Perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge if it could happen in a place like Littleton.
—President Bill Clinton, remarks on the attack at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado (April 20, 1999)
On April 20, 1999, two students entered Columbine High School with guns and bombs. When the bombs failed to detonate, they used their guns to kill thirteen people before turning the guns on themselves. Though school shootings were not a new phenomenon in the United States, the almost-live broadcasting of the Columbine carnage brought it chillingly close to Americans who were otherwise insulated—or who thought themselves to be insulated—from gun violence. As Dave Cullen remarked, “Much of the country was watching the standoff unfold. None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had.”1 A full 68 percent of Americans reported that they closely followed the story that year.2
But the tragedy was staggering not just because of the nearly live coverage. As the media scholar Cynthia Willis-Chun notes, “The violence at Columbine High was all the more shocking because it defied American assumptions about both whiteness and middle-class-ness.”3 The massacre at Columbine pierced the association across urban schools, drugs, and guns that naturalized poor, racialized communities as violent. It revealed the safety, security, and serenity of “normal” schools like middle-class, suburban Columbine High as fragile and flimsy. It also disrupted the commonplace tropes of gun perpetrators—both killers were white, middle-class teenage boys.
Columbine didn’t just rattle the off-guard American public—it also shook the police. Believing that they were responding to a hostage standoff, patrol officers arriving on the scene focused on securing the perimeter and providing aid to survivors who trickled out of the school building. They followed decades of police convention—known as “contain-and-wait”—that relegated hostage situations to specially trained SWAT teams. Writing for PoliceOne in 1997, just two years before the massacre, the Indianapolis police officer Robert L. Snow celebrated SWAT as “one of law enforcement’s greatest assets … [as] teams of highly trained, well-equipped specialists who have a continuum of choices to use when confronting a high-risk incident.”4 He distinguished SWAT specifically in relation to mass shootings like the 1966 Bell Tower shooting, which occurred on the campus of the University of Texas, Austin, on August 1 and left eighteen dead (including the perpetrator) and thirty-one injured.5
Associated with no-knock raids and aggressive war-on-drugs policing, SWAT often conjures up a show of excessive force, unrestrained by policy or procedure, against black and brown suspects. But in the white, middle-class setting of Columbine High School, the fatal flaws in police response turned out to be measured restraint and meticulous adherence to protocol. Patrol officers waited forty-five minutes for the SWAT unit to arrive as shots were being fired inside the building, and then they waited another three hours as the SWAT team methodically searched the school building: this is what their training and protocol told them to do. Dave Sanders, a coach and teacher, was shot as he tried to warn students of the attack; he slowly bled to death as the SWAT unit roamed the building.6 Years later, a group of police practitioners would summarize: “The law enforcement profession had conditioned the patrol function to fail in an active shooter situation like Columbine.… [W]hat training was provided reinforced the concept of containment and calling for SWAT teams to handle critical situations.”7 Indeed, on the ten-year anniversary of Columbine, the Associated Press ran a story about the impact of the mass shooting on police training and tactics. Headlined by Fox News as “Shoot First: Columbine High School Massacre Transformed US Police Tactics,”8 the article outlined the new police sensibilities about the phenomenon of the “active shooter”: with a gunman killing a person every fifteen seconds in an active shooting event, police now “rush toward gunfire and step over bodies and bleeding victims, if necessary, to stop the gunman—the active shooter—first.” In contrast to the strategies employed at Columbine, “it’s been a complete turnaround” according to the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.
This chapter examines how police have grappled with the threat of active shootings. It focuses on interviews with police chiefs, and it unpacks the social construction of gun violence in predominantly white, suburban and rural communities. In contrast to the aggressive enforcement described in the context of urban gun violence, police chiefs articulated a sense of shame and devastation at failing to adequately respond to active shootings, and they embraced a particular policing mindset—the Guardian—centered on proactive protection rather than aggressive enforcement. Wrestling with active shootings as a policing problem, chiefs invested their guns with distinctive emotions, swapping the Warrior’s eagerness to confront danger for the Guardian’s anxious worry about responding with inadequate speed and firepower. Police chiefs forwarded a brand of hybrid masculinity9 that blended “hardness and violence, plus compassion and care,”10 allowing them to adopt the stance of a benevolent protector rather than aggressive enforcer. And in doing so, they did not just remix masculinity; they also remade the boundary between state and society, blurring their public obligations and private duties to protect as they understood their guns, especially off-duty, to be vehicles of public safety and personal protection alike.
