The proposed framework clarifies how the social construction of crime helps to reproduce privilege along gender, as well as racial, lines. Alongside a large body of literature on the racialization of crime, relatively less attention has been paid to how the social construction of crime reproduces masculine privilege. Scholars have tended to focus on the relationship between the social construction of crime and the perpetuation of White privilege, linking the War on Crime ( Tonry, 1995 , 2011 ; Wacquant, 2001 , 2009 ) with the marginalization of poor men of color as criminals. Previous studies have analyzed the racial politics of gun carry, arguing that gun owners and carriers arm themselves against the imagined threat of Black men ( Stroud, 2012 ; Young, 1986 ). This study complicates the literature on the racialized construction of crime by integrating the gendered construction of crime and thus further unpacking the race/gender nexus in crime control ( Chesney-Lind, 2006 ; Stabile, 2006 ).

To this end, this study proposes a framework of vulnerability politics to understand how inclusive discourses, politics, and programs reproduce privilege. Vulnerability politics is a particular kind of political frame for making universalistic claims based on embodied vulnerability. By centering political claims on vulnerability, claims-makers can universalize particular standpoints under the politically appealing guise of vulnerability and victimhood. I show that gun carriers embrace a universal vulnerability that is, in fact, constructed from the perspective of men. Specifically, they emphasize warlike criminal encounters—fast, violent, and perpetrated by irrationally aggressive strangers who are almost always gendered as men (and often racialized as Black). This articulation of crime reflects the vulnerabilities that men, as opposed to women, face; according to FBI crime statistics, men are significantly more likely to be victims of shootings that are perpetrated by strangers, while women, particularly poor women of color, are more likely to be victimized by family members. In line with a masculine understanding of crime, gun carriers articulate guns as the preferable solution to all problems of crime, and they actively support the arming of women under the assumption that women are even more vulnerable to this sort of crime than men. Drawing on interviews with 71 gun carriers, I show that this construction of crime shapes and limits gun politics by promoting guns as a universal solution to a gendered rendition of crime.

Rather than dismiss this promotion of guns to women as mere rhetoric, this article takes this gender-inclusive stance seriously to unpack how gun carriers articulate a version of gender egalitarianism that reproduces social privilege. I argue that although gun carriers may actively promote guns for women, they assume a particular understanding of crime that reproduces masculine privilege by emphasizing fast, warlike violence perpetrated by strangers—the kinds of crime men, as opposed to women, are more likely to face. This construction of crime cannot account for crimes such as domestic violence that systematically victimize women, particularly women of color. I show that despite their discourse of inclusivity, the gun carriers I interviewed generally constructed crime from a masculine perspective and, in doing so, misrecognize the specificities of domestic violence, thus marginalizing women’s experiences in potentially dangerous and costly ways. As such, I argue that gun carriers reproduce masculine privilege not through raw patriarchal domination but rather through the social construction of crime, which itself is premised on patriarchal understandings of vulnerability and inequality. This is reflected not only in the attitudes of gun carriers but also in the political platform of the NRA, which aggressively promotes guns to women even as it opposes other initiatives that would protect women against crime, such as the Violence Against Women Act, to protect the gun rights of men accused of domestic violence.

While previous studies on gun culture and politics emphasize the overt masculine contours of gun culture, they gloss over the more subtle juxtaposition of contradictory gender logics within pro-gun discourse. Indeed, gender scholars working in areas other than gun politics have demonstrated that under cultural pressures for men to appear egalitarian, traditional masculinity has been “softened,” even among privileged men whom gender scholars would expect to be most committed to maintaining dominance ( Gallagher & Smith, 1999 ; Heath, 2003 ; Stein, 2005 ; Wilcox, 2004 ). This article shows that gun culture is not an exception to this trend.

