In mid-fall a few years ago, Frank Swift1 was called to the Wayne County gun board, located in the heart of Detroit. An African American man who appeared to be in his late sixties, he had previously obtained a concealed pistol license years earlier; he had filed a renewal application and expected to receive the updated license by mail. Instead, he received a notice that his application had been denied due to blemishes on his criminal record.
Between the time that his first concealed pistol license was issued and he applied for a renewal, he had had no run-ins with law enforcement and no arrests. But in that intervening time, his record took on a life of its own. Interstate databases were compared and compiled; new arrests were added. He was informed by Wayne County gun board administrators that his file had been “updated.” It now included two out-of-state arrests—but no convictions—from the 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama. As he stood at the podium, hearing the panel of law enforcement officials lay out the details of his case, he was flummoxed. The grounds for one of the arrests was made up on the spot by the arresting officer, he recalled; it was, after all, Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s. He professed no recollection of the other arrest. Motivated to renew his license, he entered a maddening labyrinth of bureaucracy and paperwork: after being told to clear the arrests, he went back to Birmingham, but police there claimed that they did not keep records that far back and provided him with no additional documentation. That wasn’t enough for the gun board. He was instructed to go back to Alabama: if he couldn’t get documentation of the arrests being cleared, then he needed to document the nonexistence of the documentation of the arrests being cleared.
The Kafka-esque maze that Frank Swift faced as he attempted to renew his concealed pistol license reveals that gun law enforcement—and its racially disparate impacts—cannot be fully captured by acts of police detention, arrest, and violence, as consequentially life-changing as these acts are. Policing the Second Amendment is not just about who dies by the (lawful) gun—as the police killings of Philando Castile, Emantic Bradford Jr., and others reveal regarding the unlivable space that lawfully armed men of color inhabit—but also how people such as Frank Swift are differentially compelled to live by the gun. Through gun law enforcement, police and other administrators have the power to profoundly shape the social, cultural, and even legal norms and expectations attached to the practice of gun carrying for those private civilians who choose to engage in it legally.2
This chapter focuses on gun regulation in action in order to unravel how gun talk translates into practice. It pivots to the “gatekeeper brokers”3 of legitimate violence: those officials who make the fine-grained decisions regarding how legitimate violence (in the form of the capacity to lawfully carry a firearm) has devolved from the state to private actors. It focuses on decisions related to concealed carry licensing. In contrast to the “may-issue” licensing system that prevailed across American states until the 1970s, today most states issue concealed pistol licenses under a “shall-issue” system that minimizes the discretionary authority of licensing officials in favor of statutory requirements.4 Instead of requiring claimants to demonstrate need, shall-issue systems require state administrators to demonstrate disqualification. From the outside, these licensing regimes appear legally designed to minimize bias. But whether these licensing regimes are as nondiscretionary as they purport—or, better put, how discretion takes shape in these regimes—is an open question that has largely been unanswerable. This is because the vast majority of the decision-making with respect to gun licensing is closed to the public, journalists, and researchers: gun licensing decisions are generally not open to public scrutiny, and records on gun licensing are often unavailable to the public due to exemptions from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Until recently, one exception was Michigan. Up to 2015, Michigan held public gun board meetings, where people like Mr. Swift could appeal decisions involving denied, revoked, or suspended gun carry licenses. Staffed largely by officials drawn from active or retired public law enforcement, these now-defunct boards were charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. The public gun board meetings I attended in Michigan in Oakland County and Wayne County provided a rare look into how decisions are made in the context of gun licensing,5 showing how police struggled to make sense of, and enforce, gun law on the ground.
Gun populism and gun militarism served as guiding frames for gun board decisions about the distribution of legitimate violence across state and society. My observations of gun board meetings in two counties—one lower-income, predominantly African American urban county (Wayne County) and one middle- to upper-income, predominantly white suburban county (Oakland County)—reveal that more is at stake in gun licensing regimes than merely enforcing statutes. Comprised almost entirely of white, middle-aged men with former or current law enforcement experience, these gun boards tasked claimants—themselves overwhelmingly African American—with clearing or cleaning their records. Gun board members lectured African Americans (as compared to white claimants) regarding their behavior during police stops, their intimate relationships, and their financial responsibilities to their families. And they often used stereotypes of black masculinity such as the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad—what sociologists call “controlling images”—to discipline would-be gun carriers of color.6 In doing so, they mobilized the concealed pistol license to bridge gun militarism and gun populism, punitively disciplining African American men (in line with gun militarism) and devolving responsibility to these men for protecting themselves and their families (in line with gun populism).
Although policymakers, politicians, and pundits across the gun debate may argue about whether gun laws should fundamentally be geared at policing guns (e.g., bans on assault weapons) versus policing people (e.g., criminalization of gun use), this chapter suggests that this may be a false binary. In a context where gun carrying has become increasingly commonplace,7 where police largely support licensed gun carry, and where the politics of legitimate violence is saturated with the politics of race, guns themselves are the vehicle through which people are disparately policed.
Rachel Simpson, an African American woman in her forties, walked up to the podium in the large auditorium that housed the Wayne County gun board. Not long before, she had learned that her gun carry license had been suspended; she was informed that she had an outstanding warrant for an arrest issued by the Detroit Police Department. Unsure of the warrant, Ms. Simpson assumed it was for an incident that occurred in 2001; as she explained, it was the only time she can remember having a run-in with the police. She brought her paperwork for that charge, which she asserted had been dropped. Her paperwork lacked a case number, however, so the gun board sent her back to the issuing court. As they explained, “There’s no case number, so there’s no way for us to know it is the same case.” Flummoxed, the woman asked for the case number for the warrant that concerned the gun board so she could follow up with the court. The gun board refused: “We can’t give you that. We can give you the date.” The woman at this point appeared visibly deflated. In a seeming snap decision, however, one of the five gun board members that day opted to give her the case number anyway, sending her off to track down—and clear—her record.