The FBI defines an active shooter as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” According to a 2018 analysis by the Washington Post, since the Bell Tower massacre on August 1, 1966, 1,135 Americans have been killed in active shootings.11 Though active shootings comprise a relatively small proportion of annual firearms deaths, they receive disproportionate coverage compared to other kinds of gun violence. In their study of media coverage of gun violence from 1997 to 2012, the public health scholar Emma McGinty and her colleagues found that most coverage occurred in the context of mass shootings.12
The heightened public attention to active shootings is often attributed to the demographics of their victims. These shootings disproportionately involve white victims as compared to other kinds of gun crime. However, they far from exclusively affect white communities. The urban planning scholar Patrick Adler’s analysis of Stanford’s Mass Shootings in America database suggests that just over 30 percent of active shootings take place in communities that are more than 80 percent white; 42.4 percent take place in communities with populations less than 64 percent white. Writing for CityLab, the social scientist Richard Florida and the journalist Alastair Boone note, “In fact, the burden of mass shootings has fallen slightly heavier on communities that have a higher share of African Americans, on average. While African Americans make up 12.6 percent of the U.S. population on the whole, they make up 17 percent of the population in communities that experienced mass shootings.”13
The racial and gender contours of active shootings suggest that active shootings signal a fundamentally different moral economy of criminality and innocence as compared to urban gun crime. This difference was evident in how police chiefs talked about active shootings: they emphasized the unambiguous moral status of victims as innocent, and they understood active shootings as an acutely pervasive, but simultaneously “out of place,” threat. The more I listened to police chiefs, the more I came to understand that they understood active shootings as more than just acts of gun violence. To the majority of chiefs, active shootings were acts akin to terrorism.
The sociologist Austin Turk writes that “terrorism is not a given in the real world but is instead an interpretation of events and their presumed causes;”14 the media scholar David Altheide describes terrorism as a “condition and state of affairs.”15 Elevating the urgency of active shootings, chiefs routinely referenced active shootings as central to this new-felt “condition and state of affairs,” especially as they explained shifts in their off-duty gun carry habits. They collapsed active shootings under the broad umbrella of “terrorism,” connecting “9/11,” “assassinations” of police, “domestic terrorism,” and active shootings as they name-dropped places associated with gun violence (e.g., “San Bernardino, Orlando, Sandy Hook” and “Dallas, Newtown, Orlando”). On the one hand, this conflation of terrorism and active shootings reinforced police chiefs’ standing as crime fighters,16 reflecting both the increasing expectation that law enforcement should be involved in antiterrorist activities17 and the resonance between the war on crime and the war on terror as sets of political claims and policing strategies.18 On the other hand, chiefs reinforced a racial politics of gun violence centered on white victimhood as they framed active shootings as terrorism. By referencing perpetrators of a variety of racial backgrounds and framing their actions as terrorism, police chiefs subtly sidestepped the empirical reality that white men are disproportionately represented as perpetrators of active shootings.19
Reinforcing the sense that active shootings represent a seemingly new, urgent, and increasing threat, police explained their newfound awareness of gun-violence-cum-terrorism. These three chiefs, for example, recognized that active shootings had shaped not just their awareness of gun violence but also their off-duty gun carrying habits:
You know, since 2001, 9/11 was a major trigger. And just last year you had assassinations in Dallas and Baton Rouge. And so those are the things that make a big splash.… I have everyday awareness and practice situational awareness. I understand that this stuff can happen anytime, anywhere.
I used to not carry as much, but now in the last five years, I’m carrying a lot more. It’s the terrorism, the domestic terrorism, the climate for law enforcement.
It’s really been the last ten years that I’ve been carrying more.… [M]ass shootings had a role. It just seems that as you experience more, and you read more, you have more of an obligation to protect. And it’s just common sense. You could seriously help people.
