On January 12, 2017, Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper Ed Andersson responded to early-morning calls that someone was shooting at cars near the desert town of Tonopah. He arrived at the scene and found an injured woman and an overturned car. He wanted to help her, but before he could, he was shot in the shoulder and then beaten. Andersson remembers thinking: “As much as I fought, I probably couldn’t have gone on anymore.”1
Enter a white man in his mid-forties named Thomas Yoxall. A local outlet described Yoxall as “a journeyman plumber, a college drop-out, a convicted felon and a tough guy whom his friends liked because he was an intimidating enforcer.” Over the decade and a half leading up to his intervention to save Andersson, Yoxall had turned his life around, according to popular news accounts. He got off of probation; he volunteered with children with developmental disabilities; he successfully petitioned to have his felony conviction expunged. With his rights restored, he became an avid gun owner and took up shooting with a crew of current and former law enforcement and military members.2
Yoxall had been on his way to Disneyland when he saw Andersson’s car race up behind him; he thought he was about to start his vacation with a speeding ticket. But as the police car passed him and exited to the shooting scene, Yoxall soon realized the situation was much direr. He decided to interrupt his road trip when he saw the trooper struggling. He yelled, “Do you need assistance?” Andersson responded, “Help me!”3
Yoxall intervened, killing the suspect-shooter with his firearm. His account exemplifies the logic of the citizen-protector4—someone who sees the use of lethal force to protect innocent life as a central civic duty in the contemporary U.S. context. AZCentral summarized: “Yoxall said he had no choice but to stop. Throughout his life, he had always seen himself in the role of a protector. This incident validated that notion.” He said he couldn’t “fathom” that dozens of cars drove by the scene but neither stopped nor called 911.5 Officer Andersson remarked, “I probably wouldn’t be here” had Yoxall not intervened; “I get to see my grandkids grow up, my daughters get married eventually.… [H]e did a fabulous thing.”
The suspect-shooter—a Mexican man named Leonard Penuelas-Escobar6—was rarely mentioned in news reports at any length, except as a setup to the uncannily heroic actions of Yoxall. Glossing over Penuelas-Escobar and his background7 to instead focus on Yoxall and the drama of the citizen-who-saves-a-cop-with-a-gun, pro-gun venues, local press, and even mainstream national outlets were celebratory. CNN declared, “Good Samaritan with a gun saves wounded cop.”8 A Phoenix-area ABC affiliate summarized: “Arizona trooper ambushed: Good Samaritan says God put him there to save the trooper.”9 These outlets seemed to agree, Yoxall had passed the ultimate test for a good guy with a gun: he rescued a cop in distress.
This chapter analyzes gun populism as a distinct form of gun talk, whereby police understand private armed civilians as productive of social order alongside institutionalized law enforcement. As the police’s and public’s responses to Yoxall’s actions suggest, police are not as invested in a strict monopoly on legitimate violence as accounts of gun militarism might suggest. Instead, they tend to accommodate the reality—and accept the broad benefits—of a widely armed populace, sympathizing with legal gun carriers and even understanding them as productive of social order.
Gun populism clarifies what gun militarism cannot explain. It illuminates, for example, why the police and the public seemed relatively unconcerned with vilifying Penuelas-Escobar, even though his biography could have easily amplified a moral panic surrounding undocumented migrants. Gun populism likewise helps explain why the police and the public would so eagerly embrace Yoxall—who, but for the expungement of his felony record, would have been criminalized by mere possession of the very gun that was now widely celebrated. Under gun populism, focus shifts away from denigrating the racialized criminals and toward commending the law-abiding citizens for their heroic actions. And as my interviews suggested, this color-blind language of lawfulness produces not calls for harsh punishment (as under gun militarism) but calls for empathy and even impunity, as police see the “good guys with guns” (which, at times, include themselves) unduly hampered by misguided gun policy. Though this color-blind language of lawfulness does not exclusively benefit white, middle-class, rural and suburban Americans, it is implicitly crafted in their image as police chiefs bespeak gun populism in terms of the capacity of law-abiding Americans to serve as fellow guarantors of social order.
Populism is a contested concept: Is it a political ideology, or merely a vessel for other ideologies? Is it inherently right-wing, or can populism carry left-wing ideologies as well? And is “populist government” a contradiction in terms (because populism is fundamentally an outsider’s rhetoric)? Scholars of populism define it as a repertoire that justifies particular political claims and arrangements according to an antipluralist construction of “the people” that is rallied against cultural, economic, and/or political “elites.”10 Accordingly, populism has been productively used to make sense of emergent political movements and the rhetoric of political claims, especially by outside political contenders.
The term gun populism reveals how populism can be mobilized to legitimize particular kinds of state-society arrangements. A brand of gun talk voiced by police chiefs across Arizona, California, and Michigan, gun populism blurs the lines around police prerogatives versus private use of force, often in an effort to protect “the people” from threats from below (e.g., political, economic, and cultural threats posed by marginalized or subordinate groups) and above (e.g., political elites in the federal government as well as economic and cultural elites). Unlike gun militarism, which deepens the divide between police and private civilians, gun populism emphasizes police as working with those they police on the terrain of legitimate violence.
Historical accounts and popular portrayals of policing have been inflected with populist sensibilities at various points in U.S. history.11 Gun populism was anticipated in the seventeenth century, when whites—by virtue of their skin color—were effectively deputized to stop, question, and apprehend people of African descent;12 in the eighteenth century, when slave patrols comprised deputized citizens who at times worked alongside newly institutionalized law enforcement agencies;13 in the organized white supremacist organizations that lynched and terrorized people of color—including African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans—from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, at times with the implicit permission if not the active collusion of local law enforcement;14 and under the color-blind mantra of “crime control” in the form of neighborhood watch groups in the late twentieth century and beyond.15
Today, I find that gun populism is reflected in the willingness of public law enforcement to align themselves with legally gun-owning Americans, who are often, though not exclusively, marked as white middle-class men. As with gun militarism, gun populism is a form of gun talk that allows police chiefs to endorse, and justify, a distinctive arrangement of legitimate violence, one shaped by the specific contexts in which police encounter gun policy. But under gun populism, the line between defensive violence and police force blurs, and this blurred line makes it all the easier for police not just to imagine themselves as armed citizens (see chapter 3) but also to imagine armed citizens as policing agents.
Like gun militarism, gun populism was evident in each of the states I studied, but unlike gun militarism, populist gun talk varied across the states. Rather than monolithic, it was reflective of the distinctive state gun laws and localized gun cultures at work in Arizona, California, and Michigan. In California, the state with the strictest gun laws, police chiefs endorsed a more limited understanding of self-defense, but they were particularly vocal about legislative attempts to regulate guns, and saw themselves—in alliance with putatively law-abiding gun owners—as unduly regulated by what they saw as legislators’ ignorant and ill-fated attempts to address gun violence. In Michigan, the state with a permissive but bureaucratic set of gun laws, police chiefs endorsed gun rights as a means of addressing the limitations of police in the fight against crime—a form of gun populism that I call “crime fighting by proxy.” In Arizona, the state with the most lenient gun laws, chiefs took this one step further, endorsing a brand of “co-policing” in which armed citizens were seen as useful to policing, not just in the sense of providing protection in the absence of police but also in support of police. Across Arizona, California, and Michigan, police chiefs aligned themselves with armed civilians in somewhat different keys of gun populism. Overall, they reveal a terrain of legitimate violence distinct from gun militarism—one in which armed civilians are imagined not as a threat but as a possible benefit to law enforcement.