Ms. Simpson’s case highlights how the gun board functions as a mechanism to compel claimants not just to comply with the law but also to confront their records8 and either clear them (if the records are accurate and charges are outstanding) or clean them (if the records are erroneous). Individuals were routinely called to the gun board for a wide array of offenses, including unpaid parking tickets, outstanding arrests ranging from disorderly conduct to attempted homicide, unpaid child support, and other offenses. This reflects broader trends in net-widening9 surveillance and recordkeeping as well as racialized policing.10
This racial disparity in gun board cases is evident in the gun board meetings I observed: though only roughly 43 percent of Wayne County’s concealed pistol license holders were African Americans, 72 percent of individuals called before the gun board were African American, and a full 80 percent of claimants called to the gun board because of charges more than twenty years old were African American. In wealthier Oakland County, this racial disparity was even wider.
The majority of gun board cases involved records-related issues—low-level “blemishes”—rather than major infractions flagging acute public safety concerns. In place of overt punishment, the very process of obtaining11 a gun license via these administrative channels served as a vehicle of discipline for roughly four in ten claimants. (See appendix A for more details on these gun boards, and additional data on the breakdown of cases and claimants.)
Records lay at the center of these procedural pains, a term12 that highlights how paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles are deployed as a penal mechanism. As I observed, a basic premise of decision-making in gun board is that records, however erroneous or incomplete, are the gold standard of the decision-making process, and gun board members placed the onus of addressing “wrongful representation”13 on claimants. As one gun board member told a claimant, “It’s your record, your responsibility!” Gun boards’ demand for paperwork devolved responsibility for accurate records from state agents to the claimant. Combined with the selective withholding of information,14 this effectively discouraged claimants from pursuing their licenses, though without official denial or revocation. Procedural pains explain why African American claimants disproportionately appeared at gun boards: not only are they more likely than whites to have contact with the criminal justice system,15 but by virtue of the demographic concentration of African Americans in urban areas, they are also more likely to face the consequences of urban decline in the form of scantily funded, inadequately trained, and/or poorly interfacing public agencies,16 which can exacerbate difficulties in maintaining accurate public records.
Paperwork served as a key vehicle for statutory requirements to come alive as disciplinary techniques. As mechanisms to ration administrative goods17 as well as deliver symbolic services by way of referring clients to other offices,18 paperwork requirements do not simply reflect a set of binding rules. They also serve as a game of maneuvers.19 Cases at gun boards were routinely marked for “reschedule,” pending additional paperwork to be painstakingly amassed by claimants prior to another appearance. In Wayne County, claimants were routinely referred to a single officer at a specific police precinct; presumably, this officer reliably knew how to issue the proper paperwork and remove outstanding warrants and arrests from the electronic records system, a task easily encumbered by bureaucratic mishaps.20 Gun board members unilaterally demanded the “the yellow paper” from this particular officer and grimaced at other-colored paperwork. For those claimants with nonviolent felony records, the gun board sometimes walked them through the expungement process in what appeared to be sincere attempts to help applicants clear their records. At other times, however, the gun board took “refuge in regulations”21 and strategically “threw the book” (colloquially speaking) at applicants who asked too many questions by simply referring them to other offices or giving them false hopes, as I observed in a couple of cases, that their records could be cleared or expunged.
Clearing one’s record was easier said than done.22 One claimant, an African American woman who appeared to be in her forties, was denied a license because of an arrest related to a drug felony. Instead of acquiring “the yellow paper” preferred by the gun board, the woman appeared with a clearance letter from a police precinct that simply stated that the arrest was not in the system:
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR #1: The clearance letter doesn’t help.
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR #2: That’s why we gave you specific instructions.
CLAIMANT: But it never even made it to court. I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to four or five police departments, and they told me it doesn’t exist …
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR #2: Then get a letter that says that!
CLAIMANT: No one will give me that letter! I got the runaround.
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR #2: It’s your arrest, you have to take care of it!
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR #3: Go back to Central [Processing] and get a letter that the arrest was discharged.
The incident was visibly frustrating to everyone involved; gun board members were themselves often agitated by the meshing of gun rules with criminal records.
Though rare, these frustrations sometimes led gun board members to argue against the protocol of relying on records. In one case, an African American man in his forties was denied a license because of two active warrants. As soon as the claimant reached the podium, one of the gun board administrators stood up from his chair, visibly unnerved: “They cancelled one of the warrants, but not the other. But they are the same case, same name, everything. And he has the dismissal paperwork. It is my recommendation that he is approved.” Thanks to the claimant’s due diligence of bringing dismissal paperwork, this gun board administrator convinced the others to approve the license, but the claimant was nevertheless given a helpfully stern warning: “You need to keep your paperwork with you at all times. Do not lose it.” Because the case still had not been removed from the electronic records database, the apparent outstanding warrant could endanger him if police, even in a routine traffic stop, became aware that he was armed. The case perhaps reflects law-enforcement-cum-administrators’ own legal cynicism.23 But it also reveals that gun law enforcement is motivated not just by the letter of the law but also the spirit of the law.24 Administrators were aware of both the promises and the pitfalls of overreliance on records, and counseled claimants accordingly. Furthermore, the case reveals that gun rights—far from “absolute”—are embedded in local understandings and practices. As the law and society scholar Alec Ewald writes of administrative restrictions on firearms ownership, “Ultimately, it is not clear that there is a ‘black-letter law’ answer” to the question of firearms possession. Instead, “the legality of firearms possession—that is, the status of an individual’s federal constitutional right” revolves around “the practices and shared understandings of local legal interpreters” that themselves reflect “legal ambiguity and uncertainty.”25
Claimants at gun board experienced procedural pains associated with having to account for records that were erroneous or incomplete. But these procedural pains also affected claimants more concretely through the loss of goods, services, and security that claimants and administrators alike associated with gun licensing. Repeated gun board visits cost them time and lost wages (claimants at times protested that they could not afford to take off work to continue coming to gun board). The loss of, or inability to obtain, a gun license could impose tangible costs on claimants, too.
