The Good Gun Owner

On an unseasonably cold April day in 2018, I stood with police academy instructors on a large training campus of a municipal police department. This week, the cadets were completing “use-of-force scenarios,” putting into practice weeks of classroom instruction focused on the laws and policies dictating when and how officers can use force.

All over the campus, dozens of officers served as role-players and evaluators as the cadets responded to a range of scenarios. In one — the “park scenario” — cadets were told that there was a suspicious person sitting in the park who might be selling drugs. I watched the first pair of cadets arrive on scene, where a man was sitting at a picnic table by himself. Within seconds, one of the cadets firmly shouted “GUN!” This response aligned with their training, where instructors insisted that cadets yell the word “gun” as loud as possible to alert other officers on scene about the threat. A feeling of anxiety circulated the air as both cadets drew their guns while shouting commands. One cadet kept his gun fixed on the man while the other carefully disarmed him, pulling the revolver from the front of his waistline and clearing it before completing the arrest. (All departments and individual officers I write about have been assigned pseudonyms to protect confidentiality. Maintaining anonymity was a condition of access to these departments.)

Following the scenario, the instructors debriefed each pair of cadets, repeatedly emphasizing the importance of identifying the gun and acting appropriately. A lieutenant explained to me that to pass this scenario, the cadets needed to “recognize the deadly threat,” alert their partner and draw their pistols and aim at the man. Cadets who failed this scenario, instructors told me, either did not see the gun, or when they saw the gun, did not draw their own pistols. In this scenario and others, cadets learned that they needed to be constantly aware of the possibility that someone may have a gun and prepared to respond with lethal force.

As a police researcher, I spent nearly 600 hours conducting ethnographic field work at four police training academies in 2018. I observed and participated in as much of the training as possible, including sitting in on classroom instruction as well as working out, learning defensive tactics and shooting guns alongside the cadets. I found that this emphasis on guns — and the threat they presented to police officers — permeated nearly every aspect of the training. In many different classes, including those focused on de-escalation training, instructors repeatedly showed cadets graphic, disturbing videos of police officers being fatally shot. The 1998 video of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller’s murder appeared throughout the curriculum, usually prefaced and prologued by impassioned warnings about the danger of dropping their guard while on duty. The dash camera footage of Dinkheller’s murder shows him initiating a traffic stop that ends in the driver pulling a rifle out of his pickup truck and fatally shooting Dinkheller. The video captures Dinkheller’s panicked screams and labored breaths as he dies alone at the side of his patrol car.

The videos instructors played at the academy showed real events, where officers wearing uniforms very similar to theirs were brutally beaten or killed. These videos reflected the uniquely American reality of an exceptionally armed society, one in which there are more guns than people. This broader landscape of firearms both shapes and is shaped by U.S. policing. Existing research has highlighted this intertwined relationship between civilian gun ownership and police use of force. In states with higher firearm prevalence, for example, the police fatally shoot civilians at significantly higher rates. Relatedly, in states with more stringent gun control laws, the police kill fewer civilians. Thus, police fear of guns is certainly not unwarranted, and the presence of guns has a real impact on civilians’ overall risk of dying at the hands of the police.

This fear of guns was both psychologically and physically ingrained into the cadets, where the instructors designed tactical and scenario-based training emphasizing the exceedingly high stakes of an interaction with a gun gone wrong. This was perhaps the most intense in situations where cadets either had their gun taken from them during a fight or when they missed a gun while frisking or searching a subject. In one police department, cadets who had their gun taken from them during a tactical exercise were required to write their own obituary at home that night. “Write about everyone you’re leaving behind,” the instructor directed.

During one day of scenario-based training at another department, the cadets learned that it was not just their own lives at risk, but also their co-officers’. One of the scenarios that day mimicked a routine traffic stop, where the driver was unknowingly armed with a gun and became agitated during the exchange. When a cadet missed the gun while searching the driver, the instructor lamented, “We’ve taught you control, we’ve taught you how to make an arrest, and you missed a gun.” To emphasize her point, the instructor added: “So, which one of you is going to tell your partner’s family that you missed the gun and your partner’s dead?” Over and over, the training for new officers seemed to communicate that the No. 1 threat to their lives while on duty was guns.

Interestingly, while academy instructors inundated cadets with warnings about the dangers of guns, the officers I met also remained staunchly supportive of gun ownership and wary of gun control measures. Some of these officers were remarkably enthusiastic about guns, pursuing shooting as a recreational hobby and making guns a key part of their identities. A white, 37-year-old instructor in one department once told me that he would “die” if he had to go a year without shooting. Symbols of guns also physically appeared across the academy space: Wooden figurines of guns adorned the instructors’ cubicles; officers often wore gun-related clothing, including items featuring the NRA logo; and patches and stickers referring to shooting competitions and gun-related organizations appeared on officers’ bags and cars. When the Second Amendment came up, officers insisted that this was a right that could not be infringed upon, that constituted an essential pillar of the country.