In a 2013 white paper, the California Police Chiefs Association (CalChiefs) noted, “California has some of the strictest firearms regulations in the nation. These regulations have served law-abiding Californians well and clearly have not interfered with firearms ownership by responsible Californians.” A handful of California police chiefs I interviewed echoed this take on gun regulation by vigorously endorsing the gamut of California’s gun laws aimed at limiting, if not eradicating, civilian access to guns. Despite some variation, however, most chiefs throughout California voiced confusion, conflict, and cynicism with regard to gun regulation. Discussing the politics behind the 2013 CalChiefs white paper on gun policy, a chief who had sat on CalChiefs’ executive board remarked,
There was such a fight.… [We considered] restricting magazine capacity, urging the Feds to do more on background checks, dealing with ghost guns, strengthening the background checks, expanding the time for waiting to purchase a gun.… And there was a major, major divide among California police chiefs.… We strive to have best practices—and that’s what we wanted to do with firearms. But nothing I ever experienced was as divisive as the issue of firearms among police chiefs.… Some chiefs left the organization. They quit because they said CalChiefs was too restrictive.
Despite CalChiefs’ general embrace of gun regulation, according to this chief, firearms constituted one of the most “contentious” issues facing the organization.
My interviews with California chiefs revealed that California’s uniquely restrictive gun policies had not deepened police consensus in favor of gun control. Instead, the politics of guns in California seemed to have generated skepticism among chiefs, who appear to increasingly sympathize with armed civilians as they become more alienated from legislators. Among many California chiefs was a distinct strain of gun populism: anti-elitism.
Whereas gun policy provided California police chiefs in the 1980s and 1990s with an opportunity to assert police prerogatives vis-à-vis unlawfully armed criminals and to embrace gun militarism (see chapters 1 and 2), gun policy today also provides an opportunity for police chiefs to assert their prerogatives vis-à-vis what they see as misguided policymakers, or what the law and society scholar Anjuli Verma labels as “counterfeit experts.”16 Police chiefs—even chiefs sympathetic to the overall project of gun regulation—expressed nearly unanimous apprehension regarding California policymakers. One chief referenced an ill-fated urge among politicians to “do something” in the aftermath of gun tragedies: “After [the mass shooting in] San Bernardino, you just see all these politicians grasping at straws so they can show that they did something.” Others showed outright disdain for politicians: “And you know—a lot of legislators just answer to the people who elect them. A lot of them couldn’t even pass a civil exam. Most Americans couldn’t.”
California chiefs reasoned that because “politicians … don’t know how [law enforcement] works intricately,” they “put law enforcement in a bind.” Chiefs cited the sheer number of gun laws as leading to contradictory, complex laws that they found unenforceable, even in well-funded agencies.17 Rather than emboldening police chiefs and committing them to the project of gun regulation, California gun policy had the opposite effect by encouraging cynicism. As one California chief commented,
What I think needs to be done is wipe the books clean. So much of it is piecemeal, and most officers don’t even know the law at the entry level—they rely on cheat sheets or senior officers. And we are doing the best we can—and you know, we’ll arrest people and then do the research—and then release or charge on the arrest.… It’s like you need to be a specialist to regurgitate the law.… We have 60,000 or so statutes—we are inundated. Then there’s about 500 to 700 new laws per year. So really, what are we doing? And why?
This chief resonated with others who described California gun laws as “an enforcement nightmare [that] practically [requires] a law degree to understand the 115-plus pages on ARs [assault weapons]” and that “mak[es] our lives miserable.” Fed up with the complexities of California gun laws (and California laws in general), this chief makes the sweeping statement that the state’s regulatory apparatus needs to be erased and rewritten from the ground up. Until that happens, however, he maintains that police “do the best we can.”
Other chiefs likewise threw up their hands at what they saw as the intricate absurdities of California’s gun laws, at times even sympathizing with officers who underenforced California gun laws. As one chief reasoned,
You’ll have the farmer who doesn’t realize he has high-capacity magazines and the law changed, and he can’t have them. Well, he really doesn’t know. And so you have officers who see that, and they might not bother enforcing it. Because we’re in triage mode. We have to think about what’s worth it.
Such grievances are best appreciated within California’s broader policy environment. Whereas criminal justice actors, especially California’s prison guard union, played a key role in pushing forward a “tough on crime” agenda in the early 1990s,18 police chiefs found themselves at odds with new policies introduced in the mid-2010s meant to rein in carceral spending in California and compel the state to comply with Eighth Amendment standards prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment,” as discussed in chapter 2.19 Two initiatives in particular—realignment of prison inmates into county jails (AB109)20 and reduced sentencing for certain crimes (Proposition 47)21—have created much debate about and public criticism of California’s carceral apparatus. Although these initiatives have failed to fundamentally change the state’s appetite for punishment, they created a terrain of politics in which chiefs became particularly invested in and incensed about the local and state ramifications of what they saw as a rollback of a largely successful war on crime. One chief explained that California’s push toward decriminalization and decarceration appeared “incongruent” with California’s elaborate gun laws:
I have been very vocal on this, and I will tell you exactly what I told Governor Brown.… I find it very incongruent that in a state where you are pushing for more gun control laws that we would also be de-emphasizing criminal gun behavior.
This chief, who had unique access to Governor Brown by virtue of his leadership position within the law enforcement community, directly mobilized California gun politics to communicate his opposition to California’s rollback of the state’s war on crime. Another chief succinctly described the politics of California crime control as “asinine”:
They [legislators] don’t know what they are doing if they think any of that [e.g., banning assault weapons] has an effect on crime.… [I]f you really want to do something, start locking people up.… Because, either it’s going to make people think twice, and if it doesn’t, who gives a shit? Because at least they are off the street for those ten years! Now, I’m on my soapbox, but in California, we have more than enough freaking laws! But it’s all these liberals who just want to keep people out of jail. It is asinine!
Though they vehemently supported “tough on crime” gun laws such as mandatory minimums and sentencing enhancement (see chapter 2), chiefs saw many of California’s gun control laws as misguided, and even hypocritical, policies in a state that has increasingly gone “soft” on crime.22 Within a policy environment that had largely veered toward rethinking mass incarceration, gun policy thus allowed California police chiefs to participate in a status competition23 among criminal justice stakeholders by asserting their moral high ground with respect to the policymakers. The willingness of California police chiefs to speak to me about their “politically incorrect” (to quote one chief) thoughts on guns was likely a reflection of this frustration: I provided a forum for chiefs to anonymously air sentiments that they could otherwise utter only behind closed doors.
But California’s legal apparatus not only troubled police chiefs as enforcers of gun laws; it also implicated police themselves as objects of gun law enforcement. Although the regulation of guns usually sparks a conversation about private civilian access, California’s gun laws also shape police’s relationship with their own guns. In California, firearms restrictions such as waiting periods, weapons bans, and ammunition regulations typically, but not always, have included explicit police exemptions for on-duty, off-duty, and/or retired police. But several chiefs worried that gun bills proposed by California lawmakers too often fail to clarify exemptions for police. One chief recounts an early debate over Los Angeles city’s local magazine ban:
The way it was originally written made no sense. It would have been illegal for officers from other places to go into LA city. It would have made it so that reserve officers couldn’t go in. They exempted LA police, but there were all these other issues. And retired cops who have to qualify every year, they would have also been affected.
Likewise, in 2016, the California Police Chiefs Association publicly opposed Proposition 63, which lays out a background check system for ammunition purchases. Arguing that “Proposition 63 complicates current law with one that is costlier and seriously flawed,”24 the CalChiefs president at the time, Ken Corney, cited specific concerns regarding how the proposition would complicate ammunition purchases by police departments.