Active shootings shaped how police chiefs understood suburban and rural space and the policing problems endemic to these spaces. Active shootings scrambled the racial politics of policing gun violence, upending sensibilities about where gun violence should or should not take place. While the war on crime (and its subsidiary war on guns) has focused largely on containing crime within urban spaces marked as poor, disorderly, and dangerous, active shootings have represented a different kind of penetrating threat, one that bucked containment to urban space and instead unsettles white space. For example, these three chiefs illustrated how the threat of otherwise rare acts of violence could mushroom into a cloud of ever-present danger as they reflected on the spatial politics of active shootings:
You never know where and when someone will start shooting, and you can’t outrun a bullet. So you have these things happening in the theater, schools, Best Buy, where some nut job just snaps. I do think about that.
Active shootings—I don’t like to call them school shootings because they can also be a workplace and other places—those are up. I read the intelligence bulletins, and it’s happening at the national level, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen here.
Something can happen in the strangest places. I wouldn’t go to church without a gun.
The church, the school, the workplace: none of these are necessarily “strange” places with respect to violence, except by virtue of their racial and class marking. In other words, they are the public equivalents to the private sanctuary of the white picket fence: places that “should” be peaceful and serene. Reflecting this marking of space, one chief told me the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, had particularly affected him because it exposed these newfound vulnerabilities:
Aurora: it seemed commonplace. It wasn’t a school. This is a movie theater where there is no security; people buy a ticket, and they go in. They let their guard down. They are sitting and eating their Red Vines and popcorn, and they are vulnerable. They lose consciousness of place and time.
As such, active shootings disrupted a social geography of violence that neatly designated certain spaces as “safe” and others as “dangerous.” Accordingly, chiefs understood active shootings to be inherently uncontrollable and foreign to the spaces in which they emerge—that is, terrorism. Accordingly, this threat to unexpected places and unexpected victims led chiefs to see active shootings as an urgent problem, even as they recognized their rarity.
Active shootings do not just scramble the racial politics of gun violence with respect to where gun violence takes place and whom it victimizes. They also scramble the racial politics of who perpetrates gun violence—and why.
Active shootings are more likely to involve white male perpetrators than other kinds of gun violence.20 The criminologists James Alan Fox and Jack Levin found that non-Hispanic whites represented 69.9 percent of mass killers,21 while the dataset compiled by Mark Follman, Gavin Aronson, and Deanna Pan for Mother Jones shows that white boys and men have perpetrated 57 percent of mass shootings.22 The politics of white masculinity have shaped coverage of these tragedies over time: before the Columbine massacre, school shootings were typically portrayed in mainstream media as involving black and brown perpetrators in marginalized, “inner city” schools, and these tragedies were typically treated as clear-cut cases of criminality. Today, however, as the sociologists Scott Duxbury, Laura Frizzell, and Sadé Lindsay find in coverage of active shooters,23 white perpetrators are more likely to be framed in terms of mental illness, even though the vast majority of people with serious mental illnesses are nonviolent and are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence.24
Framing the perpetrators of active shootings as suffering from mental illness helps to repair the community bonds that these tragedies rattle by emphasizing them “as [individual] aberrations, anomalies within society, or psychopaths who represent the antithesis of mainstream America.”25 The designation of active shootings as terrorism thus dovetails with the social construction of active shootings as a problem of mental illness rather than gun violence. Both highlight the unambiguous moral status of victims; both emphasize victims as “normal kids” in “normal places” doing “normal things” (to paraphrase); and both therefore resisted any narrative impulse to “blame the victim.” Both the “terrorism” and “mental illness” designations, furthermore, help make sense of active shootings by individualizing the blameworthiness of the perpetrators and treating it as fundamentally foreign to the social contexts in which it occurs. This perhaps explains why police chiefs labeled white shooters by turns as “terrorists,” “mentally unstable,” and even “evil”: each of these designations situated the killers as outside of the communities that they terrorized.
