of the contemporary gun lobby is that not only do arms make the man, gun ownership is a constitutional right (2nd Amendment) and a natural right (right to self-defense). The argument then moves to a “guns everywhere” position that will supposedly create safety — a policy of mutually assured destruction writ small. While not to diminish the terrible and often genocidal violence meted out on the American western frontier, the contemporary frontier masculinity, with its demand for ever more guns in ever more places, gets the history wrong of some aspects of this “wild” West. For example, when Wyatt Earp became marshal in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 he issued Ordinance #9.
You’ll note the first article prohibited carrying any deadly weapons within the city limits. Such inconvenient facts are of little importance, however. The frontierist myth of self-reliant individuals who provide their own security overshadows such factual niceties. The frontierist myth also, crucially, requires the reproduction of the frontier. This is embodied in the political work of the gun lobby.
Given the political power of the gun lobby, it has had the ability to move legislation that further promotes a weaponized citizenry and a militarized society. The Castle Doctrine laws, themselves already predicated on a notion of one’s home as a military fortification, have given way to Stand Your Ground and concealed carry laws. Rather than being required to retreat to your home and perhaps defend it there (every home an Alamo), Stand Your Ground laws state one may use lethal force simply if one feels threatened. Frontier masculinity depends on the idea that threats abound. Since actual expansion and annexation has been foreclosed (for the time being, at least), the form of the frontier has morphed. The frontier has become internal and takes the form of suspect identities and spaces. “Bad” neighborhoods with their “bad” people. Trayvon Martin was the new frontier.
Given the aggressive posture of the American gun culture, the easy access to not just sporting rifles and shotguns, but semi-automatic and high-capacity hand guns and military-grade assault rifles, and the ever-loosening gun regulations in American society, it is perhaps reasonable that the American police have become increasingly armed to the teeth. Of course, this is hardly the only causal factor in increased police militarization. A short list of factors include increased interpenetration of police work and military missions, greater coordination in training and education between military forces and police forces worldwide, and the surplus of military materièl from the end of the Cold War through the present that has gone to American local law enforcement.
In many ways, American police training has embraced the celebration of the supposedly righteous violence that is promulgated by US gun culture.
Significantly, a leading police trainer David Grossman (a former Army officer) describes the police who attend his sessions as modern-day frontiersmen. In Vietnam and in Iraq, the US military referred to the enemy territory as “Indian Country” — an area beyond the frontier that was a zone of permissive violence. The relation is thus dialectical and symbiotic. As security analyst Christopher Carr has suggested, a militarized citizenry poses a real or perceived problem for the forces of order. Add to this a militarized police with a tradition of racism, and it’s clear why America, the richest society on earth, is also exceptional in its ambient violence — a gun death every 14.4 minutes.
Finally, given the fact that US police personnel, especially agenda-setting ones from big cities like New York, L.A., and Boston, regularly travel the world to share their policing techniques, and, after retirement, their security expertise and merchandise, the US influence on global policing is clear. That is not to say it is a one-way street. For example, the NYPD annually sends its officers for training with the Israeli military in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. Other departments in NJ, California, Florida, North Carolina, and DC amongst others have also gone for training in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In effect, American cops practice repressive techniques on Palestinians and bring that know-how home. Palestine is very much the frontier abroad. Demobilized soldiers from the US war in Afghanistan have joined police departments and have openly employed US Army counterinsurgency techniques on certain US populations — the internal frontier. Nevertheless, given the prestige of the US security apparatus and its global reach, the forms of police militarization in the US have made their way across the world. And one reason for this is the American obsession with guns.