Consider the case of an African American man in his thirties who was called to gun board. As a security guard, his employment was tied to his gun license. A veteran who had served in Afghanistan, he came to gun board in his military uniform, perhaps to compel administrators to ask about his service (a tactic that appears to have been successful). He recollected the offense that led him to the gun board: “I blew a 0.03 [blood alcohol content] while carrying.… I take complete responsibility for this. I’m not trying to say I’m not responsible. But I work security.” One of the gun board administrators interrupted him to ask, “Where?” The claimant continued, “At Guardian Alarm. I’ve lost a ton of money. I went down from $12 an hour armed to $8 an hour. It’s putting stress on me and my wife.” Looking at the claimant’s military uniform, the gun board administrator remarked that because the ticketing officer wrote up the offense as a civil infraction, it was up to the discretion of the gun board whether to revoke his license. Pondering the decision, the administrator moved the conversation in an unexpected direction: “Why are you a security guard?” The claimant replied, “I’m going to school.” The gun board administrator offered, “You can get $18 an hour here [at the Sheriff’s Department]. Go online … we’re hiring.” Another gun board member jumped in, “We need about 60 to 70 people … right now. You can make $42K to $47K—and we top out at $62K.” The claimant, apparently stunned to be given a job lead, muttered, “That’s a good life.”
The claimant’s financially motivated desire for a gun license revealed that gun licenses do not just reflect a person’s record but also constitute part of that record.26 Inverting the “mark” of a criminal record,27 a gun license credentialed this claimant as a skilled employee to security companies as well as to the very state agents tasked with licensing him to carry a firearm. The racial politics of respectability seemed to interact with the gun board administrators’ localized understandings of gun rights; presenting himself as a responsible gun owner willing to wield firearms on behalf of state interests (as embodied by his military uniform) and to better himself and his family socioeconomically (as evidenced by his stated plan to fund a college degree with his security guard work), this claimant distanced himself from stereotypes of black men as criminal or lazy. The board reinstated his gun carry license.
This claimant’s dependence on his gun carry license for higher income was not uncommon. More commonly, though, employment needs related to gun carry revolved around jobs viewed as “dangerous.” These included jobs in liquor establishments, delivery jobs, and jobs requiring the handling of large amounts of money, especially at night. Likewise, license seekers tried to demonstrate that their life situations called for heightened security measures in order to convince gun board members of their legitimate need for a firearm. Gun board members at times took an understanding tone toward claimants who had been repeated victims or who lived in areas recognized as crime-ridden. Even those claimants brought in on attempted homicide charges sometimes found a sympathetic ear with the gun board, who viewed their actions as examples of self-defense and, therefore, as evidence of their exposure to crime. This sympathetic sensibility among gun board officials resonates with gun populism. In line with both the valorization of victims’ rights28 and a general public willingness to treat criminals (that is, those against whom licensees presumably use their firearms) swiftly and harshly,29 gun board administrators were at times willing to overlook blemishes for gun carriers who, by virtue of their employment status or need for a firearm, could present themselves to gun boards as respectable and responsible.
On the way to a gun license, then, claimants often experienced a records “runaround” that landed them in bureaucratic and moral entanglements they were compelled to unravel in order to carry a firearm legally. With more criminal justice contact than whites, African Americans disproportionately experienced this runaround. But African Americans were not just more likely to be called to gun board to address paperwork. Once they arrived there, they were subject to a distinct kind of processing as compared to their white peers—one that punished and disciplined claimants of color, especially African American men, according to controlling images of black criminality. As my observations revealed, this treatment reflected both gun militarism and gun populism. On the one hand, gun boards at times extended gun militarism by revoking the gun licenses of claimants of color as a way to supplement the shortcomings of the criminal justice system, mobilizing the gun license in the service of criminalization. On the other hand, gun boards enacted an apprehensive brand of gun populism as they issued licenses to gun carriers of color by communicating to them the racialized terms on which their licenses were issued—and could be revoked.
Midway through the morning session at a Wayne County gun board meeting, a gun board member opened a file folder and called for Jerome Brown, an African American man who appeared to be in his forties. Mr. Brown arose from his chair and walked down the stairs. Arriving at the podium at the front of the auditorium, he stated his name and then quickly spelled it out. The administrator read the details of his case, “Mr. Brown, you were denied a [gun license] application because of an active Third Circuit Friend of Court Warrant.” Due to unpaid child support, a warrant for his arrest had been issued.30 The administrator continued, “You appeared in September, at which point you were arrested.” Reviewing my fieldnotes, I realized that Mr. Brown must have been one of the two arrests I witnessed that month; Mr. Brown had already appeared before gun board and had already been arrested at gun board. The administrator queried further, “Then your warrant was cleared. How much did you pay?” He responded, “$2,500. I paid the full amount after I got arrested.” Paperwork in order, he was approved for a license to carry a gun concealed. His case was the only one I observed in which someone arrested at gun board returned with the proper paperwork and a cleared record and was ultimately approved for a license. Nevertheless, it highlighted the capacity of administrators to funnel, or threaten to funnel, individuals into the criminal justice system based on their criminal records.