But these designations also situated active shooting perpetrators as outside the purview of law enforcement, too—as mental health problems rather than policing problems. Historically, mental illness has long been used to pathologize forms of survival and protest among African Americans: the physician Samuel A. Cartwright made a racist wager that runaway slaves were merely exhibiting signs of a mental illness, drapetomania, while displays of Black Power in the 1960s were often popularly diagnosed as symptoms of psychotic illness. In The Protest Psychosis, the medical scholar Jonathan Metzl unravels the suturing of antiracist protest and mental illness to explain why, in the mid-twentieth century, schizophrenia transformed from a disease disproportionately affecting whites to one that disproportionately affects African Americans.26 In the contemporary context of gun crime, however, the racialization of mental illness has taken a markedly different form: mental illness–associated gun crime is now popularly associated with gun violence perpetrated by whites, whereas black-involved gun crime is subsumed under the auspices of criminality, even when issues of mental illness are evidently in play.27
Situated beyond the long shadow of black criminality, then, mental illness–related gun crime elicited a less punitive, and more rehabilitative, approach with more second chances for redemption among the police chiefs I interviewed. Police chiefs’ near-unanimous embrace of a war on guns in the form of enhanced sentencing and mandatory minimums (see chapter 2) was matched by an equally vigorous call for a softer side of this war in the form of mental health services and enhanced background checks. From Arizona to California to Michigan, police chiefs overwhelmingly depicted the intersection of mental health and guns as one of the most urgent, but also vexing, criminal justice issues.28 One Arizona chief called for “comprehensive mental health background checks, and the ability to correlate it with firearms checks. Criminal background checks are not enough.” A California chief reasoned, “Mental health: we all agree that that’s a problem. I don’t understand why we try to build consensus, instead of working where there already is consensus.” A Michigan chief adamantly noted, “Mental health, that’s my top concern … and we are 100 percent dropping the ball.”
Many (though not all) police chiefs saw the background check system itself as fundamentally flawed, with lackluster interstate data sharing and poor protocols on data integrity. But several chiefs worried about more than just shoddy bureaucracy; they saw the flawed U.S. background checks system as indicative of a broader breakdown, marked by a broken mental health system. As one Michigan chief said, “We don’t deal with mental health, like we don’t deal with anything. Think of all the places [mental health facilities] we’ve closed, too. In Ypsilanti, there used to be a huge mental health facility. Hundreds of people were there. Where are all these people? Nothing is being done. And it’s not hard for someone with mental health issues to get a gun.” This chief is right: mental health services have dramatically shrunk in the past few decades, and prisons and jails have turned into de facto mental health facilities—so much so that The Atlantic could declare in 2015 that “America’s Largest Mental Health Hospital Is a Jail.”29
In sharp contrast with their Warrior sensibilities surrounding urban crime, police chiefs resented—rather than relished—running into danger in the context of mental health crises. They begrudged that their call to duty had expanded to require them to also act as mental health care professionals. Chiefs from Arizona, California, and Michigan disliked that police are now charged with addressing problems that other sectors of society have shirked. One Arizona chief saw this as a broad trend that burdened police: “Most of the US’s problems land in the laps of police—whether it’s homelessness, mental illness, gun violence, substance.” Similarly, one California chief bemoaned the use of force against people experiencing a mental health crisis: “One of the things that just really bothers me is that I hate to use force against the mentally ill. It bugs me and bothers me when officers are forced to do it. And so when there is a 5150 [California dispatcher code for a mental health call], I tell my officers to call dispatch and ask for the Crisis Intervention Team. And they are like, ‘Why? We don’t have one.’ And I say, because I want it recorded.” Faced with a broken system, this chief turned bureaucracy into resistance: a paper trail documenting society’s moral abdication toward mental health.
Make no mistake, then: police chiefs want policies to address mental health–related gun violence—these were often cited as police chiefs’ top priorities alongside the “tough on crime” gun laws described in chapter 2. But they saw these brands of gun policy as a fundamentally different kind of project than those targeting the urban gun offender; this project prioritized mental health services rather than law enforcement. As such, calling for gun policies in the form of enhanced background checks, mental health services, and social supports to address active shootings not only echoed public opinion broadly in support of these initiatives; it also freed up police to do the “real” work of law enforcement.
