Citation

Burbick J. Stanford Law Policy Rev. 2006; 17(3): 657-669.

Affiliation

Department of English and Program in American Studies, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Gun shows are local gatherings for the display, sale and exchange of firearms, but they often can include items from homemade fudge to piles of tattered romance novels. They range from "flea markets" to stripped-down commercial discount stores and often contain both under the roof of a county fairground pavilion. These small town shows have become unlikely political battlefields, pitting gun show organizers, lobbyists and National Rifle Association (NRA) affiliates against unsympathetic members of Congress, government agencies, and state, county and municipal governments.

Gun shows can be studied as cultural markets that sell not only things, but also ideas and values. They house distinct styles of merchandise and meaning often connected with narratives about the nation, masculinity, and war. Individual tables and booths sell frontier-style weapons, guns culled from the history of our domestic and foreign wars, fantasy and survival guns packaged with DVDs on counter-insurgency and terrorist tactics, handguns for home defense, military-style weapons for the maximum shooting sensation, and last but not least, guns for hunting and target shooting, the recreational weapons of a thoroughly industrial and commercial society.

The gun show presents us with a moment in U.S. culture in which specific commodities are believed by certain people within our society to be capable of speech. Litigation over gun shows has challenged the definition of what it means to be "engaging in the business" of selling firearms and who has the right to sell, exchange or trade them and under what circumstances. More recently, lawsuits have debated how guns sold at gun shows may be protected as political and commercial speech, and gun rights advocates have claimed that the shows themselves are a form of political expression. One such suit led to a recent legal opinion over a California gun show that rejected these First Amendment claims by stating that "a gun itself is not speech," even though the plaintiff claimed that because political messages were inscribed on specific rifles sold at gun shows, the gun could itself become a form of speech.

To some, to purchase a gun was to practice politics, an act of resistance to the authority of the state and its regulatory powers. The regulations were perceived as threats by liberals and the Left to control their lives. Purchasing a gun meant that you could defy the brand of politics you despised. At a time when access to political power to affect social change seems to belong ever more to a class of professional politicians, lobbyists, and moneyed elites, the act of buying a gun can mimic genuine political action, making citizens into consumers rather than participants in civil society, turning guns into commodities that require federal courts to battle over whether they are protected by the Bill of Rights.

In this way, gun shows are markets for political pantomimes that simulate the exercise of political power with commodities that seem to contain and convey political speech. Gun shows provide more than merely compensation for the loss of access to political power in every day life. They redirect political energy to continue a system that always withholds effective political power. Like pulling the trigger of a gun, the sensation of political resistance is given, only to be taken away in the harsh realities of political lobbies, parties, and corporations that dominate American politics.

This voice of the gun grants lethal force to the individual in his isolation from others except his imagined fraternal band. It justifies his right to such a gun based on national myths of masculinity. It cries self-defense against the anonymous face of the juvenile predator, the psychotic rapist, and the unknown evil that bangs at the front door or lurks in the shadows. The individual becomes the mini-state, the army of one, who dreams of the ultimate in political power, a gun beyond regulation.

The rifle raised in the hand above the head mimics and defies the "Black Power" salute. It reassures the patriots of their descent from the original minutemen, the band of brothers, who represent the nation and protect it from those whose rights impinge on their freedom - the girlie man, the juvenile predator, the gangster rapper, the tax man, the liberal, the school teacher, the "femi-nazi". The list is long and enemies are generated anew every hour to challenge the right of the law-abiding man to buy, own, and brandish the gun. The gun finally speaks, its commodified meaning always threatened and threatening, an advertised discourse upheld by the Constitution and the founding fathers, passed on to kin and kind.