Most scholarship on gun culture has focused on one side of this contradiction, namely, the patriarchal proclivities of pro-gun America and the association between firearms and masculine domination. Connell (2005) and O’Neill (2007) link guns to a violent “masculine heroism” ( Connell, 2005 , p. 214), while Melzer (2009) argues that NRA members embrace a mythologized frontier masculinity that emphasizes men’s heroic defense of the (White, heterosexual, conservative) social order. Burbick (2006) , who studied American gun shows, finds that gun proponents are embedded in a “male fantasy” that celebrates White masculinity, and Stroud (2012) argues that guns allow men to enact hegemonic masculinity through fantasies of violence marked by race. However, the 71 gun carriers I interviewed contradict straightforward narratives of masculine domination and patriarchy. Rather than maintaining a male monopoly on guns, they actively promoted guns to women, oftentimes touting them as the “great equalizer,” and I met no gun carrier who voiced opposition to the idea that women should be armed. To quote Will above, they believe that “a woman who can defend herself is very admirable.” How can this discourse of inclusivity be reconciled with accounts of gun politics as masculinist and patriarchal?

Leading up to the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in the mid-1990s, the NRA ran ads encouraging women “to choose to refuse to be a victim” by arming themselves with guns, 1 and over the past few decades, the NRA, shooting ranges, and firearms manufacturers have made significant attempts to reach out to women by marketing to women, starting women-only “Ladies Night” at ranges, promoting women-only tournaments and selling pink guns that look more like fashion accessories than lethal weapons ( T. Smith & Smith, 1995 ). Yet alongside this promotion of guns to women, the NRA has regularly opposed laws that would make it more difficult for people who are suspected of domestic violence to access firearms. In the mid-1990s, the NRA unsuccessfully worked to stop the federal Violence Against Women Act. The organization has consistently labeled this law and similar state-level laws as indiscriminate attempts to permanently criminalize gun owners, 2 and it includes the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence on its lengthy list of “national organizations with anti-gun policies.” 3 The NRA’s initiatives reflect a contradiction within gun politics: On one hand, the gun lobby vigorously opposes laws that would restrict the gun rights of men suspected of domestic violence abuse. On the other hand, it actively situates itself as pro-women by promoting guns to women as the gender “equalizer” in defense against criminal threats.

approximately 20% of license holders in the 40 Right to Carry states are women. Women are most likely to be attacked by men, who, by and large, have the advantage of size and strength. Having a firearm shifts the advantage in the woman’s favor.

You’re no different than a guy! You are just as susceptible if not more so than men. And a woman who can defend herself is very admirable. Why should you go walking around feeling helpless?

Alongside this research on race and crime, other scholars have analyzed the relationship between gender and the social construction of crime. Research, for example, shows that criminals are not only racially marginalized but also portrayed hypermasculine men who fail to achieve hegemonic masculinity ( Connell, 2005 ). In addition, gender scholars have interrogated how victimization is gendered and, moreover, how women’s particular forms of victimization reproduce women’s subordination. Gender scholars have argued that the association between feminization and vulnerability has naturalized women as victims and, moreover, have structured women’s fear of crime as perpetrated by hyperaggressive, savage strangers ( Franklin & Franklin, 2009 ; Madriz, 1997b ). Research on crime, gender, and vulnerability has shown that gender difference is constructed through violence and violent threat; Hollander (2001) argues that “shared beliefs about human bodies” demarcate women as vulnerable and men as dangerous. Further naturalizing women as victims, domestic violence and rape have historically been dismissed as less-than-criminal by perpetrators and police ( K. Anderson & Umberson, 2001 ; Schrock & Padavic, 2007 ); in one striking example, domestic violence was literally de-criminalized by the City Council of Topeka, Kansas, in 2011. 4 As a growing body of intersectional scholarship shows, domestic violence disproportionately affects women of color in terms of rates of victimization as well as access to redress ( Miller, 2008 ; Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005 ) yet the racialized, classed, and gendered contours of this problem are oftentimes not taken as seriously by the criminal justice system as other forms of crime.

Gun ownership in America has also been attributed to the racialization of crime ( Stroud, 2012 ; Young, 1986 ); Young (1986) shows that White Detroit males who espouse racist views are more likely to own guns for protection against crime, while Stroud (2012) maintains that gun carriers engage in “fantasies of violence and self-defense” against racial minorities they perceive as dangerous. Responding to “tough on crime” politics and policies as well as media panics about (Black) criminality, White Americans (particularly middle-class suburban Whites) have become the consumers of private security—gated communities, crime-resistant SUVs, and private surveillance systems—often due to imagined fears of Black criminality ( Simon, 2007 , p. 201). By carrying guns, gun carriers embody this self-reliant citizen capable of self-protection through the consumption and carrying of firearms.