Advocating mental health supports they believed would ameliorate the threat of active shootings and gun violence more generally, chiefs vehemently insisted that they were not mental health professionals. But as I learned while listening to them describe their encounters—both real and imagined—with active shootings, neither did they understand themselves as Warriors vis-à-vis urban and suburban gun violence. Instead, they saw themselves as Guardians.
One Michigan chief I interviewed had spent his entire career policing rural jurisdictions. He explained that he is the only police officer in his family, and when asked why he joined public law enforcement, he earnestly smiled: “I will give you a cheesy answer: I wanted to help people.” When the interview turned to combating gun violence, this earnest desire took on enhanced urgency. The chief referenced the 2015 Charleston church shooting in which a self-identified white supremacist killed nine black churchgoers at a historically black church:
You know people say, “Oh, this guy is racist or whatever in Charleston.” No, it’s just evil. It’s evil killing good people. And the evil is getting stronger and stronger, and the good is being made to look evil, and that’s why we need to be superheroes.
Sidestepping the much-publicized racial motivations of this mass killing, this chief makes sense of this active shooting by appealing to a color-blind discourse of good and evil.30 The chief concludes that such killings are “just evil,” which in turn compels him to embrace a particular understanding of himself—as a “superhero.” Framing police as “superheroes,” this chief and others adopted a distinctive brand of policing—the Guardian—in response to active shootings.
The emergence of the Guardian reflects shifts in recent years31 as police practitioners, policymakers, and politicians have promoted it as an alternative to the Warrior. The former sheriff Sue Rahr and the criminal justice scholar Stephen Rice juxtapose these two mindsets by reminding police that they are not soldiers: “The soldier’s primary mission is that of a warrior: to conquer. The rules of engagement are decided before the battle. The police officer’s mission is that of a guardian: to protect.”32 Likewise, one rural Arizona chief summarized this shift,
There’s [been a] switch [to] the Guardian mindset.… We are here to protect the public, their rights, and … we need to do whatever we have to [to] do that. So, we’re not just investigating, we are protecting—and that is whether we’re talking about a shooting, terrorism. We are now expected to do more.
In this chief’s and in Rahr and Rice’s framings, the Guardian is charged with a moral obligation to protect innocent lives, grounding police work not in dominating others (as in the Warrior) but in protecting others. Distinguishing these two mindsets can be tricky; after all, as Seth Stoughton reminds us, the Warrior may likewise be motivated by ideals of “honor, duty, resolve, and the willingness to engage in righteous violence.”33 For this reason, the Warrior and the Guardian are perhaps better understood not as mutually exclusive ways of approaching police work but rather as distinctive stances on policing that can be mobilized for different kinds of policing problems.
Listening to police chiefs, I learned that not just their thoughts on gun violence but also their understandings of their own police guns were key to unraveling the distinctions between the Warrior and Guardian as police experience these mindsets and the emotive worlds they entail. I expected—and found—that in the context of the Warrior mindset, guns are deployed as a means of evoking aggression, empowerment, and hostility vis-à-vis criminal aggressors—as described in chapter 2. What I didn’t expect was the very different purpose that they served for the Guardian: to avoid feelings of guilt, shame, and devastation at being unable to protect an innocent.
Shame was central to how the Columbine massacre and other active shootings haunted the police chiefs I interviewed. Judging from my interviews almost two decades after the Columbine shooting, the sense of collective failure regarding the police response to that active shooting has remained palpable. One white, middle-aged chief oversaw public law enforcement in a former mining town in Arizona, but before that, he had patrolled a neighboring community to Littleton in suburban Denver. He explained,
I was in a neighboring community in Colorado when Columbine happened. And you know, that really impacted us. We felt like failures. We thought: how could we have allowed this to have happened? Here, we waited outside while kids were being killed. And that was really our attitude—we were failures.… And I would say that in Colorado, we found it offensive that some people went to gun control. Because we felt like we let society down.