Statutorily, administrators must deny licenses pending resolution of certain outstanding issues. But if these issues involve warrants, then gun board administrators also have the discretion to coordinate an arrest. But they cannot arrest everyone: gun board administrators must contend with the availability of jail space and the willingness of local jails to take in claimants. This gap between the prerogative to arrest and its feasibility means that although arrests can and do happen at gun board, administrators often rely on the threat of arrest as a means of compelling compliance. Using the threat of arrest as a mechanism to police would-be gun carriers, gun board administrators transpose a technique from street policing (that is, the “warning”), and, in doing so, expand the reach of the criminal justice system as they remind claimants of their precarious position between criminality and lawfulness. In this way, administrative process expands criminal justice by facilitating the differential flow of people into the criminal justice system and by encouraging claimants to internalize the gaze of the state and thus understand themselves as precariously subject to the law.
Not unlike the sting operations orchestrated at welfare offices, where recipients are told they have benefits waiting only to find handcuffs upon their arrival,31 people could be and were arrested at gun boards. Over five months, I observed twenty-five instances in which claimants were arrested or directly threatened with arrest.32 Meanwhile, broad threats—directed at no particular individual—were especially common in Wayne County. In that county, at least one gun board meeting a month included a session that addressed claimants with outstanding warrants. These claimants, usually numbering between twenty and thirty, would typically enter the auditorium en masse and be lectured on their outstanding warrants as a group. Consider one gun administrator’s opening remarks to claimants with outstanding warrants, as captured in my fieldnotes:
[The administrator] jumps to the front of the auditorium and starts pacing.… He calls four names off first, and tells these African American men to sit in the very front row [of the auditorium]. He [then] starts in on the lecture, “Everyone in here has an active warrant, and you are going to take care of it. You can go to jail right now. Now, I probably won’t arrest you right now, but I can. So go pay your bond, get rid of the court date, get dismissal paperwork, get something that says, ‘not guilty.’ If you have this paperwork, we can talk to you today. If you don’t, you need to go get it.”
After this lecture, arrests are made; warrants for unpaid child support and violent felonies almost always resulted in arrest before cases were individually heard. In Wayne County, twelve arrests—all involving African Americans—occurred after these opening lectures.
Other kinds of warrants (e.g., for misdemeanors for unpaid parking tickets or for nonviolent felonies such as unemployment fraud) did not necessarily result in arrest. Such cases were determined by the availability of jail space, on the one hand, and the motivation of gun board members to punish certain kinds of records and particular claimants, on the other. Although a threatened arrest did not always open the valve between the gun board and the jail, such threats served as a panoptic33 reminder to claimants that this valve could be turned. So while gun board members might quietly urge one another to “Call the jail to see if they have space,” they usually presented their authority to funnel claimants into the criminal justice system in terms of their own discretion, reminding claimants of their legal vulnerability as they concealed the spatial limitations of the jail. For example, at the beginning of one gun board meeting in Wayne County, an African American woman in her thirties approached one of the gun board members as the other claimants found their seats. The gun board member insisted that the woman needed to “Go to Macomb County” to address her arrest. She argued that there was no arrest and no record. The gun board member cut her off: “You need to leave before I arrest you. You have a serious enough warrant that I could arrest you. You need to leave before I change my mind.” He laughed as the woman left, saying, “She has a ten-year-old daughter waiting out there. I am becoming too nice in my old age!”
This threat of arrest was mobilized even for claimants who had no outstanding warrants, such as in cases in which gun board members “smelled marijuana” or thought an applicant “looked high” as well as in cases in which applicants acted “disorderly” by asking too many questions. One older white man was called to the gun board because he managed to obtain a medical marijuana card and a concealed pistol license—an illegal combination under federal law. Flummoxed by the gun board’s reasoning, he asked, “Can I get that in writing?” and “Can’t I ask questions?” Exasperated, one gun board member threatened arrest: “You are two seconds from being arrested for disorderly conduct.” Again, such threats often did not materialize. Instead, the threat of arrest operated as a tool of discipline amid the specter34 of the gun board’s discretionary ability to funnel claimants into the criminal justice system.
This mobilization of the threat of arrest in the context of gun board illustrates how administrative process expands criminal justice, but not as the pipeline evoked in metaphors regarding pathways into incarceration (e.g., the school-to-prison “pipeline”). Rather, criminal and quasi-criminal records provide the wrenches with which gun board members could open the valves to criminal mechanisms, or at least threaten to open them. This link between administrative process and criminal justice is mutually beneficial. This valve-turning allows an administrative process to act as a handmaiden to criminal justice; likewise, criminal justice enhances the authority of administrators by providing a mechanism (the threat of arrest) to compel compliance, quell disputes, and remind claimants of their precarious position before the law.
But the administrative process also engendered its own forms of punishment—in the form of both denying and revoking gun carry licenses from people deemed statutorily or otherwise unfit to have them as well as disciplining and regulating those people to whom they are granted.
Jessica James, an African American woman in her early twenties, made her way down the staircase at the gun board meeting. The first case of the day, she was accompanied by her lawyer, an African American man in his forties. Summarizing the reasoning behind the denial of the claimant’s license application, a gun board member explained that she was ineligible for a gun carry license for several reasons, including two felony convictions related to illegal possession of a controlled substance. Her lawyer responded in a matter-of-fact manner:
We were fully expecting a denial. We are working on a case with a previous judge who should have considered her under HYTA [Holmes Youthful Training Status; a mechanism for youths who committed a crime between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one35 to remove the conviction from their records], but she was not given HYTA. She was nineteen during that case and turned twenty while the case was still under way. So we are using this as another piece of evidence to show that she’s been affected by the HYTA denial.