Over the past 50 years, sociologists have emphasized the politically significant consequences of the social construction of crime. Moving beyond positivist approaches that emphasize the causes of criminal behavior and take criminal law for granted, sociologists in the 1960s began questioning how criminal behavior comes to be defined, arguing that law is a contested terrain that reproduces inequality, particularly with respect to gender, race, and class. In particular, scholars have drawn attention to the criminalization of poor Black men of color. Despite marked drops in crime rates, crime—particularly the image of hyperaggressive Black criminal men—continues to shape the American social imagination ( Tonry, 2011 ). Stabile (2006) shows that news narratives surrounding violent crime exacerbate racialized fears of White victimization, particularly White women’s victimization, by African American men. Moreover, the criminalization of poor, Black men both produces the disproportionate representation of minorities within the criminal justice system ( Harcourt, 2006 ; Harris, 1999 ) and justifies a “tough on crime” approach that subjects minorities to a punitive criminal justice system that exercises unequal power over minorities from the bottom (i.e., police) to the top (i.e., the death chambers) across schools and other community institutions ( Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010 ; Rios, 2011 ).

Integrating the racialized and gendered social construction of crime, this article interrogates the counterintuitive ramifications of vulnerability by analyzing gun politics as a case of vulnerability politics. This article develops an intersectional contribution to the literature on race, gender, and crime by showing how the racialized construction of crime reflects the perspective of men and thus is deployed along gendered lines (in this case, obscuring domestic violence). It also adds to vulnerability scholarship by explicitly detailing the discursive mechanisms of vulnerability politics in the social construction of crime along the lines of gender as well as race. By developing a theoretical framework for the vulnerability politics and applying it to the case of gun advocacy, I show how the social construction of crime not only stigmatizes Black men ( Tonry, 2011 ; Wacquant, 2001 , 2009 ) but also marginalizes women. I demonstrate that gun proponents justify their right to carry a gun by emphasizing a “universal” vulnerability to a particular threat: fast, lethal threats perpetuated by strangers who are often Black and always men. This construction reflects the perspective of men: Men are more than 4 times as likely to be killed with a firearm than women, and men are more than 5 times as likely to be the target of multiple criminals. This reproduces gender bias through the misrecognition of the specific crimes that women, especially poor women of color, are liable to face—namely, domestic violence.

This framework draws on vulnerability scholarship that has emerged amid mounting critiques of rights discourse. A number of scholars have argued that civil rights discourse, and the rights revolution it has inspired, places victims at the center of American politics ( W. Brown, 1993 ; Bumiller, 1992 ; Skrentny, 2002 ). As analyzed by Polletta (2006) , the political emphasis on victims has shaped the types of stories that claims-makers can tell about the sources of victimhood and its redress, resulting in the reification of social marginality as well as the reassertion of individualism. Legal analysts and political theorists ( Butler, 2004 ; Fineman, 2008 ; Oliviero, 2011 ; Turner, 2006 ) have developed the construct of vulnerability to extend these critiques in two ways. On one hand, they call attention to vulnerability as an inherent aspect to human life, and they suggest that politics and policies should be aimed at addressing vulnerability as an inherent, if singular, human condition rather treating victimization as a temporary status. On the other hand, these studies also call attention to the pitfalls of politics that universalize particular vulnerabilities as the vulnerabilities of all. Fineman (2008) interrogates this “sameness-of-treatment” approach to vulnerability. According to her, laws or policies that are often crafted by claims-makers and policy makers to address “universal” vulnerability obliterate the ways in which class, race, and gender shape the human condition of vulnerability. Applying a “one-size-fits-all” solution to a falsely universalized vulnerability, such policies obscure other forms of vulnerability, rendering them unintelligible and, therefore, invisible. So while Gilson (2011) argues that ignorance sustains invulnerability, Fineman suggests that dominant understandings of vulnerability also sustain ignorance—about other vulnerabilities. Thus, these largely legal analyses suggest how discourses surrounding victimization are powerful and problematic precisely because of their ability to present particular interests and/or perspectives in universal terms. This is a strategy often used by the American Right, as Oliviero (2011) and Polletta note.