This stake in California gun laws also extends to very personal concerns about gun access. One chief noted that his lack of “passion” about guns reflects the less limiting gun restrictions he experiences as a police officer:
If I couldn’t carry [a gun by virtue of being a police officer], I would be a lot more passionate about this [gun rights]. I’d feel like I’m being prevented from protecting my family, and people know that cops don’t show up.… [I]n the streets, there are not as many rules, and people may need that [i.e., to carry a gun]. Street cops may see it that way, too, and I don’t necessarily disagree.
Echoing pro-gun discourse that circulates among gun carriers,25 this chief cites police inadequacy to explain a need to carry a firearm.26 His statement is suggestive of how gun policy itself shapes police attachment to firearms: accustomed to carrying a firearm, this chief asserts that he would be politically galvanized if he could no longer carry.
Other chiefs suggested that police are affected by California’s gun laws, especially when they retire and must relinquish some of the gun access they enjoyed—and became accustomed to—as active police. Consider California’s assault weapons ban. The Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, revamped in 1999, bans assault weapons in California. As originally written in 1999, both active and retired “peace officers” were exempt from possession restrictions; in 2002, a U.S. Appeals Court upheld the assault weapons ban but struck down the clause regarding retired police. Today, active “peace officers” in nineteen different California agencies are eligible to purchase and possess otherwise banned weapons, but they must give up these guns once they retire. One chief explained,
It makes no sense—police have their own personal AR’s and carry them when they are on duty, but as soon as they stop being cops they have to turn them back in. But they are their personal guns. It doesn’t make any sense.
Another chief likewise revealed his personal grievances with California gun laws. When I asked him what he’d like to change with California gun laws, he responded with a very personal request that reflected how his status as active-duty law enforcement made him acutely attuned to California gun laws,
I’m worried that when I leave law enforcement, because I live in California … I won’t be able to buy what I want to buy. Because right now I can buy anything.
My interviews with Arizona chiefs suggested that some retired California police even go so far as to leave the state after they retire to relocate to more gun-lenient pastures. One Arizona chief in a rural spot observed,
This area is full of cops from California. They all come here because they don’t want to have to deal with California gun laws—and California in general—so they move here, or Montana. We have so many retired cops in this area!
California police chiefs, on the whole, articulated a specific brand of gun populism: anti-elitism. They defined themselves in contrast to lawmakers and legislators who overwhelmed police with intricate gun laws that are ineffective in stopping criminals but, as they saw it, negatively affected law-abiding gun owners, including police themselves. Allowing police exemptions for guns while active duty did not deepen police consensus in favor of gun control; instead, it compelled some police to empathize with armed, law-abiding civilians. California police chiefs thus suggest that police are not simply street-level bureaucrats “making” public policy on the ground.27 Rather, gun laws transform police into political actors as they negotiate—whether symbolically or materially—the distribution of legitimate violence within and beyond the state. In contrast to their endorsement of mandatory minimums and their embrace of gun militarism, California police chiefs express gun populism both to voice discontent regarding particular gun policies and the legislators who penned them and also to acknowledge a constituency of lawful Americans productive of public safety, whether police or civilians.
Amid California’s restrictive gun laws, police chiefs blurred the lines between themselves and civilians as gun owners. But in Michigan and Arizona, where gun laws are less restrictive in terms of both gun possession and gun use, police chiefs blurred the line between themselves and civilians as gun users—and imagined a much more proactive, and even collaborative, role for armed private civilians in the pursuit of social order.
In June 2014, the Detroit police chief James Craig appeared on the cover of the National Rifle Association’s magazine America’s First Freedom with the cover line: “We’re not advocating violence. We’re advocates of not being victims.” An African American chief who had worked in jurisdictions as different as Los Angeles, California; Portland, Maine; and Cincinnati, Ohio, before returning to Detroit, Craig saw the desirability of concealed carry among Detroiters as a simple calculus: crime victims do not have time to wait for police in a violence-prone city lacking in police resources. As an African American “big city” police chief, Craig’s perspective may seem unusual, but he was far from an outlier across the state. Michigan chiefs echoed Chief Craig; one white rural police chief, who had started his career in Detroit, openly “applauded” him, saying, “Chief James Craig really embraces concealed carry, and I think that’s courageous. I applaud him because he says a lot of things that other chiefs wouldn’t say.”
In line with Chief Craig’s public statements, most chiefs in Michigan saw licensed concealed gun carry among private civilians as a form of crime fighting by proxy: insistent that even the most well-resourced police cannot protect all victims at all times, Michigan chiefs said they were comfortable with self-defense by private civilians as part of their overall crime-fighting mission.
Among most Michigan chiefs and across majority–African American and majority-white jurisdictions, licensed gun carriers were imagined as enhancing personal protection—even serving as a stopgap to police limitations. For example, these chiefs of majority-white areas emphasized the “ridiculous” presumption that police are adequate protection from criminal endangerment:
I believe that citizens need to be able to protect themselves. We cannot protect them—we just can’t. It’s impossible. Here we have the fastest response times, and that’s partly a result of the population layout. But our police officers: they are true police. They put themselves in danger. They relish it! True police officers. They get there in two minutes. How much damage can you do in two minutes? The government cannot save people from danger. That is just ridiculous. So people should be allowed to defend themselves.
I say fight back with everything you have. You have innocent victims who comply, and they still get shot! There was this guy who got carjacked right on 8 Mile [in Detroit]. And he did everything they wanted him to. He got out of the car; he gave them everything. All the witnesses who saw it said he complied. Yes, he did it all, but they still shot him in the chest.
Both of these chiefs emphasize the concealed pistol license as an individual-level stopgap for crime fighting in the absence of police, evoking an almost frontierlike mentality to insist that individuals are on their own when faced with a threat.
Likewise, a chief of a majority–African American jurisdiction maintained that “crime prevention is the sole responsibility of the people. Police facilitate it.… But it is the people who have allowed this to permeate their neighborhood.” He explained:
That fits in with the idea that it’s unrealistic to think of a police officer on every corner. There was a[n African American] woman, a nurse who had a CPL [concealed pistol license]. And she was walking out of the street, and she shoots and defends herself. She—I don’t want to say eliminated—she stopped the threat. And she has an absolute right to do that.
This chief seamlessly flows from police jurisdiction to self-defense, suggesting that concealed carry “fits in” at the intersection where police prerogatives meet community responsibility.
Although today’s chiefs by and large told me that they were comfortable with licensed concealed carry, Michigan’s police had not always endorsed licensed concealed carry in the state, especially before the passage of the new “shall-issue” law that required that all qualified applicants be granted a license (before 2001, licenses were given on a discretionary basis only to those who could demonstrate to a gun board that they had “good cause” to carry a gun). On the eve of the implementation of the state’s broadened concealed carry law, some law enforcement officials joined gun control groups in opposing the law, and the incoming Wayne County prosecutor Michael Duggan and Governor Jennifer Granholm garnered the support of some law enforcement in an unsuccessful drive to block the law’s implementation.28 A decade and a half later, police chiefs recalled the period as fraught with uncertainty and dismay. One chief noted, “There were the fearmongers at the beginning.… I was mildly concerned at the time, but nothing came to fruition.” Another offered, “When the law changed, my personal belief was that we were going to have tons of problems. I was shocked that we didn’t. I really thought it was a bad idea.” One more chief noted, “It meant more training with officers so that they could understand what to expect with the new law.” But then he went on: “The people who are carrying illegally, well, they are going to do it regardless, so that didn’t change.”