A gun board member clarified, “So you are effectively trying to create a record?” The lawyer affirmed, “Yes, that’s right. We are here to create a record.” Remarkably, though “she doesn’t want a [gun carry license],” the lawyer had encouraged his client to apply for and receive a near-certain denial because, he believed, it would help show that Ms. James was undergoing undue hardship as a result of her exclusion from HYTA. The lawyer’s strategy was two-fold: first, to use the gun license to expose an injustice related to Ms. James’s record and, second, in doing so, to create a new record of that harm based on the shared presumption that being denied a gun carry license constituted a kind of hardship.36 This strategy relied on a particular presumption: that gun licenses represented a public good, and their denial represented a punishment in itself.
Legally speaking, a concealed pistol license is an administrative privilege, not a right; the U.S. Supreme Court, as of this writing, has not ruled on whether gun carry is covered under the Second Amendment. But the lawyer’s strategy reflected broad-based sensibilities about the everyday politics of guns and the organization of protection and policing. Gun carry was a social right that hundreds of thousands of Michiganders—white and black—sought to exercise.37 Although the denial of gun licenses is formally distinct from an arrest or detention, it carries a powerful message about civic inclusion, about who gets to be a “good guy with a gun.”38
If carrying a gun was a right—at least, as informally understood by ordinary people—then taking that ability away could double as a punishment. In some of the cases I observed, gun boards did exactly this. Denying, revoking, or suspending a gun license served as an administrative process that provided an opportunity for punishment when criminal justice mechanisms were absent or inadequate—for example, when police may be unable to make a formal arrest but can refer a suspect to the administrative board for review. In the same way that police work is marked by an ability both to enforce law and also to use it in ways that fall short of (e.g., everyday harassment)39 or fall outside the purview of (e.g., street justice)40 formal justice, gun law administrators—themselves public law enforcement—could deploy punitive administrative techniques in the absence of formal criminal justice mechanisms.41 Of the 936 cases I observed across two counties, roughly one in ten cases involved gun board members using denial, or threat of denial, of a gun license as a punishment (16 percent of Oakland County cases and 9 percent of Wayne County cases; see appendix A for more details). At times, I even observed cases involving police referrals that either did not involve formal charges or involved charges that had already been dismissed, especially in Oakland County. With criminal justice channels exhausted, cases ended up in gun boards for review. In such instances, gun boards could revoke, or threaten to revoke, a claimant’s gun license as a punishment in itself.
Consider one case involving an African American man in his twenties who claimed that he had shot his gun in self-defense. He was charged with attempted homicide, but the case was ultimately dismissed in court. He was referred to the gun board by local police. Gun board members approached his case with suspicion as they evoked racial stereotypes; one member said the shooting “sounds like one of those basketball feud things.” Gun board began by questioning the claimant about his employment status; he explained that he had two jobs at two separate group homes. Reflecting a moral, rather than legal, partition between those who are deserving and undeserving of gun carry licenses, one gun board member exclaimed, “He works at a group home—what does he need a gun for? He doesn’t own a liquor store!”
The other gun board member decided to call the detective on the case and learned that the “victims never showed up, and all the witnesses moved to get out of [the city where the incident occurred]. Detective says it was a great case for felonious assault, but they were overzealous with charging him with attempted murder.” Illustrating the “tough on crime” sensibility that led police to selectively embrace lawful gun access, he explained to the claimant, “I called the detective in charge. I believe in Second Amendment rights, and if I had it my way, everyone would carry a gun. But my vote is not to reinstate based on the safety of others.” The claimant laughed and exclaimed, “You believe that?” The gun board member continued, “I’m dead serious. I want everybody to have a gun. I believe in the Second Amendment. But with rights come responsibilities.” The claimant left without his license, despite having been formally convicted of no crime. In this case, the ambiguous status of gun carrying—as both a privilege requiring the licensing of the state and a social right as per local understandings of gun carry—created the room for administrative process to provide a stopgap for cases that “should” have been prosecuted but were not. To use the criminologist Lucia Zedner’s phrasing, the board sought “to make good the failings of the criminal justice system.”42 Instead of probation or imprisonment, the offender faced indefinite revocation of his gun license.
Via license revocation, the gun board facilitates a kind of “parallel punishment” where criminal justice mechanisms are absent or inadequate. But this did not constitute the bulk of their work; gun board members weren’t interested in revoking licenses as much as they seemed invested in regulating licensees. Gun board members could not just punish; they could also discipline—and not by withholding gun licenses, but by issuing them and attaching to them particular, racialized presumptions regarding public and private conduct.
Midway through a gun board session, one of the administrators suddenly interrupted the proceedings. Pausing a line of claimants called to the podium in the front of the large auditorium where this gun board meeting took place, he made an impromptu lecture to the roughly forty people, almost all African American, about the “responsibility” of a gun carry license:
There is a big responsibility with a [license].… It’s on you. You can’t get into altercations. You can’t get into road rage.… Because as soon as someone sees you, and they see the shadow of a gun, or they see a print of a gun through your clothes, or they see you reaching for a gun, they are going to call the police. They are going to say you pulled a gun on them.… So you got to put your big boy pants on, put your big girl pants on, and you have to take the higher ground.
Invoking the politics of respectability, this administrator’s words suggest that the gun board did more than simply process paperwork. Taking a patronizing and paternalistic tone, this gun board member saw the provision of the concealed pistol license as a vehicle of disciplining claimants into good behavior.