Though this chief spoke of intense feelings of responsibility for the police response to Columbine, he was not present at the high school that day. Nevertheless, he uses “we” as he discusses the feelings of failure in the aftermath of Columbine: the police response at Columbine was a failure of the law enforcement community writ large, and he was personally aggrieved by the loss of life (“Here, we waited outside while kids were being killed”). This was not the mere mistakes of the individual officers on the scene that day (“bad apples,” as debates on officer misconduct in the context of urban policing often reference); rather, the police response at Columbine is understood as a failure of police to stay true to their core mission of protection. In the words of this chief, “We really are the only first responders. We have to treat every situation that way.” This takeaway suggests that police should see themselves not as specialized experts but as first responders, ready and willing to engage whatever threat may come their way—and wherever and whenever it may come.
If the “dream” haunted chiefs with respect to tropes of urban gun violence (as described in chapter 2), then a different kind of nightmare disturbed chiefs with respect to active shootings: not being able to intervene to “run to the threat,” even if that meant “not stopping to help the people who needed our help.” As another Arizona chief noted,
That [the Columbine massacre] was a watershed moment in terms of active shooting. That was when we were all retrained to intervene—and trained to step over the dead bodies to run to the threat. And the hardest part there was not stopping to help the people who needed our help who we were stepping over.
In this nightmare, perpetrators all but vanish into an amorphous threat; victims—whether dead and stepped over or screaming and helpless—are central to how police understand these encounters.
This nightmare takes place not in the high-crime imaginary of the urban streets, but in the most unassuming spaces—what one chief called, as noted earlier, “the strangest of places.” And whereas the “dream” that haunts police in the context of urban law enforcement involves a gun that refuses to shoot, this nightmare revolves around a police officer—oftentimes off-duty—who finds himself unwittingly unarmed. As three chiefs illustrate:
I could not live with myself if I was in a situation where I could save lives, and I wasn’t able to [because I was not carrying my firearm off-duty]. I can’t imagine being at a public shooting and not having the tools [e.g., a firearm].
If you have an ability to carry a gun, it is your responsibility to do and intervene should there be an attack. Say I’m in a movie theater, and there’s a shooting, and I am there, but I can’t do anything because I don’t have a gun? I would feel devastated. Ashamed. Guilty. I would feel like all of those lives lost were on me. And it would ruin me forever.
Shame on us if we are called to this, and we are able to save a life, but because we were unprepared we didn’t. It would break my heart.… More than any other thought, I carry a gun because of that.
Although other chiefs did not share the former Colorado chief’s close encounter, they often articulated unprompted fears of impotence amid the threat of active shootings. Surprisingly, even the handful of chiefs who told me they rarely carried off-duty also expressed this moral imperative: “I would feel stupid if something happened, and I was walking around without my gun.… I feel responsible for my community”; “I am worried that I’ll be out and about and need one and wish I had one on me.… I need to be able to do something.”
Active shootings appeared to have transformed the emotive attachment of police chiefs to their guns. By emphasizing feelings like embarrassment, shame, devastation, and guilt, chiefs focused less on courageous crime fighting against suspected criminals and more on the sense of failure, particularly with respect to victims, that would come with an underwhelming response to active shooter situations. Guns evoked feelings of aggression, empowerment, and hostility in the context of urban gun violence, but in the context of active shootings, guns seemed to help police chiefs engage in a different kind of emotional labor. Their practical usefulness notwithstanding, guns also helped police chiefs avoid feelings of guilt, shame, and devastation with respect to active shootings. In such contexts, these chiefs seemed less concerned with the thrill of the chase; they were not emphasizing trouble as a means to prove their police chops. Instead, they were anxious about how trouble might find them—in places where and times when they least expected it and would be caught off guard.
Accordingly, rather than the overt hypermasculinity of the Warrior, these chiefs embraced a hybrid masculinity—one that integrated “hardness and violence” in the service of “compassion and care.”34 Chiefs’ sense of duty vis-à-vis active shootings echoed Iris Marion Young’s observation regarding “masculinist protection”: namely, that violence is not just a vehicle of aggressive domination among men but also a means of asserting “good men’s” utility to their families and communities as protectors.35 Amid the threat of active shootings, chiefs from Arizona, California, and Michigan did emphasize a masculine imperative to courageously face danger; however, under the Guardian mindset, this urgency is centered on protection of innocent victims, especially children,36 rather than enforcement against suspected criminals (e.g., “catch the bad guys! Lock ’em up!”) as under the Warrior.