As these excerpts intimate, chiefs in Michigan learned to incorporate and accommodate the new laws governing concealed carry into their practical understandings of policing and public safety. From talking to Michigan chiefs, I learned that the concealed carry licensing process did not just vet would-be gun carriers; it also allowed police chiefs to deploy the gun license as a color-blind indicator of good character and moral standing. Accordingly, Michigan chiefs alluded to a distinct moral calculus regarding gun carry and gun carriers, something that might be termed “system exposure.”29 Emphasizing the training requirements and background check process, police chiefs viewed a civilian’s willingness to undergo “the process” to obtain a concealed pistol license as a key marker in itself of moral fitness to carry a gun. In this way, the concealed carry licensing process shapes how police chiefs draw lines between lawful civilians and criminal suspects, and how police come to be more comfortable with a well-armed populace. One chief summarizes this transformation by drawing a parallel between police badges and gun carry licenses: “In 2001 [when the state’s new concealed carry law was first implemented], it was a little unnerving. But you grow into it. I mean, you go into a room with armed people, and it’s unnerving, but then you see their badges or licenses, you know that because of that, they have training—or at least that’s what you presume.”
System exposure eased police chiefs’ discomfort with a system they knew to be fallible. Consider one police chief who explained, “No bureaucracy is perfect. Human error is possible, and we’re always vulnerable to that. But it’s not likely. And a criminal isn’t looking for permission for illegal activities.” Realistic that “no bureaucracy is perfect,” he settles his uneasiness by averring that a civilian’s willingness to “look for permission” distinguishes them from the criminal gun carrier. Other chiefs made similar statements. One chief remarked, “If people are even willing to approach the system, they are probably citizens who are responsible.” Another maintained, “I don’t care if people carry if they go through the process. They are probably responsible, and if they aren’t, it’s drinking at the bar, not shooting up a daycare.” This suggestion that concealed carriers are “probably responsible” is revealing: even if they fail to live up to responsible gun ownership, they are still fundamentally different from the imagined criminal who is “shooting up a daycare.”
Chiefs’ ability to see gun carriers as proxy crime fighters therefore depended on their comfort with the credentialing process these gun carriers underwent to receive a concealed pistol license. One chief reasoned:
[Interviewer: What do you think about civilians carrying guns?]
That’s a hard one. Because it depends on the citizen, and we have to get it right in terms of how we screen citizens. I don’t know if we have the answers. But when we get it right, we have a well-trained citizen who is armed and familiar with the operation of a firearm, they understand firearms safety, and they can save lives and help people in a situation that needs that. On the other hand, if training is not adequate, if people just do the bare minimum—and then plus you have mental issues—well, they can hurt people.
With the disclaimer that civilians need to be vetted, chiefs understood concealed carry as a mechanism of crime fighting.
Opting out of the controversial and often highly technical debates about whether “more guns” mean “more crime” or “less crime,”30 most chiefs saw concealed carry as having little impact on crime one way or another; as one Michigan chief bluntly noted, “Ultimately, the people with [legal] guns aren’t the fucking problem!” At the same time, they did see concealed carry as an invaluable proxy for police at the individual level. And some chiefs did insist that concealed carry reduced crime. These two chiefs clarified that they felt safer with more guns in the hands of civilians:
I’m in support of it, provided there is the proper training and background, yes. I have no problem with it at all. [Interviewer: Do you feel more safe, less safe, or about the same knowing that people in Michigan are carrying guns?] More safe.
Really, when was the last time you heard of a mass shooting in Michigan? There are so many guns everywhere.… I firmly believe that the reason why we don’t have mass shootings is because people don’t know who is carrying.
Among the majority of Michigan chiefs I interviewed, the licensing process served as a positive credentialing procedure to divide would-be gun carriers into “good guys with guns” versus criminals by virtue of their willingness to undergo “the process.” In this way, Michigan police chiefs articulated a populist vision of order maintenance, one in which ordinary armed citizens (“the people”) are crucial ingredients of social order.
But if, as the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller notes,31 “the people” of populist thought represent a narrow, antipluralist subset of the political community, then it is the concealed pistol licensing process that does the color-blind work of narrowing down this community of “good guys with guns.” Just like the negative “mark” of a criminal record,32 this sorting reflects a color-blind sensibility sheathed in a language of law abidance versus criminality. The vetting process itself reproduces racial disparities in access to legitimate violence by virtue of its reliance on criminal justice records: while concealed pistol licenses are granted to all qualifying applicants, men of color are disproportionately likely to be disqualified because they are disproportionately likely to have felony records33 and other kinds of contact with the criminal justice system that bar them from obtaining a concealed pistol license.34 As chapter 5 will describe in more detail, the loosening of concealed pistol licensing laws in states such as Michigan has obscured the historical color line distinguishing legal and illegal gun access by reframing gun access around lawfulness and legality—but the color line in gun access nevertheless persists. The concealed pistol license also functions as a color-blind device by reproducing the politics of respectability for those gun carriers of color who qualify. The emphasis on training and responsibility—against the backdrop of criminal record vetting—allowed police chiefs to cast the armed civilian35 in terms of a color-blind embrace of “respectable” racial minorities.36 Accordingly, police chiefs celebrated gun carriers of color who used guns in self-defense—such as the armed nurse described by the Michigan chief above—as examples of the color-blind appeal of gun carry, even as the police killings of lawfully armed African Americans such as Philando Castile and Emantic Bradford Jr. (as well as the analysis I will present in chapter 5) suggest that the privileges attached to such licenses are not color-blind in practice.
In Michigan, concealed licensing laws have set up a vetting process that buttresses a color-blind line between “good guys with guns” and “bad guys with guns,” allowing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the state to legally carry guns.37 Often expressing comfort with the idea of licensed concealed carry, Michigan’s police chiefs have largely accommodated the state’s gun laws by embracing a populist stance on gun carry best characterized as “crime fighting by proxy.” But police chiefs could also adapt to gun-rich contexts in which no such vetting process exists, such as Arizona, and as they adapted, they embraced a more entrenched version of gun populism.
In 2010, Arizona removed the permitting requirement to carry a firearm concealed; an individual who can lawfully own a pistol can also carry it openly or, provided they are over twenty-one years old, concealed without a special license.38 Despite the state’s reputation as a Second Amendment haven, however, Arizona police chiefs do not unilaterally embrace the state’s unprecedentedly deregulated gun policy environment. Concerns—about gun training, gun safety, poorly coordinated police databases, and other gun law enforcement tools that Arizona police lack—often surfaced among Arizona chiefs. As one chief noted with chagrin, “Just about anyone can carry a firearm—why? Why does that make sense? … That’s not the ‘true’ Arizona. The true Arizona cares about firearms safety.”
These concerns, however, generally did not rise to the antagonistic tenor exhibited by California chiefs with respect to that state’s restrictive gun laws; Arizona chiefs were guarded in expressing misgivings about Arizona gun laws, at times scratching their heads as to why Arizona’s gun laws did not cause more problems—and even offered solutions—for public law enforcement. Against the backdrop of a generally pro-police legislature and pro-gun populace, police chiefs (whether willingly or begrudgingly) say they have adapted to Arizona’s gun laws, asserting a distinct brand of gun populism—co-policing—as they see armed private civilians as potentially productive of public safety.39
Chiefs with long careers in Arizona provided a glimpse into the different worlds of gun regulation in Arizona over the past several decades. As one chief commented,
In the 1970s, it was very strict. You could not have a gun concealed.… If it’s in your glove compartment, that’s concealed, and that wasn’t allowed. Now … you can have it anywhere.… I can say that at the time [when permitted concealed carry was legalized], law enforcement was not happy. They did not support going to concealed carry permits. Because they saw it as putting us in danger. It was really a safety issue for us.
This chief initially appeared to vindicate what many advocates for enhanced gun restrictions warned about loosening gun laws: more guns mean less officer safety.40 I probed further: “How would you say that [this change] affected police then?”