With the consent of interviewees, I either recorded interviews, which I transcribed in full, or took notes, which I later turned into narratives. I analyzed these data using Atlas.ti; although I approached my data with questions regarding the social construction of crime, I developed my coding scheme inductively by paying attention to the themes, contradictions, and slippages voiced by interviewees regarding victimhood, criminality, and the defensive use of firearms. Having reviewed pro-gun materials published by the NRA and other national gun organizations prior to fieldwork, I hoped to explore the dynamics of gun rights as “universal” rights, but only after my analysis of interviews did domestic violence emerge as a key theme for understanding gun-rights discourse in gendered terms.

Interviews lasted between 1 and 5 hr and were semistructured. I asked open-ended questions on numerous topics related to gun rights and self-defense, including queries on their background, their involvement with gun-rights organizations, why they choose to possess and carry firearms, whether their family members or friends carried guns, gun training, and carrying practices, and their thoughts about guns rights as a basic human right (a line often touted by the NRA), particularly with respect to gender, race and, depending on the interviewee, other lines of difference. Perhaps because of my role as a female interviewer, the question of women and guns usually came up organically in interviews. Oftentimes, interviews included discussion on broader political themes, such as the War in Iraq and national health care.

I met prospective interviewees through contacts with state-level, pro-gun organizations and firearms instructors. I contacted the leaders of local gun-rights organizations as well as firearms instructors to solicit interviews; I also met prospective interviewees at activist events I attended as well as shooting ranges. At the end of each interview, I asked interviewees to pass my contact information along to prospective interviewees, and if I believed that interviewees could connect me with a more diverse pool of prospective interviewees based on the interview content, particularly with respect to race and gender, I emphasized this to interviewees. Although I used snowball sampling and, therefore, do not have a response rate, the majority of prospective interviewees I approached agreed to be interviewed.

Almost half of my interviewees were accredited firearms instructors; because Michigan gun carriers are required to take firearms training and because training covers not only gun handling but also firearms law and safety, firearms instructors may serve important roles in articulating the relationship between guns and crime. Thus, while my sample is not representative of gun owners or carriers at large because it oversamples for firearms instructors, it should provide meaningful insight as to how gun carriers reconstruct crime, vulnerability, and victimization by those who frequently think about and discuss these issues. For this reason, I designate interviewees involved in firearms instruction. My sample is in line with survey data showing that gun owners are predominantly (though not exclusively) White men ( Gaeser & Glendon, 1998 ; Gallup, 2005 ). It includes only 11 women; this number reflects men’s overrepresentation in gun culture (80%-90% of concealed pistol license holders are men). The inclusion of more women may have provided more variation in the construction of crime; however, the uniform articulation of crime by White and non-White men leads me to believe that the inclusion of more non-White men would not significantly change the findings presented here (although as I highlight in the discussion section, this remains an open question). In addition, my sample disproportionately comprised white-collar individuals who live in suburban areas; these data situate my interviewees as disproportionately middle-class, which is in line with survey data that show that gun owners tend to have above-average incomes and own their own homes ( Gaeser & Glendon, 1998 ; Hepburn, Miller, Azrael, & Hemenway, 2007 ).

I interviewed 71 pro-gun men ( n = 60) and women ( n = 11) who carried guns on a regular basis; the vast majority of interviewees were White (87%), while 13% were Black ( n = 7), Hispanic ( n = 1), or multiracial ( n = 1). Interviewees were primarily employed (or looking for employment) as blue-collar workers in professions like welding or trucking (39%), white-collar professionals like lawyers, IT specialists and administrative staff (42%), and security specialists, such as current or former police officers, self-defense instructors, or bouncers (11%; in addition, 25 interviewees were certified by the NRA to teach firearms courses and taught on a regular basis, although this was not a primary source of income for all of them). Most were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, with a mean age of 48.5 years. Based on their own political identification and the political views expressed during the interviews, 13% ( n = 9) were left-leaning libertarians or liberals, and the rest were right-leaning libertarians and conservatives ( n = 62). The vast majority of interviewees were from Southeastern Michigan, including Detroit, Flint, and Lansing and their suburban and rural surroundings.