Understanding how gun boards operate as a mechanism of social control more interested in discipline than punishment requires attention to what the sociologist Megan Comfort calls “sociological ambivalence.” In her book Doing Time Together, Comfort introduces this concept to highlight the multiple and contradictory ways in which individuals engage with penal institutions that by turns oppress and empower them. In my own observations of gun boards, the concept of sociological ambivalence was useful for bringing into focus gun board members’ own ambivalence about gun licensing. Reflective of broader pro-gun sensibilities among law enforcement, these administrators often saw gun carry as a reasonable—and widely acceptable—response to fears about crime and disorder in Metro Detroit, and they sympathized with private civilians interested in carrying guns. At other times, however, they sought to proactively curtail access to guns to private civilians, such as those deemed dangerous to themselves or others.
This ambivalence was not merely preferential on the part of gun board administrators; it was built into the contradictory frames of legitimate violence that circulate among gun law enforcers: gun militarism and gun populism. Sometimes these frames were mutually reinforcing, but at other times, they were mutually undermining; regardless, legally armed people of color, especially men of color, were situated at their intersection. To split the difference, gun board members did not use the gun license as a vehicle of punishment as much as a vehicle of discipline. Discipline was a more much regular feature of gun board than formal sanctions, and shaming and degradation were especially common in Wayne County, where African American men most often received admonitions on responsibility.43
Degradation ceremonies, a concept developed by Harold Garfinkel,44 helps to make sense of how formal administrative proceedings integrate shame, embarrassment, and accusation as a means of disciplining claimants.45 Using Garfinkel’s framework in her book Crook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve highlights how degradation ceremonies impart punitive “lessons” through which “racial divisions [are encoded] with symbolic meaning about violating the shared moral values of hard work, competence, and motivation.”46 When organized around controlling images (that is, stereotypes aimed at naturalizing inequality), degradation ceremonies can serve as dramatizations of racial/gender hierarchies: people positioned differently along the intersecting lines of race and gender are publicly subjected to different treatments that communicate race- and gender-specific social expectations.
Amid the specter of the high-crime, African American–majority city of Detroit and the stereotypes of black criminality that that entails,47 African American men looking to carry guns lawfully in Metro Detroit encounter a courtesy stigma by virtue of their racial/gender identities and social locations.48 They are held accountable to two controlling images in particular: the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad. The Thug is a version of “African American masculinity associated with criminality and poverty.”49 It has been used to justify public expenditures on policing and punishment50 and to legitimate “attacks on African American boys’ and men’s bodies and minds.”51 Controlling images of African American men as criminals began to circulate in the late 1800s and early 1900s52 but gained traction widely in the post–Civil Rights era,53 during which “tough on crime” politics mobilized the threat of black criminality.
If the Thug stereotypes the public lives of black men, the Deadbeat Dad is tied to the private sphere. The Deadbeat Dad trope refers to “a man simply too lazy to try” and “who has simply walked away from his children and—most important—doesn’t seem to care.”54 The origins of the Deadbeat Dad trope may date as far back as the 1920s,55 but it enjoyed mass circulation under the auspices of the 1965 Moynihan Report, which declared the African American family to be in “complete breakdown” due to “out of wedlock childbearing.” By 1986, Bill Moyers’s The Vanishing Family recirculated this imagery,56 creating a “widespread moral panic about absent fathers.”57 In my observations, gun board administrators often typecast black fathers as delinquent providers who are prone to violence within the home, and accordingly, I broaden the definition of the Deadbeat Dad to include fathers framed either as delinquently absent or abusive.
A gun carry license is primarily a permit that regulates public behavior—that is, carrying a gun in public. Accordingly, standards for contact with police are built into the legal framework of gun licensing. Licensees who failed to disclose their status as license holders to police during stops had their licenses suspended and their files reviewed at a gun board; the gun board had the discretion to suspend licenses up to six months. Police could also suspend, revoke, or deny licenses based on “excessive police contact.” I observed gun boards explicitly discuss police contact 64 times, overwhelmingly with African American men (39 times) and African American women (9 times), and most of the time in Wayne County.
Discussions of disclosure were bound up with concerns about officer safety. As one Wayne County gun board administrator noted, “Everybody—whether carrying or not—just put your hand on the wheel and say, ‘I have a [gun carry license].’ That puts the officer at ease.” Although disclosure requirements are intended to enhance safety, such cases also served to discipline African American men according to the controlling image of the Thug. In these cases, gun board administrators enforced informal rules of conduct between African Americans and the police, particularly regarding the deference of the former to the latter.58
Consider one African American man called to the Wayne County gun board. Explaining his failure to disclose to an officer, the claimant asserted his awareness of appropriate conduct with police: “Over the last five years I have been stopped by as many suburban agencies as are people on this board.” He used the term “suburban” to flag an awareness of the changing rules of engagement across the 8 Mile border (the street that runs between African American–majority Detroit and its whiter, wealthier suburbs). This assertion of expertise, however, backfired because it raised another set of concerns for gun board administrators: “Why [so much police contact]?” Despite documented evidence of African Americans’ disproportionate contact with police due to racial profiling,59 the gun board treated this claimant’s police contact as an indicator of his individual suspiciousness.60 Sticking to a color-blind script,61 this claimant seemed to cede that it was ultimately his individual responsibility to avoid police contact. In responding to the administrator’s question, he demonstrated his willingness to comply with the heightened scrutiny he warrants as a gun carry licensee: “Just because! I have a ten-year-old car. And I always have insurance. And I always disclose.”
Claimants often adopted scripts that appealed to—or at least did not contradict—color-blind sensibilities. In one case, however, I did witness a claimant explicitly cite race as a factor in police stops. This African American man’s gun license was suspended because of a felony assault charge from a Detroit suburb. He explained, “I was driving, a guy flipped me off, and then flicked his cigarette into my car as I was getting in the right lane. We both called the police—and I was the one who got arrested.” One administrator responded by individualizing responsibility, saying, “Road rage. You want to have a [gun carry license]? You have to be responsible. Why were you the one that got arrested?” The claimant apprehensively names race:
CLAIMANT: Truthfully?