It really raised our awareness, so now we always say, “Watch the hands!” If someone has their hands in their pockets, we say take your hands out of your pockets, because now we assume everyone is armed. The mindset definitely changed. We adapted. We accepted that that’s the law—and that’s the case with all laws. That happens all the time. And so as far as affecting officer safety, I don’t think so, I don’t think assaults on officers went up because of that exact law. Now, we are seeing a rise in assaults on officers, but I think that is just because we [American society] are more violent.
According to this chief, although police “were not happy,” they responded not with legal cynicism surrounding the law but by “adapting.” Experiencing the impact of gun laws on officer safety as overblown, this chief resisted attributing violence against police to laxer gun laws (“Now, we are seeing a rise in assaults on officers, but I think that is just because we are more violent”).
Other chiefs also expressed ambivalence: on the one hand, they maintained apprehension about the removal of regulatory mechanisms in Arizona, but on the other hand, they experienced little fallout in terms of safety as a result. Consider these two chiefs:
I don’t think it’s a good thing. Now, it has not come to fruition. I have not experienced any fallout from getting rid of the training. But still, I don’t think it’s a good thing to get rid of the training. Because you should be formally trained in the law and the handling of a gun.
Anecdotally, I think the lack of incidents involving the mishandling of guns means that it isn’t that much of an issue. Now, are there people who have guns within a mile of here that I’d be concerned given their level of training? Sure, but they haven’t posed an issue.
Arizona police chiefs found a variety of ways to downplay the risks of policing a heavily armed population. For example, they focused on the tactical aspects of interfacing with a widely and well-armed general public. One chief maintained that he was a better cop when he assumed everyone was armed; comparing his experiences in Arizona with his brief time in California, he found he appreciated the Arizona approach:
You know, when I was a deputy [in Arizona], every tactic we had was based around the idea that every car had a gun—and that 90 percent of those guns were legal. So in my view, our approach was smarter and safer. I’m just talking about the mechanics of the stop.… In California, everyone assumed that [occupants of] cars weren’t armed, but that’s not the case at all. The truth was, you have just as many guns in California, except 90 percent of them are illegal! Now, of course, that’s partly because of California law. You make one small little error in transporting the gun, and you are illegal.… So what ends up happening [in California] is that first, you approach the car less tactically. Then you scan, look, you don’t see anything that maybe raises the flag that there’s a gun—and then your tactics get even worse!
In this chief’s view, a greater number of legal guns did not endanger but instead enhanced police safety insofar as guns become an ever-present weight on an officer’s mind, compelling officers to approach vehicles more tactically.
As with California and Michigan, such attitudes must be contextualized within Arizona’s broader policy environment; amid few grievances about the general direction of Arizona criminal justice policy, police chiefs offered that they generally encountered a police-friendly environment. One chief notes, “We are a very pro-cop state, so I would say [legislators] are open [to listening to police].” Another agrees that “Arizona is a very law enforcement friendly state, it’s conservative.”
Arizona chiefs thus adopted a pragmatic stance that allowed them to emphasize how police might benefit from a widely armed citizenry. Navigating the practical consequences of an armed citizenry, different chiefs provided different renderings of how armed civilians could serve as what one chief described as an “asset to public safety.” Amid the assumption that Arizonans had a “reputation for being sharpshooters,” as one chief told me, police chiefs entertained the idea that Arizona gun laws had, indeed, deterred violence:
Here, everyone has a gun. And I don’t know if there is a correlation, but it certainly seems like there could be a connection because we don’t have the level of gun violence here. You know, think about it: if you go to rob a store, there’s a good chance the store owner is armed. And there is a good chance everyone else in there is armed, too!
Illustrating the costs of gun control, chiefs referenced gun violence in big cities—especially Chicago—as a counterpoint to Arizona. As one chief wagered, “Look at places with strict gun laws—like Chicago!” Another chief reasoned, “Well the places with the strictest gun control—Chicago, New York City—they also have the highest murder rate. Now, places where it’s more lax? Phoenix is the sixth or seventh largest city—and our homicide rate is really low.” But New York City’s murder rate has dropped dramatically since the early 1990s—and is one of the lowest among major U.S. cities.41 Likewise, the designation of “strictest gun control” is loose; Chicago does not have the strictest gun control (California’s gun laws are stricter, for example).42 Of course, historically, these cities have—and, in Chicago’s case, continue to have—elevated murder rates, and they most certainly have stricter gun controls than in Arizona. Further, these cities are associated not just with gun violence in general but with a particular kind of gun violence: urban gun violence associated with boys and men of color (see chapter 2).
Arizona gun violence rates rank it in the top third of states.43 But when police chiefs embraced gun carry among private civilians as a prosocial activity, they often emphasized specific, relatable instances of civilian gun use rather than rely on broader trends in crime. This is reminiscent of the legal scholars Dan Kahan and Donald Braman’s cultural theory of risk,44 which argues that the risks ascribed to guns are filtered through people’s cultural orientations; rather than crime rates, chiefs’ understandings of guns as productive of public safety were situated within their hands-on, intimate understanding of police work. For example, chiefs regularly referenced examples of civilians assisting officers, including the widely covered Department of Public Safety (DPS) incident in 2017 that opened this chapter. In that incident, the armed civilian Thomas Yoxall used his firearm to kill an assailant, assisting the Arizona DPS officer Ed Andersson, who had been shot. One chief described this and another incident to illustrate that “these sorts of things happen a lot”:
There’s this great video of a crazy big guy who is beating a police officer. And you have this African American guy who comes up, and he’s armed, and to alert the officer, he just yells at the guy—stop, get off, or I’m going to shoot. Well, the guy stopped, and this guy laid down his gun. It was done perfectly. And then you have the DPS incident [involving Officer Andersson and the armed private civilian Yoxall]. So I think those sorts of things happen a lot. I would say I would feel more comfortable if more good people were armed.… Because if you think about the shootings that have happened in malls, in schools, if someone with training and experience with the weapon would have been there, they could have stopped that bloodshed. And that’s okay in my book!
Although this chief does not racialize the “crazy big guy” or the “police officer,” his deliberate racial marking of “this African American guy” as a “good guy with a gun” suggests both the noteworthiness of an armed African American man playing the role of the “good guy” (thus reinforcing the implicit whiteness of the “good guy with a gun” trope) and the greater porousness of this category with respect to race for “respectable” people of color rendered so by the defensive uses of their guns.45
In a similar vein, another chief squarely placed gun carriers as part and parcel of a generalized duty to police. As a school resource officer, this chief had encountered the active shooter who would massacre a public constituent meeting held by then–U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and leaving more than a dozen wounded. I queried the chief about his thoughts on the response, at this active shooting, of concealed carriers such as Joe Zamudio, who ran out of a nearby business to help disarm the shooter as the shooter was reloading his firearm.46 The chief responded with sardonic humor: “I was mad they didn’t shoot him!” His response reiterated the blurred lines, discussed in chapter 3, between police and private armed civilians as first responders to active shootings. He continued:
But they saw him reloading, and they knew: that’s my opening. That’s education, and that’s a bystander doing a good job by deciding he is not going to fire. It all comes down to education, and if they can provide back up with education. I’m all for people taking on a life of responsibility. I’m just two eyes! But if I have eight eyes? It’s much easier to see everything. And if civilians call 911, and then they can handle an attack?
I interrupted him to ask what, then, he thought about Stand Your Ground laws.
We love it. Carjackings in Tucson: we were having one a day. And suddenly, you try to carjack and you get shot in the face? Well, my goodness! They started to come down.
Likewise elaborating on armed private civilians as first responders alongside police, another Arizona chief expressed a similar, if more generic, sentiment, expanding the paradigm of community policing to include armed civilians:
Yes, I’m okay with people having weapons. And I would say, the more good people with guns, the more chance you have to stop the bad guys.… [My feelings have] changed since I started. I think there was something about police carrying a gun, that it brought certain benefits, like—oh, I was one of the few! And everyone else had to apply for a permit.… [But lately] I’ve really thought a lot about community policing. And that we can’t do it all ourselves. And maybe that’s stretching it to include guns, but that’s where I’m going to stretch it.