Police have always been attached to their off-duty guns, but the threat of active shootings—now framed as terrorism—has provided a renewed emphasis on off-duty carry, both among police and among policymakers looking to bring a “see something, say something, do something” approach to counterterrorism to its logical conclusion. As one chief noted,
I would say there’s been a significant shift in the last 10 years [in terms of carrying off duty]. You know, more things are happening—shootings, that sort of thing. And so I just think it’s more and more important to be able to engage. If I weren’t able to engage because I didn’t have a weapon—I would be overwhelmed with guilt. You know, and it used to be the case that police couldn’t carry out of state—that changed under Bush 43 [President George W. Bush]. But I went to the FBI training in DC, and we weren’t allowed to carry a firearm. And the directors of that program told us—you could follow the rules and not carry, but then you’d be the only people in DC without guns. [Interviewer: So you carried anyway?] I carried anyway. I wouldn’t want to be without it.
Throughout the history of modern policing, police have largely embraced off-duty carry,37 even as they have recoiled at the requirement that they carry off duty as an uncompensated extension of their professional duties beyond working hours. In other words, police have long wanted the option to carry, just not the requirement. But up until 2004, police were constrained from doing so. That year, the U.S. Congress passed the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (LEOSA), referenced by the chief above. (See chapter 1 for a more in-depth discussion of this law and its passage.) The new law cleared the way for police—both active and retired—to conceal carry their firearms anywhere in the United States. Its proponents pointed out that the law would “allow tens of thousands of additionally equipped, trained and certified law enforcement officers to continually serve and protect our communities regardless of jurisdiction or duty status at no cost to taxpayers” and that “this legislation will help its members to protect citizens in the wake of a terrorist attack and that it is even more necessary since September 11, 2001.” As Glen Hoyer, a retired law enforcement officer and the director of the NRA’s Law Enforcement Division, told Officer.com in 2010, “You’ve got a tremendous amount of law enforcement experience in a retired officer.” Indeed, LEOSA was supported by the NRA, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the Law Enforcement Alliance of America; the Police Executive Research Forum and the International Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the legislation.
In the aftermath of this law, the police chiefs I interviewed told me that they rarely traveled within-state or flew across the United States without their guns. This represents an interesting reversal in the historical consolidation of public law enforcement as wielders of legitimate violence. Modern public law enforcement grew out of ad hoc citizens’ militias taking a variety of forms (see chapter 1), but LEOSA rekindles the militia sensibilities of public law enforcement, blending the police role with the armed citizen and conflating a gun carried for professional reasons (i.e., law enforcement) with a gun carried for personal reasons (i.e., self-defense).
This blending was evident in my conversations with police chiefs: when it came to their off-duty carrying habits, they often slipped between their prerogatives as public law enforcement agents and their prerogatives as private armed civilians. One chief told me, “I carry more often than before.… Oddly enough, I was just talking about this with my wife, and we were talking about going to church, and we go to church up near Lansing. And I will carry my gun to church. And part of that is the obligation to protect. ISIS. My biggest concern is to be able to proactively protect my family.” Another chief explained, “I don’t want to be caught in the middle of some movie theater where someone is shooting—I’m going to be that person that does something.… [T]here are lots of examples where people are unarmed, and here you have someone shooting for the hell of it. So I’m not going to be one of those guys. I am going to protect my family and stop—or at least try to stop it.”
Police chiefs could easily move between these two scripts—the obligation to protect one’s community, the obligation to protect one’s family—because the same brand of masculinist protection undergirds both. Indeed, the views of these chiefs echoed the men who carry guns as a means of asserting a masculine duty to protect themselves, their families, and even their communities. As I found in my earlier research on gun carriers, they often embraced a citizen-protector model of gun carrying as a civic duty centered on the willingness to use lethal force to protect innocent life.38 Blurring the lines between police guns and private guns allowed police chiefs to tap into broader sensibilities about guns as defensive tools, drawing on pro-gun sensibilities to blend—and in doing so, buttress—public and private prerogatives alike. This blurring is not merely symbolic; recently, a Florida court ruled that the state’s Stand Your Ground law also applies to police.39 As we will see in chapter 4, this blurring has also recast how police understand and interface with private armed civilians.