This article is part of a broader study to understand the politics of concealed carry as an everyday practice; while more than eight million Americans have licenses to carry a gun concealed according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there is scant research on this social phenomenon (but see Stroud, 2012 ). Moreover, concealed carry is relatively new: Over the past 40 years, almost dozen states have dramatically expanded the ability of Americans to carry a gun on their person. Despite the national presence of the NRA, the vast majority of gun laws, including concealed carry legislation, are implemented at local or state levels ( Spitzer, 2004 ). To understand self-defense politics from the ground up, I focused on one state: Michigan. Since 2001, Michigan has passed significant rollbacks on gun restrictions related to self-defense, and according to the Michigan State Police, about 1 in 25 residents hold a permit to carry a firearm concealed. I chose Michigan for this larger project because the state’s socioeconomic decline, combined with its relatively recent passage of expanded concealed carry laws, provides a window into how pro-gun sentiment is mobilized to address contemporary problems of crime and social insecurity.

Analysis: Gun Politics as Vulnerability Politics

“Universal” Vulnerability: Victimization When asked about their reasons for carrying a gun, interviewees respond by calling attention to their ever-present risk of victimization. Gun carriers emphasized embodied helplessness amid a broader social breakdown, and they usually did so in two ways: They referenced firsthand experiences of embodied vulnerability, or they described an embodied vulnerability to crime as an abstract, but nevertheless inherent, aspect of their everyday life by recounting imagined or secondhand stories of crime. In doing so, they articulated the inadequacy of various sources of protection, including parents, police, and even the socioeconomic privilege that undergirds “safe neighborhoods.” Consider Sam and Michael, both of whom were directly victimized. Sam is a White man in his late 20s and a member of several pro-gun organizations, including the NRA, and he grew up in a rural area of the Detroit Metro suburbs relatively unaffected by crime. Nevertheless, when I asked him why he began carrying a firearm on a regular basis, he told me the following story of being bullied as a child. I was kind of a small kid, and [three older kids] started harassing me [when I was on the playground]. They were in roller blades and hockey sticks. I guess the easy way to say it [is that] they beat the snot out of me with the hockey sticks. My parent who had always been my protector wasn’t there. That feeling of helplessness tends to stick with you. Even all these years later, it’s that feeling of helplessness that I remembered. Meanwhile, Michael is a White man in his late 40s. In contrast to Sam, he grew up in the city of Detroit, and now, he teaches firearms instruction in an urban suburb. When I asked him why he turned to carrying firearms, he told me, When I was 18, I was nearly beaten to death by a gang. I sustained really serious injuries. I was able to break the hold that somebody had on me—there was nine of them. When I got away, I called 911. A police car finally rolled up, and I told them I needed to get to that hospital. They weren’t all that concerned, but they let me in the car. [Then they left me at] a bus stop, and when the bus came, I staggered on to it and said to the driver, “I have to get to a hospital somehow, I can’t see, I don’t know where I am.” And he took me to another intersection and gave me a transfer so I could take another bus and eventually end up at the hospital. I had a couple of surgeries, a couple months of rehab. About six months later, I was able to return to work, and it cost me thousands of dollars. Sam and Michael did not simply fear crime; they situated themselves as vulnerable to crime by emphasizing their experience of victimization in terms of total, embodied helplessness (Pantazis, 2000). For both of them, their usual sources of protection proved to be inadequate; for Sam, his mother was nowhere to be found as he was beaten by three older kids, while for Michael, the police failed