This chief is particularly striking insofar as he links his shifting relationship to his own gun with his shifting sensibilities regarding armed civilians amid the perceived limitations of police. No longer seeing himself as “one of the few,” he now sees armed civilians as a necessary stopgap, given that police “can’t do it all [themselves].”
Even Arizona chiefs apprehensive about armed civilians still found themselves endorsing civilian intervention in some instances, given the realities of policing remote, resource-poor jurisdictions, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of police work more generally, on the other hand. One chief admitted, “My concern is if someone is a concealed carrier, I don’t know him—is it a bad guy? A good guy? And in that case, the situation really dictates.” Nevertheless, he noted,
I would say—if an officer needs help? And they know that it will be an hour for anyone to get there and that’s with their lights and sirens going off? And then there’s a responsible citizen that would help? Well, I would say that that would be welcomed. Because we just don’t have the manpower.
Thus, with “everyone” armed—indeed, even “grandma may be carrying a gun!” according to one chief—police chiefs learned to see guns as productive of social order, downplaying gun violence in the state in favor of embracing local gun laws. As such, police chiefs acclimated to Arizona’s gun laws, framing their concerns in terms of a populist sensibility of co-policing that integrated armed civilians into the pursuit of public safety.
If gun militarism intensified zero-tolerance, hard-line criminalization, gun populism appeared to foster the opposite: discretion, caution, even impunity. In addition to blurring the lines between police and civilians as armed protectors, gun populism echoed libertarian and conservative concerns about government overreach and overcriminalization.47 Such concerns were loudest in California with respect to gun possession; they could also be heard in Michigan and, to a lesser extent, in Arizona.
As mentioned earlier, California chiefs articulated uneasiness about state laws that criminalized the “wrong” people but let those whom they saw as hardened criminals off easy. One chief I interviewed had worked extensively with California’s Armed Prohibited Persons System (recall from chapter 2 that the system is a database of individuals who at one time owned firearms but then became prohibited possessors). The chief explained his take on California’s gun laws: “It’s more restrictions, it’s more difficult for the manufacturer, and that’s our business plan for gun control.” Sensing ambivalence, I asked whether he supported this “business plan.” “Good question,” he said, and paused for several long moments before responding in full:
I don’t know. I don’t personally have a problem in terms of banning those guns. And it works. Because manufacturers are opting out [of the California market].
[Interviewer: So why the long pause?]
Well, it goes back to: How far are we going to take it? Now, if you have a magazine that has more than ten rounds, you are a criminal. And you could have someone who moves from out of state … but as it says on the Department of Justice’s website: ignorance of the law is not a defense! I’ve just dealt with so many people who just didn’t know. They didn’t even know to register.… [S]o that’s [what] gives me pause.
This chief’s hesitancy contrasts with his—and other chiefs’—broad endorsement of “tough on crime” gun laws. Pivoting the target of gun laws from urban gun criminals to people who “just didn’t know,” this chief becomes stuck on recognizing the criminalizing reach of California’s gun laws.
Other chiefs were more explicit in their opposition to California’s gun laws, rooting their criticism in how these laws, as they saw it, unfairly and even unconstitutionally criminalize gun owners. One chief bemoaned that these laws “punished the whole class” for the misdeeds of a Johnny-come-lately (e.g., “If Johnny is late, punish the whole class? But we do exactly that with these [gun] laws”); another California chief lamented that “harsh gun bans” are forced on “the masses” while criminals enjoy leniency. And still another chief said that these laws threaten to “creat[e] the propensity to act outside of the law for people who would have otherwise been law-abiding but who are now criminals.” These sentiments suggest cracks in the so-called Blue Wall that shrouds police work and keeps police subculture insular. Instead of advocating that police maintain exclusive access to firearms (as gun militarism might suggest), chiefs see gun restrictions from the perspective of gun populism as unduly harming the people they police.
But not all people fall under the purview of the police’s concerns.
As I listened closely to police chiefs as they described their worries about overzealous gun laws, I saw a pattern: the “normal people” (in the words of one chief) who many chiefs saw as unduly bearing the regulatory brunt of California gun laws were designated with tropes associated with white, middle-class status. Chiefs used archetypes—the “rancher with a gun,” the “teacher with a gun,” the “farmer”48—to describe such gun owners. The “teacher” evokes public service; the “farmer” and the “rancher” evoke Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman republicanism, which lionized early white settlers as “real” Americans by virtue of their ethic of self-sufficiency and self-reliance.49 Typecast by an implicit work ethic, they each represent mainstream, “salt-of-the-earth” sorts. These tropes contrast starkly with those tropes—the gangbanger, the drug dealer, the superpredator—associated with urban gun criminals, as discussed in chapter 2. And these “salt-of-the-earth” tropes elicit a different response from chiefs with respect to gun law. Whereas the urban gun criminal warranted aggressive laws amid an enforcement apparatus that was too often too lenient toward criminals, the “normal people” who found themselves on the wrong side of unnecessarily onerous regulations deserved, if not the benefit of the doubt, at least the benefit of mutual commiseration.
To illustrate, consider three chiefs who voiced concerns about mandatory minimums:
I think everything should be done on a case-by-case basis—or at least, that you should have the ability to consider special circumstances. Because you box people in with generic laws. Let’s say you have a nineteen-year-old kid that jumps into his dad’s truck. He’s going to work, he’s late, gets pulled over, and then he’s found with his dad’s gun in the car because his dad didn’t take it out, and now he is facing five years, and so he’s going to plead that down. [Michigan]
I think people need to be evaluated as individuals, in their individual circumstances, and yes, that can be time-consuming, and that’s why people fall back on the mandatory minimums. But Arizona—[consider] our DUI laws. In those cases, you have to serve the minimum. So you have a career criminal who is basically a turd, and they get the same sentence as someone who never committed any crime, and who is drunk because their father just died, they just went to the wake, they decided to get hammered, and now they are driving home. We treat everyone the same, but they are not the same. I strongly believe that crimes committed in the heat of passion are different than crimes that are planned—but they could both involve a gun! [Arizona]
Well, that’s where I come up with a little bit of a problem—I have had issues with—say you have a guy who is arrested and convicted for a white-collar felony. But now he’s a taxpaying family person, you know, not that that is the only thing that’s important, but I’m trying—[Interviewer: To paint a picture?]—Yes! It would be someone like you and me! And so maybe this person has a hiccup when they were younger, they made a mistake—and so now he can’t go hunting, you know, something that doesn’t have anything to do with a gun crime—but he’s banned. Because he’s on that [Armed and] Prohibited Persons list. So I see that as a problem, because then someone else can steal a gun, and what do we do? I write a ticket. [California]
Each of these more nuanced takes on mandatory minimums reproduces a similar reasoning—that certain criminals must bear the force of the law, but the law should not be onerous for the “taxpaying family person … like you and me,” the hapless nineteen-year-old trying to get to work on time, or the grieving son coming home from his father’s wake. Each of these imagined gun offenders operates outside of the purview of tropes of black criminality; the politics of respectability—cued through explicit tropes of hardworking, taxpaying, family-focused people—exempts these gun offenders from the category of “hardened” criminal and instead puts them in the category of people who made an understandable mistake. These chiefs’ words suggest the significance of racial ideologies linking not blackness and criminality but whiteness and innocence: Although a handful of chiefs explicitly extended this greater care to gang members (recall, for example, the discussion of felony murder in chapter 2), by and large chiefs afforded greater impunity to gun owners marked as white, middle-class Americans. Such moral improvisation produced zones of exculpatory discretion for those deemed by police as—to paraphrase the legal scholars Stephen Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno writing on frontline decision making50—“deserving a break.”