ADMINISTRATOR: Yes, I want the truth.
CLAIMANT: Because I was black, and he was white.
At these words, the panel of administrators literally threw up their hands in a show of indignation. The administrator retorted, “Watch the news: every other day people are getting killed over things that start out as nothing! You are a nice young man, you need to take the higher road!” Rather than directly address his claims, the gun board reasserted that the outcome of police encounters rests on the claimant’s shoulders.62 With this heavy-handed caution, the man’s license was reinstated.
White applicants did not undergo this kind of treatment. Both Wayne and Oakland counties’ gun boards tended to take a matter-of-fact approach to cases related to police contact involving white men. As a typical example, one white man who appeared to be in his sixties came to the Wayne County gun board after paying a fine for failing to disclose his status as a gun carry licensee to a police officer. An administrator informed him that his license would be suspended for six months, after which he should “come see us … [to] get your license back.” This applicant was not questioned about the incident, he was not warned about the consequences of misbehavior, nor was he instructed on appropriate interactions with police. White men were rarely admonished, and when they were, it was often brief and even jovial. For example, one Oakland County case involved an affluent suburban police department that had entered a warning in a white man’s federal record, which effectively barred the man from purchasing or possessing weapons. Adopting a sympathetic tone, an administrator jokingly mused, “You did something to tick off [those] police!”
This joking tone was absent in cases involving African American men’s police stops, although a gun board member did adopt a wisecracking attitude toward one African American woman. This woman returned to the Wayne County gun board after a six-month suspension to claim her license. Before reissuing, an administrator reminded her how to engage with police:
GUN BOARD MEMBER: And now you know the first thing to say is …?
CLAIMANT: I have my gun!
GUN BOARD MEMBER [LAUGHING]: No! If you do that, they are going to start pulling their guns on you! You say, “Officer, I have a [gun carry license], and I have my weapon on me.” Not, “Guess what’s in my pocket!”
This kind of follow-up “quiz” was common for African Americans, but not for whites who failed to disclose. Even with the softer tone adopted by the gun board toward this woman, the gun board’s warning that she should expect police to perceive her as a threat aligned with racial disparities in policing. This treatment also resonates with the growing criminalization of women of color63 and the historically long-standing tendency for African American women to be treated as socially male by state apparatuses of social control.64 Rather than a fleeting moment of sympathy as with the white applicant in Oakland County, this interaction both encouraged the claimant to adopt the gaze of the police officer by seeing her own legal actions as dangerous and made light of the gravity of having to do so.
At the gun board meetings I observed, African Americans, especially but not exclusively African American men, were disproportionately disciplined with regard to their interactions with police. Administrators reminded them that their guns—though legal—made them suspect to law enforcement; that they should expect guns drawn if they broke informal rules of conduct with police because their actions would be read as threatening; and that, therefore, the outcomes of police stops ultimately rested on their shoulders. Animated by the controlling image of the Thug, such encounters dramatized the subordinate position of African Americans, particularly African American men, vis-à-vis law enforcement (claimants were expected to demonstrate knowledge of, and behavioral compliance with, informal rules of conduct during police stops); vis-à-vis the gun board (administrators mobilized moralizing scripts to compel claimants to account for controlling images); and vis-à-vis other claimants (at these public gun boards, such questioning was usually reserved for African American men).
Although gun carry licenses regulate behavior outside of the home, a significant portion of cases involved private matters. Of 936 gun board cases I observed, 111 involved intimate partner violence (IPV), 16 involved child support, and 3 involved child custody cases. African American men were disproportionately represented: they comprised 60 percent of IPV cases (67 African American men); 67 percent of child custody cases (2 African American men); and 100 percent of child support cases (16 African American men). The majority of cases took place in Wayne County; in Oakland County, I observed just 9 IPV cases, 2 child support, and no custody cases.
Such cases suggest that gun carry licenses were used to address a fundamental dilemma in federal gun regulation efforts related to IPV: uneven and ineffective enforcement due to poorly kept databases and inadequate interoperability across enforcement agencies.65 My observations, especially at the Wayne County gun board, however, suggest that gun carry licenses also opened opportunities for state agents to discipline African American men according to the controlling image of the Deadbeat Dad.
To start, consider one fifty-nine-year-old African American man whose license was suspended because of a weapons charge.66 When he admitted that he was on probation, a Wayne County administrator asked the claimant why. He explained, “Child support. I’m paying back. I’m retired now, and I owe $107,000. And I pay $100 [a month]. I’ve had employment issues.” The administrator exasperatedly exclaimed, “That’s stacks on stacks!” The claimant continued:
CLAIMANT: I got a weapon because I was assaulted. I asked the police if I was restricted from getting a weapon, and they said no, so I sent in my paperwork.
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR: How much was the weapon?
CLAIMANT: Between $500 and $600.
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR: That could have been used to pay child support!
CLAIMANT: But they are grown now!
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR: Don’t say that. Their mother paid the bill. She had to foot the bill! When they needed a fieldtrip, Pampers [diapers], someone had to pay for that! That’s why you have to pay this.
CLAIMANT: I take the blame, and I haven’t missed a payment in three or four years.
GUN BOARD ADMINISTRATOR: Your priorities are all screwed up.
Although the claimant provided a pragmatic justification for his gun license (“I was assaulted”) as well as a legal one (“I asked the police if I was restricted”), this gun board administrator admonished him about his poor parenting choices, defined by his financial contributions (or lack thereof) to his family. Although the gun board appeared to be legally required to reinstate his license, they did so only after compelling the man to accept his blameworthiness (“I take the blame”) and interrogating his “priorities.”