This complex police relationship with firearms — with officers both intensely fearful for their safety on duty while being supportive of gun ownership — was representative of a broader pattern. A 2016 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that almost half the officers surveyed nearly always or often had serious concerns about their physical safety while at work. In this same poll, 74% of the police officers surveyed felt it was more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns than to control gun ownership. This percentage represented a distinct position from the general public, where just 53% of civilian respondents agreed with this statement. Police officers were also much less likely than the general public to support a ban on assault-style weapons, with just 32% of officers surveyed (compared to 64% of civilian respondents) supporting this kind of policy.

As I continued to conduct research about the police, this combination of ideological commitments continually cropped up. I began to wonder: How is it that officers could recognize the threat that guns presented to them as part of their daily lives, while remaining so pro-Second Amendment?

To resolve this ideological tension, police officers relied on narratives that wove together logics of threat, criminality and race to make clear distinctions between types of gun owners (good vs. bad) and to draw conclusions about the potential effectiveness of gun control policies. Gun control measures would never be capable of eliminating the illegal possession and use of guns by criminals (i.e., bad gun owners), officers explained, so it was not worth pursuing. Any attempt at restricting gun possession, they concluded, would take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, leaving everyone more vulnerable to violence resulting from illegally owned firearms. This sentiment is neatly summarized by the phrase popularized by pro-gun advocates, including the NRA: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Gun scholars have consistently shown that these narratives of the good gun owner vs. the bad one are deeply wrapped up with race and gender, where guns enable mostly white men to enact a form of protective masculinity of “innocents” (which, in effect, means white women and children) from Black and brown men they imagine to be engaged in violent crime. Race, gender and class have shaped gun ownership and gun reform from the very beginning, where some of the earliest gun regulations included weapons restrictions for Black and Indigenous people, among other groups. Several centuries later, the National Rifle Association began supporting some gun control measures only when the Black Panthers became armed.

These distinctions — between good and bad gun owners — and their connections to gender, race and criminality, map onto the ideologies police officers use in explaining their positions on guns. In her study of police chiefs, for example, Jennifer Carlson found that specific racial frames are used to conceptualize two distinct groups of gun owners: Black and brown men who are imagined to be “hyperviolent gun criminals (e.g., the ‘gangster’),” and white, middle-class, law-abiding armed citizens, respectively. This conceptualization of legitimate vs. illegitimate gun ownership, Carlson argues, effectively extends the state’s monopoly of violence into this second group.

This series of narratives is not just restricted to police chiefs; similar ideologies came up in my interviews with officers. When I asked a white homicide detective in his 40s who he thought should be allowed to have a gun, he began to describe his views on gun control, explaining that ultimately:

This detective expressed the first piece of this overarching logic about guns: that even with gun control policies, it simply would not be possible to address the acquisition of illegal firearms. He went on to make distinctions between types of gun owners, highlighting that his treatment of gun owners depended on his own interpretation of threat. He explained that he was “all about someone carrying a gun for the right reasons,” and elaborated that when conducting a traffic stop, if the person is “up front about it … they say, ‘I have a gun in the car,’ then that’s cool. That’s what you’re supposed to do. And I normally still watch their hands and stuff, but I’m usually going to be pretty cool about that, because I respect that.” However, he went on to explain that his decision-making depended on how someone looked, explicitly saying he engages in some level of profiling:

Although this detective did not explicitly mention race or class here, he used images fraught with race- and class-related assumptions to describe who he thinks is likely engaged in crime. In very sharp contrast, just a few moments later, he explained that if someone is carrying their gun for the “right” reasons, the law should be a bit flexible:

Despite the color and gender-blind language that the detective uses, it is not difficult to ascertain what he means. In one of his scenarios, he describes a person with a gun, who is “tatted up” and looks like a “gang member” as a threat, even if they legally own the firearm and inform him that they are armed. On the other hand, he enthusiastically endorses someone who is “doing the right thing” by illegally bringing their firearm to church to protect others in the event of a mass shooting (which could potentially be prevented by stronger gun control measures).

For many police officers, gun ownership and carry are considered legitimate and nonthreatening when the person with the gun embodies expectations of white, middle-class respectability — but not otherwise. These folks are just like them, they reason, and in many ways, represent an extension of police power. The answer, then, to this puzzle of police officers’ ostensibly conflicting ideologies about guns is simple: It depends entirely on who is holding the gun.