Though loudest in California, chiefs raised resonant concerns in the other states I studied. In Michigan, chief after chief expressed profound ambivalence regarding gun prohibitions related to restraining orders51 due to domestic violence. Their legal cynicism wasn’t entirely surprising or unique; police chiefs across Arizona, California, and Michigan described restraining orders as “just a piece of paper.”52 What was striking about Michigan chiefs’ ambivalence, as compared to California and Arizona chiefs, was not their exasperation at the legal process but rather their frequent concerns about “vindictive” (in the words of two Michigan chiefs) girlfriends, wives, and exes who used restraining orders to manipulate men and, sometimes, other women. For example, one chief expressed his ambivalence by noting,
I think the [restraining orders] are a good thing. Now, let’s say there’s a boyfriend and girlfriend fighting, and there’s a police report, she says its physical abuse. Is it made up? Could be, and the guy is going to jail if he has a gun. And he might not even know he has [a restraining order]! So too many take them out too easily, but I don’t want someone to be denied a [restraining order].
Another Michigan chief asserted, “I think it would be naive to not believe that a [restraining order] can be taken out as a tool, for example, in child custody or something.” And yet another Michigan chief summarized: “It doesn’t happen as much now, but you’ll still have times where the guy breaks up, and you have two girls fighting over the guy for a while—and one girl will take a [restraining order] out on the other girl. It’s just foolish!”
The more I listened to Michigan chiefs vent their concerns about restraining orders, the more I realized that this was not just a matter of protocol; much like California chiefs’ concerns about overzealous gun regulations in that state, this was personal, but unlike California chiefs (or Arizona chiefs, for that matter), Michigan chiefs were uniquely affected by state-specific laws related to gun prohibitions under restraining orders. In California, police work is exempted from these orders, and restraining orders in Arizona do not trigger gun seizures, but in Michigan, police under restraining orders lose their guns, which means they cannot work patrol. To illustrate, consider this chief’s concerns regarding restraining orders that require that a person relinquish his or her guns:
It’s a remedy if there is a presumption of guilt.… But there’s a big issue with my guys [police officers]. If a police officer gets a [restraining order on him], he can’t do his job [because he can’t have a firearm]. He’s suspended, and even if he gets it dismissed, it is impossible to recover from the stigma and the financial losses. So, you have to watch out. There was this one guy who started dating this hot woman; he brought her to our after-work drinks. Turns out this woman had been in a few car accidents, and that’s how they started dating. I had to talk a lot of sense into the guy. Like, do you realize that guys can be blacklisted and [passed] over for promotions and just generally ostracized because they end up getting all caught up with women on the lookout for men they can use?
This chief alludes to stereotypes of women as conniving Jezebels,53 on the “lookout” for vulnerable police who can be used for their personal gain. Another Michigan chief similarly emphasized the impact of restraining orders on police in particular, emphasizing the harm that a restraining order can wreak on an officer’s job while doing little more than “giv[ing] people a false sense of security”:
There are people who take out [restraining orders] because they are vindictive, and judges are quick to issue them, and they have the ability to do great harm—let’s say an officer is having a divorce, and the wife takes out a [restraining order] on him. Then he can’t even work [because he can’t be around guns]. It also gives people a false sense of security. Because if someone really wants to do you harm, a [restraining order] is not going to stop them.
Michigan police chiefs’ concerns about restraining orders circled back to legal gun carriers, especially worries about the fairness of seizing guns amid the specter of the vindictive spouse. One Michigan chief explained,
That’s [gun restrictions related to restraining orders] tough. I know people who have had a [restraining order].
[Interviewer: In law enforcement?]
No! If you are in law enforcement and you get a [restraining order], that’s goodbye job! But in the general public, there are people who get into an argument. Say John Q. Public. He gets in an argument with a wife, and he’s loud, and she’s afraid, and so she takes out a [restraining order]. But John Q. Public is a CPL [concealed pistol license] holder! And now his gun is taken away.
As this chief reveals, though Michigan chiefs widely and straightforwardly embraced aggressively enforcement of gun laws against the “bad guys with a gun” (see chapter 2), they seemed more ambivalent (e.g., “it’s tough”) regarding enforcement against the putatively “good guys with a gun” (in this excerpt, John Q. Public, the concealed pistol license holder). Another Michigan chief told me he found unfair the federal gun regulations banning those convicted of domestic violence assault from possessing firearms because “it was applied ex post facto.”54 Accordingly, though he was aware of at least one hunter in his jurisdiction with such a conviction, “he [the hunter] has not suffered that consequence. He’s kept on hunting. I think he’s continued to own a gun. He’s technically in violation, and so that’s not right. But the Constitution forbids ex post facto punishment.” Each of these examples suggests that Michigan chiefs, like California chiefs, find themselves entangled with gun laws in ways that not only blur the distinctions between them and armed private civilians but also make them hesitant about the gun laws themselves—leading one chief, in this final case, to appeal to constitutional principles to knowingly underenforce the law.
Reflective of Arizona’s lenient gun laws, chiefs found fewer opportunities to bemoan overzealously restrictive gun laws (as in California) or lament the possibility of being disarmed by restraining orders (as in Michigan). But a politics of impunity was visible in how Arizona as well as California and Michigan chiefs tended to address open carriers (who wear their guns visibly) and sovereign citizens (who do not recognize the authority of the federal government or local police). Although police chiefs held a range of attitudes on open carry and “constitutional types” (in the words of one chief) and many vehemently opposed open carry,55 most chiefs saw them less as a public safety threat and more as a threat to the delicate balance between gun rights and gun safety insofar as they unnecessarily made people “feel uncomfortable.” As one Michigan chief narrated a hypothetical encounter with an open carrier: “We get calls about two or three times a year about it. And I have to explain [to people], ‘It’s legal.’ I know it’s legal, and it’s fine. But it’s not about me. It’s about the people who aren’t comfortable. And is it worth it to make people uncomfortable?”
This reasoning is striking for a number of reasons, not least because police violence against black and brown people often also starts with discomfort: as in widely covered incidents in Philadelphia,56 Oakland,57 and elsewhere, a white passerby calls police to report a “suspicious” or “out of place” person of color, which then instigates a chain of events that may result in harassment, detainment, arrest, or violence. But in the case of open carriers and sovereign citizens (who are disproportionately, though not exclusively, armed white men), police chiefs show a propensity to disengage, instead opting to inform the public that uncomfortable actions are, in fact, entirely legal. In a handful of cases, police chiefs told me about specific nonconfrontational approaches they had taken to open carriers and sovereign citizens. For example, one chief in Michigan told me,
[A while back], there was a guy who came in and wanted to have an open carry meeting in the library. The librarian, who was really smart, asked, “When?” [The open carrier] was dumbfounded, because his point was not to have a meeting; he just wanted her to say no. [After that,] the city manager said, let’s set a policy. But I said, no, let’s just have two cops there, and let them have their meeting. Because once you set a policy, that is a whole other can of worms: a formal policy would be worse because these groups are highly organized. They can fight you, and my job is to take care of this city. We have to figure out how not to get caught in their bag of tricks. Be sophisticated, and don’t let them trap you.