In IPV cases, the gun board also compelled claimants to account for their private behaviors. This disproportionate scrutiny of African American men reflects cautionary feminist analyses67 that IPV law enforcement promises to protect women at the cost of penetrating the privacy of marginalized groups. In IPV cases, the gun board routinely inquired about personal matters, and in cases involving African American men, I observed questioning of both the claimant and his intimate partner.
Consider a Wayne County case involving an African American man whose license was suspended because of a 2014 assault charge. The case opened with the administrator questioning the claimant about the details of the charge:
ADMINISTRATOR: Who [the victim] was it?
CLAIMANT: My fiancée.
ADMINISTRATOR: Is she here right now?
CLAIMANT: Yes.
ADMINISTRATOR: Ma’am, come on down!
The woman walked down from the “audience” to the podium to explain:
It was a bad argument at home, and the police came. I didn’t call the police, and the police did not really speak to me. I said I did not want to press charges. It was a few days of heated argument, the kids were there, the kids were arguing too.
Listening to both the claimant and his partner account for the claimant’s charge, the gun board administrator reproached both of them on responsible parenting: “That sets a bad example for kids. Both of you need to find a better way to communicate.” The claimant responded, “We’ve been together for 14 years, three boys and three girls, we started from the bottom, and we are here now. And now after the fight we kissed and made up.” The couple smiled as they talked about their kids. The gun board accepted the claimant’s explanation; his license was reinstated.
For white men called to gun board because of IPV-related issues, inquiries were less inquisitive and more lighthearted. I never observed the partners of white men testify on their behalf. For example, one white man’s IPV charge from Las Vegas was met with moralizing laughs before the gun board approved his license: “You know what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas!” Another white man with a misdemeanor assault charge was simply asked, “How is the relationship now?” He explained, “Wonderful. Terrible then.” His license was approved, and the gun board admonished him with a threat but refrained from further questioning: “Kids don’t need to see parents arguing. If there is anything else, we’ll pull [the license] in a second.” As these cases suggest, the gun board appeared willing to approve and reinstate the licenses of African American and white claimants alike with regard to IPV; the difference was the extensive moralizing inquiries that the former, but not the latter, experienced as a condition of their licenses.
As the public policy scholar Michael Lipsky reminds us, “The administration of public welfare has been notorious for the psychological burdens clients have to bear. These include the degradation implicit in inquiries into sexual behavior, childbearing preferences, childrearing practices, friendship patterns, and persistent assumptions of fraud and dishonesty.”68 The gun board’s inquiries into the private matters of African American men complements state penetration into the private sphere of marginalized women,69 revealing that the state’s welfare interest in the private sphere extends to men as well.70 Accordingly, the gun carry license can serve as a disciplinary mechanism for regulating private black lives: African American men were held accountable to the controlling image of the Deadbeat Dad, as they were given detailed lessons on financial responsibility and communication skills and were compelled to open up their private lives to scrutiny, accept blame for their shortcomings, and demonstrate appropriate priorities.
Much has been made of gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice engaged in by millions of ordinary Americans and inflected by the politics of race, class, and gender. But it is not just a social practice; it is also a state practice.71 Unlike past historical periods when gun access and use were more strictly regulated along racial lines,72 today’s gun laws are formally nondiscretionary regimes in which African American men can, and do, apply for and receive gun carry licenses. Lawfully armed African Americans are situated at the contradictory intersection of statutes that expand access to guns in line with gun populism and practices that criminalize people of color, especially men, in line with gun militarism. In seeking permission to carry a gun, such claimants push the racial/gender boundaries of legitimate violence that have been historically endorsed and enforced by state actors at local, state, and federal levels.
Michigan’s gun boards—which were public at the time of my observations—provided a rare and valuable opportunity to unravel how administrators navigate gun populism versus gun militarism as they stake out the boundaries of legitimate violence. Working at the racialized crossroads of impunity and criminalization, gun board administrators improvised degradation ceremonies that place African American men in a zone of provisional citizenship. My observations show that when African Americans, particularly African American men, seek and receive gun licenses, they did not do so on the same terms as other license-seekers. Not only were African American men disproportionately called in to appear at the gun boards I observed, but they also were exposed to a different set of racialized demands in order to obtain a license. Gun board administrators—themselves largely drawn from law enforcement—nimbly and subtly deployed stereotypes and expectations as an implicit condition of the gun carry license. These stereotypes and expectations often reflected broader racialized tropes, such as the controlling images of the Thug and the Deadbeat Dad, and they were used to impart “lessons”73 to African American men: both explicit instructions on how to conduct themselves as gun carry licensees as well as more implicit discipline regarding their position at the bottom of the racial/gender hierarchy. Incentivized by a license to carry a gun, in turn, African American men were encouraged to internalize controlling images.
By the end of 2015, Michigan gun board meetings closed their doors to the public, and gun carry licensing was reorganized within the state. Administrative gun licensing decisions are now made by the Michigan State Police, and all appeals are now directed through the county court system. The move was supported by gun rights proponents within the state, who rightly observed uneven enforcement and inconsistent protocols across Michigan counties. Gun rights advocates, however, overlooked a critical issue at play in the debate regarding Michigan’s gun boards: that unequal treatment—especially along the lines of race—is not restricted to gun boards but shapes the criminal justice system from the inside out. The “solution” of centralizing decisions and routing them into county courts may well do more to strengthen, rather than unravel, the dynamics laid out here. Without recognizing the kinds of gun talk—that is, gun militarism and gun populism—that percolate through the state and society to facilitate the disparities laid out here, we merely transpose the problem. We don’t solve it.