to help him reach a hospital. As such, they discussed their experiences in terms of extreme bodily vulnerability. An acknowledgment of vulnerability—that is, an acknowledgment of both embodied helplessness and faltering social protections—consistently marked the first- and secondhand stories of victimization that gun carriers told me. Connor, a White salesman in an urban suburb of Detroit, used to think he lived in a “safe” neighborhood. As he said, “like 99% of other people in the world, I thought nothing’s gonna happen to me, I’ll be okay.” However, when a random kidnapping occurred at a fast food joint he frequented, Connor realized that he, too, could be the target of crime and decided to purchase a handgun. Corey, a White cashier in Flint, simply stated that “crime’s up, cop’s are low” to explain his decision to purchase a gun, explaining that the recent economic downturn had left him believing that he, too, could fall victim to crime and thus had to rely on only himself (i.e., “cop’s are low”) for protection. More than positioning themselves as hypothetical victims of crime, gun carriers saw themselves as inherently vulnerable to an ever-present threat of crime: Crime could happen anytime, anywhere. Take Danny, a White writer and part-time firearms instructor, Rachel, a White secretary and part-time firearms instructor, and Gerald, an African American who runs a foster care facility in Detroit: I disagree with the premise that it’s very unlikely that you’re going to be attacked on the street. I don’t have a statistic to back this up, this is just from the reading I’ve done. You probably have a 50/50 chance in your lifetime of being criminally victimized . . . I had a student who had been abducted from a supermarket parking lot. She said she was abducted, put in a trunk of a car, taken someplace else, raped, beaten, and left for dead. She survived, and she now carries two guns at all times. A supermarket parking lot! Who would think? (Danny) This [gun] is for my own safety. I go out for walks all the time, and these guys come out from nowhere, and if they’ve got guns or not, they’re big boys! (Rachel) People just wig out, just for the fact that that’s how they feel that day! (Gerald) Danny explicitly acknowledges that although statistics may suggest otherwise, crime is a real, ever-present threat (“I don’t have a statistic to back this up”). Even so, he estimates that a person is just as likely to be victimized by crime over the course of his or her lifetime as not, and it could happen in the least expected places (“A supermarket parking lot! Who would think?”) Meanwhile, Gerald emphasizes crime as unpredictable, saying that “people just wig out just for the fact that that’s how they feel that day.” Likewise, Rachel emphasizes that “these guys come out of nowhere,” as if the threat of crime literally materializes out of thin air. Their conviction that crime can happen anytime, anywhere is not based on expert knowledge (i.e., statistics) as much as lay knowledge (Lupton & Tulloch, 1999): Danny purposively reads about self-defense, teaches self-defense courses, and knows several crime victims, and Rachel told me that most of her knowledge about crime comes from stories and firsthand accounts from other instructors and her students. Meanwhile, Gerald told me that his knowledge of crime comes from his firsthand experiences of victimization and secondhand experiences he hears about from friends and acquaintances. Sociologists have highlighted that modern society is characterized by concerns about risk and fear (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Lupton, 1999), particularly crime (Garland, 2002; Simon, 2007). Gun carriers’ understanding of crime as an ever-present threat is in line with these broader social concerns about risk. By emphasizing the ever-present risk of crime, gun carriers are able to present their cause as a universal one, glossing over the ways in which race and gender structure who is most vulnerable to crime. Further downplaying the significance of gender and race, I now show how they imagine guns as the great equalizer that neutralizes differences of gender and race and allows every law-abiding citizen to equally protect him or herself from the ever-present threat of crime.

