Policing the Second Amendment: Guns,Law Enforcement,and the Politics of Race

As research on firearms has resurged with a focus on the cultural complexities of gun ownership, it has often failed to consider how law enforcement officials understand and enforce the right to bear arms. Combining interviews with police chiefs, participant observation, and extensive archival research, Policing the Second Amendment demonstrates how gun ownership in the United States is understood by law enforcement via racial frames and color-blind ideologies. Carlson takes the reader on an incisive empirical journey to examine how firearms, firearm policies, and firearm access are legitimated, brokered, and enforced along racial lines.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by discussing how the rise of “tough-on-crime” policies and “broken windows” policing contributed to law enforcement officers often taking on a Warrior mentality (i.e., police as aggressive enforcers). Within the context of firearms, this mentality frames urban gun violence as a growing issue and is embedded within racialized tropes of criminality. Of course, as Carlson describes, “urban gun violence” is a racially coded phrase that refers to (illicit) gun ownership within Black communities. Extending this line of thought, Chapter 2 lays out how the “war on guns” was, and continues to be, constructed using strategic racial frames. Utilizing stereotypes of gang violence and other controlling images of Black (male) individuals, this war on guns situates urban gun violence as a particularly dangerous form of illicit gun ownership. However, as the subsequent chapters demonstrate, not all illicit gun ownership is treated equally.

Considering mass shootings in predominantly White communities, Carlson’s analysis captures the nuanced ways that gun violence and its consequences are framed by law enforcement along racial lines—even if race is never explicitly mentioned. Contrary to the Warrior mentality and tropes of Black criminality present in discussions surrounding urban gun violence, law enforcement often adopted a Guardian frame (i.e., police as protectors of the innocent) when discussing mass shootings in predominantly White communities (e.g., Parkland, Sandy Hook) and conceptualized (White) victims as innocent targets. This Guardian mentality frames victims of mass shootings as “innocent victims, especially children” that need to be protected from harm (p. 100). Thus, “urban gun violence” and “mass shootings” are used as racially coded dog whistles that, in turn, conjure the Warrior and Guardian identities among law enforcement.

While the previous chapters focused on law enforcement’s perspective on gun violence, Chapter 4 shifts gears to demonstrate how law enforcement perceive an armed populace. Interviewing police in states with diverse firearm policies (California, Michigan, and Arizona), Carlson captures how law enforcement often co-construct their own right to bear arms, both personally and professionally, with that of armed citizens—a reference to the history of policing as (White) militia-based enforcement and violence. When states have restrictive gun policies (e.g., California), law enforcement feel hindered in their ability to properly enforce firearm laws. Importantly, extensive gun control policies create complex, and constantly changing, guidelines that produce complications for law enforcement and armed citizens’ knowledge of how to correctly (i.e., legally) own a firearm. As Carlson notes, “[police] chiefs 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” (p. 112). However, this was often in reference to the color-blind, yet racially framed tropes of the “law-abiding gun owner” and “good guy with a gun.”

On the contrary, in states with looser gun laws (Michigan, Arizona), police chiefs saw civilian gun ownership as a benefit to public safety. Many referenced how if a citizen is armed, this has the potential, especially in rural areas, to stop criminal activity before law enforcement can respond. Yet, law enforcement often frames armed individuals “through explicit tropes of hardworking, taxpaying, family-focused people” and were often “outside of the purview of black criminality” (p. 133). Thus, there is an implicit, yet clear, racial delineation of who is allowed to (legally) own a gun and defend themselves.

While the previous chapters focused on the relationship between firearms and law enforcement, Chapter 5 focuses on another key broker in the access to firearms: gun boards. For context, gun boards are a panel of mainly “active or retired public law enforcement . . . [that] were charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm” (p. 145). Carlson highlights how administrative burdens of gun ownership are unequally imposed on Black gun owners via gun boards. Throughout hearings, more than 70 percent of those called to the Wayne County gun board (Michigan) were Black even though only 40 percent of gun owners in Wayne County were Black. Using controlling images of Black masculinity, the gun board panel degraded and disciplined those summoned. This becomes another way for the criminal justice system to reserve gun ownership and the right to self-defense to White citizens.

Much like Carlson’s research writ large, Policing the Second Amendment is an incisive and digestible study of firearms. Readers are engrossed with rich evidence of how gun violence and gun ownership, as well as the threshold to maintain the right to carry, is drawn along racial lines. Highlighting this color line provides a sobering, yet critical, exploration of how access to guns and the right to own firearms is entrenched in racial politics and rife with racial inequities. This book should be a required reading for researchers interested in race, firearms, and criminal justice. In addition, the clear, concise writing and overview of multiple schools of thought would benefit students in Society and Policing, Firearms and Society, and Race and Criminal Justice courses. Frankly, this was a book I did not want to put down and the pages are bursting with marginal notes. Although this can, at times, cause the reader to get lost in the weeds, the Introduction and Conclusion help the reader see the bird’s-eye view and clearly identify the key contributions. However, I was left desiring a more direct and impactful discussion on how law enforcement officials utilize intersecting class, gender, and political identities and frameworks to navigate firearms and firearm violence. Overall, this book will be a staple in my library and a book I revisit regularly.