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Abstract
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Guns have come to occupy an increasingly visible place in American society. In recent decades, most states have relaxed their laws regulating the carrying of concealed weapons, and many states have expanded the right to use guns defensively through Stand Your Ground laws. Congress has allowed a decade- long ban on semi-automatic assault weapons to expire and provided a legal shield to gun makers and sellers. Public support for stricter gun laws has declined sharply, while self-protection has emerged as the dominant reason for American gun ownership. And, gun rights proponents increasingly are carrying guns concealed, but also openly, into public spaces. The Supreme Court and at least one Court of Appeals have validated these developments by recognizing an individual right (albeit not absolute) under the Second Amendment "to keep and bear arms."
These pro-gun developments and the growing pro-regulation countermovement have provided occasion for legal scholars to re-examine the Second Amendment, both as a legal principle and a social fact. However, these examinations have neglected a powerful theoretical lens that has been hiding in plain sight: gender. It is time to take seriously that the exercise of gun rights and responsibilities is and always has been gendered, that the state is and always has been gendered, and that these two dynamics are intertwined. Complementing existing theoretical insights into the history of guns in America, a gender-centered approach can help make sense of this historical patterning--including the contemporary debate over guns in public spaces--in a way that other lenses cannot.
Understanding the Second Amendment as gendered first requires understanding governance as a gendered phenomenon. Gendered governance encompasses two understandings: (1) the ways that the apparatus of government (laws, bureaucratic institutions, and so forth) reflect and reinforce the traditional social ordering of men and women--the governance of gender; and (2) the ways that the state and its agents perform functions historically associated with men and women--the gender of governance. The American state was created by and in the image of men, while American state building has largely been about the task of defining and redefining the boundaries between the male citizenry and the masculine state. Since the founding, the question of firearms regulation has been at the heart of debates over the state's prerogatives in both the public and private spheres. Though the article focuses on state apparatuses, it uses the term governance, rather than the state, because the term governance is more expansive. It incorporates gun policy as both a set of laws and a set of commonly accepted practices, and it calls attention to patterned dispositions toward solving problems...
Available: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss2/5
Language: en |