Rather than taking a “law and order” approach to open carriers, this chief takes a more subtle, nuanced approach, aimed at neutralizing open carriers and the discomfort they pose rather than entangling them in the legal system. Likewise, an Arizona chief in a rural, predominantly white town told me how he coached his officers to address sovereign citizens:
Most people don’t give us any hassle [but] we have a few of the “constitutionalist types.” They’ll have no plates, no driver’s license, and they don’t recognize our authority. They only recognize the authority of the elected sheriffs, not the police. So I tell my officers, don’t be confrontational, don’t get into a debate, because you are not going to win a debate with them! Just be polite, do your job, and if they want to argue the ticket, they can take it up with us later. Be cordial and professional.
In the case of open carriers, sovereign citizens, and “constitutional types,” police chiefs described nimble interpersonal know-how aimed at subduing a potentially volatile situation—and these included the police chiefs who found themselves frustrated, irritated, and even angered by these gun-wielders. The chief in this excerpt describes a highly professionalized approach of deescalation—exactly how police stops should unfold. It starkly contrasts with how high-profile police killings of black boys and men have unfolded. For boys and men of color, the “furtive movements” of lawful gun owners or even the admission of being lawfully armed, such as in Philando Castile’s case, have resulted in split-second decisions, quick trigger-pulls, and, ultimately, death. Likewise, the seemingly straightforward offense of illegal gun possession indicates dramatically different misdeeds across different racial frames of violence. In the context of the gangbanger, drug-dealer, and superpredator, the illegally possessed gun reflected yet another indicator of criminal depravity (see chapter 2). But for the farmer, the teacher, or the rancher, illegal gun possession both constituted a potentially forgivable mistake on the part of the gun-offending individual and cast doubt on the legitimacy of gun law itself. Alongside gun militarism, gun populism thus reminds us that at the intersection of gun politics and the politics of the police lie both power to criminalize some people as well as the prerogative to treat others with impunity. Gun populism—and the blurred lines it entails between police and certain civilians—captures the broader imageries of legitimate violence that naturalize this disparate politics of impunity.
Though most chiefs embraced populist sentiments with regard to gun law and policy, chiefs were not hard-line gun rights proponents. Nearly all chiefs wanted to retain some form of vetting for gun carriers, and police chiefs generally supported—albeit with caveats—a variety of gun regulations. Chiefs, furthermore, switched scripts between gun populism and gun militarism. They might embrace a populist stance with regard to some gun policies (e.g., licensed concealed carry), but eschew it with regard to others (e.g., open carry), and embrace gun militarism with regard to still others (e.g., mandatory minimums). As distinct brands of gun talk, gun populism and gun militarism coexisted, and chiefs invoked and tailored them to make sense of particular instances of gun uses and gun users.
Some chiefs, however, rejected gun rights on principle. They were a handful who outright questioned the Second Amendment, breaking with the political necessity that police show at least some willingness to enforce the laws of the land, including the U.S. Constitution. Though they policed in wealthy low-crime areas, in rural high-crime areas, and in sleepy tourist towns, these chiefs were few and far between. They were aware that they were in the minority, and they were downright perturbed by their colleagues. As one chief told me, “Cops don’t make sense. The street cop: he doesn’t want any gun control. He doesn’t want crooks to have guns, either. But he doesn’t see that wide access means crooks will have guns.”
Some were uncomfortable with guns, seeing even police as too dependent on guns as a “necessary evil” and opining that they wished they could get rid of all guns—including even their own. These few chiefs disliked guns, and they rarely carried their own off-duty. One chief in particular saw himself as coming from a different era; one of the oldest police chiefs I interviewed, he bemoaned that the world had changed, and American gun culture was no longer recognizable to him. He preferred, as he told me, the way “the Canadians do it.” And true to form, this chief carried his own gun only under one circumstance: when he traveled to remote areas where bears might pose a threat.
Others, however, were just as committed to carrying off-duty as their pro-gun counterparts, but they doubted the efficacy of private civilians intervening. As one California chief who policed an ultrawealthy suburb noted,
I think it’s [concealed carry for civilians] crazy. I think it is a bad idea for civilians to arm themselves. You know, sometimes people will occasionally tell me they want to get a gun—and I try to talk them out of it. Here’s what I say.… If you have a gun for defense, you better be shooting to kill if someone is doing something that calls for a gun. And the average citizen has just not thought that through. So I tell them they need to have a serious sit-down and think of the consequences—not just legal. The moral, psychological consequences. And if they are still absolutely convinced, I tell them—buy a dog. Get a bullhorn. Get an alarm system. Stay away from guns!
This chief reasons that private civilians are morally and psychologically unprepared for engaging in armed self-defense. Nor are they equipped to navigate the moral and psychological consequences if they do engage in armed self-defense—consequences that are too easily enabled by the presence of an impulsively acquired firearm. Unlike gun populism, which blurs the distinctions between police and the civilians they police, this sentiment extends the “us-them” logic of gun militarism, though without the racialized overpolicing often attached to it. Given the internal weakness and even turpitude of civilians, an armed citizen is “crazy” to this chief.
Although a minority of police chiefs assertively separated themselves from private civilians with regard to access to firearms, most of the police chiefs I interviewed did not draw such clear lines.58 Police chiefs on the whole appear to have absorbed (even if, at times, begrudgingly) the gun-wielding citizen-protector,59 not as a threat to public law enforcement’s purview, but as a boon to public safety, seeing armed private civilians as buttressing, rather than undermining, public law enforcement.
Throughout the history of public law enforcement, police have known that the actions and reactions of civilians are critical factors in determining the course of public safety. This is why police popularized the emergency call—dialing 911—as an act of public-safety-making in the early twentieth century. It is also why police have encouraged civilians to join together in neighborhood watch groups since the 1970s. And finally, it is why police today want civilians to be observant—“see something, say something”—so they can serve as citizen-witnesses if circumstances warrant. The story of twentieth-century police professionalization has been a story of cultivating these bonds between police and civilians, often in ways that situate police as the experts in crime fighting. But with the increase in gun carry by private civilians, the normalization of legal guns in everyday life, and the changing understandings regarding gun violence as a social phenomenon, police are confronting new questions: in what contexts, and with what kinds of justification, is private legitimate violence appropriate and even appealing with respect to the maintenance of public safety?
Gun populism helps us unravel how and why mainstream gun rights sensibilities resonate with police as law enforcers. Under gun populism, police may undermine the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence as they tout their alienation from legislators (as in California) or emphasize their alignment with legally armed civilians (as in Arizona and Michigan). As I found, police may take on these stances not to undermine police legitimacy but to enhance it. Police chiefs’ embrace of pro-gun discourse revealed that this discourse provides, perhaps paradoxically, a mechanism for police to justify state behavior (i.e., if civilians are justified in owning assault weapons, shouldn’t police also be justified?). In this way, police may well benefit from the politics of private self-defense by deriving from it a justificatory gun talk regarding state use of violence.
As a brand of gun talk, gun populism makes sense within a particular policy and social context: where police are willing to—or, at least, have accepted that the policy and cultural environments require them to—selectively embrace legitimate violence of certain private civilians alongside their own. Accordingly, police chiefs across Arizona, California, and Michigan voiced three distinct versions of gun populism, each sensitive to the state-level policy regime in which it was embedded: “anti-elitism” in gun-restrictive California, “crime fighting by proxy” in gun-permissive Michigan, and “co-policing” in gun-lax Arizona. Across all three states, chiefs embraced a color-blind rhetoric that emphasized gun owners and gun carriers as mainstream Americans who reflected the virtues associated with white, middle-class respectability. They often illustrated their stylized understandings of “good guys with guns” by alluding to law-abiding, hardworking, and reputable typecasts—the teacher, the rancher, the taxpayer, and the family person, for example.
Not all police chiefs embraced these sentiments, and not all who did embraced them with equal enthusiasm. But the vast majority of police chiefs I interviewed voiced, to some degree, gun populism as a means of recognizing the category of “good guys with guns” to include not just police but also private civilians.