On February 14, 2018, an armed assassin entered a high school in Parkland, Florida, and killed seventeen students and teachers. It was a police officer’s nightmare—and not only because of the terrible tragedy itself. Soon after the shooting, reports leaked that the school resource officer named Scot Peterson—a Broward County sheriff’s deputy—had been on site during the shooting, but had joined fellow officers behind cover as shots rang out and students were murdered. In contrast to police killings of unarmed African American boys and men, which often elicit silence, police were openly condemnatory. Coral Gables police, who arrived on the scene later and immediately entered the building, were shocked and dismayed at the deputy’s actions. The sheriff reported that he was “devastated, sick to my stomach.”
The officer broke protocol. But he also broke rank with the Guardian mindset that organizes how police understand, and imagine they would respond to, active shootings. In the aftermath, Broward County officials changed policy to codify expectations for police tasked with responding to active shootings: police now “shall” intervene.40 By January 2019, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Safety Commission issued its nearly five-hundred-page report.41 The commission members, nearly half of whom were law enforcement or former law enforcement, recommended enhanced prevention, better law enforcement response mechanisms, and increased opportunities for teachers to be armed in the classroom. Together, they noted, such measures would enhance the possibility that first responders would either identify threats before they can escalate into lethal violence—or stop them as soon as they do. And in June 2019, Peterson was charged with child neglect, culpable negligence, and perjury—what the New York Times described as “an unusual instance of law enforcement officers being held criminally liable for not protecting the public.”42
As Egon Bittner famously noted, “the role of the police is best understood as a mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiable coercive force employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies.… [T]he role of the police is to address all sorts of human problems when and insofar as their solutions do or may possibly require the use of force at the point of their occurrence.”43 The gap between the reality of police encountering gun violence and/or using their own guns in the line of duty (which is rare compared to the thousands of stops that police conduct every year) and its persistent possibility means that police guns are pregnant with anxieties and hopes, dreams and nightmares. If police are troubled by anxieties about the impotence of their guns amid the specter of urban gun crime (and indeed, my interviews with police chiefs suggest that they are), they are also troubled by fears and frustrations surrounding their guns in the context of active shootings represented by flash points like Sandy Hook, Orlando, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Parkland, and dozens of others.
But the meanings attached to police guns—and to their identities as police—are strikingly different across these two contexts. Regarding gun violence associated with urban contexts, police chiefs construct themselves as aggressively courageous Warriors pitted against gun violence associated with black and brown gangbangers, drug dealers, and superpredators. However, regarding gun violence associated with rural and suburban contexts, white victims, and white perpetrators, police chiefs embrace the Guardian mindset: they reframe gun violence as terrorism, revamp their own police duties as first responders, and understand police failure in terms of cowardice not in apprehending criminals but rather in saving victims.
Policing, in other words, is not reducible to the Warrior brand. Rather than a mere lack of gun militarism, active shootings ignite renewed focus on police capacities as protectors. Juxtaposed with chapter 2, this chapter shows that the racial politics of innocence and blameworthiness, in intersection with a masculine prerogative to protect, bifurcates how police understand gun violence—and themselves as law enforcement. Rather than splitting police into mutually exclusive groups of Warriors and Guardians, these mindsets represent different toolkits44 that police can bring to understanding the problems they police, which is why the majority of police see themselves as both enforcers and protectors, according to a recent Pew survey of law enforcement.45 Thus, though they may wield the same guns across urban, suburban, and rural contexts, police chiefs affixed their guns with different emotions as they confronted different kinds of gun violence. Active shootings provide an opening for police chiefs to bring a populist sentiment to policing and, in the process, deepen their own affinity with the politics of gun rights—both for themselves and, as we shall see, for law-abiding civilians.