“Universal” Solutions: The Great Equalizer A popular adage within gun circles is that “God created man and woman [or simply, man], but Samuel Colt [a firearms manufacturer] made them equal.” During my interviews, gun carriers told me that guns leveled differences among men and between men and women and allowed women to defend themselves against crime as much as men. This emphasis on guns as an “equalizer” echoes Stroud’s (2012) finding that men carry guns in part to address the aging, and weakening, male body. Extending this finding that guns equalize differences among men, I found that gun carriers view guns as “equalizers” across lines of gender and racial difference. The promotion of guns beyond White men complicates the typical caricature of gun advocates as bigoted “toothless, butt-scratching bubbas” (Massey, 2004, p. 577); rather than dismiss their professed inclusivity as window-dressing, I interrogate this professed inclusivity seriously because it shows how the social construction of crime, rather than overt racism or sexism, reproduces privilege along the lines of gender and race. Some accounts of gun owners and carriers suggest that pro-gun men view women as “gun grabbers” who take away their guns and gun rights (Burbick, 2006). As Burbick’s (2006) analysis suggests, this term has been used by gun proponents to describe wives, mothers and girlfriends who pressure them to sell their guns or discourage them from participating in gun culture. While the gun carriers I interviewed did use that term to describe anti-gun politicians (such as U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, U.S. House Representative Nancy Pelosi, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg), they generally articulated a different relationship between women and guns than that captured by the phrase “gun grabber.” Consider Paul, a White firefighter from Flint, Nancy, a White secretary from the Detroit suburbs, and Ron, an African American instructor in his 50s: If Hulk Hogan breaks into my house, my wife is going to stand in the hallway and blaze away until he falls. It doesn’t matter that he could physically dominate her at any moment, she has an equalizer. (Paul) You know, a grandma can pull the trigger. It has nothing to do with [the gender of] who’s carrying it. He’s [pointing to her husband] no more dangerous than I am. We can both pull the trigger. It’s just that simple. (Nancy) The criminals really don’t have an idea as to who’s carrying and who’s not. All it takes is for a few bad guys to get shot and word will get out: Hey, people are carrying guns now! Especially women [carriers]! (Ron) Here, self-defense through guns is seen as an “equalizer” against the backdrop of inherent inequality across gender. Paul suggests that any differences in physical strength implied by gender—he contrasts his wife to Hulk Hogan—disappear once his wife is armed, while Nancy reduces self-defense to a simple, physically easy action that is independent of one’s gender: “pulling the trigger.” Similarly, Ron described concealed guns as a “threat” to criminals, regardless of the carrier’s gender; criminals will presumably be less likely to target people—“especially women”—if only they know that “people are carrying guns now.” Echoing this belief that guns are gender “equalizers,” male gun carriers often told stories about how they encouraged women in their lives to carry guns or how they were disappointed that these women chose not to carry. Some men emphasized their own roles as protectors as they encouraged women to be armed. The gun carried by Paul’s wife serves as a way for Paul to fulfill his role as protector in absentia. As he described, I would hate to think that right now, while I’m sitting here at work, my wife is absolutely defenseless at home . . . The only thing that is going to protect my wife and my children from whatever he has in mind is a gun that she keeps next to the bed. Likewise, Richard, a White retired engineer, imagined a “woman to be in her own bedroom unarmed alone” as he encouraged that his wife, and women more generally, be armed: She [my wife] has a pistol that she keeps to the side of the bed, which is good. If she wants to get rid of me, it’ll be handy [laughs]! But I don’t want any woman to be in her own bedroom unarmed alone. I’m sorry. I don’t think any woman should be on the highway alone without being armed. As with Paul, the gun that Richard’s wife has at her bedside seems to stand in for a missing (male?) protector: Any woman who finds herself “alone” therefore “should” have a gun. Other gun carriers described women’s guns as supplementing, rather than supplanting, men’s monopoly on the means of self-protection (McCaughey, 1997). After emphasizing that women should be armed, Justin, a father and husband, told me that he encourages his wife to carry in his presence: “if we were together, I would definitely make sure she had it.” However, his reasoning behind this encouragement revealed that her gun hardly acted as a means of gender equality: “you have it with you, and then I can use it, you know.” Likewise, Jamal, an African American gun carrier, told me that he thought it was “cute” that women carried, but that should “something go down,” he assumes that he’ll “take control.” But intertwined with, and alongside, these more patriarchal co-optations of gender inclusivity were statements that departed from male protectionism (Stiehm, 1982). Casey, a 29-year-old White gun carrier, told me that he has taught each of his ex-girlfriends how to shoot a gun and encouraged them to carry as well; during our interview, he referenced Angelina Jolie’s character in Mr. and Mrs. Smith to describe his ideal mate: “A girl who not only do I love and I want to be with, but she’s got my back, too!” Opening the possibility that he might need a woman, and her gun, to defend him against threat, Casey explicitly breaks from the patriarchal formulation that men have an exclusive privilege to protect. Meanwhile, Dylan, a White technician from suburban Detroit, weaves together these two formulations—the more patriarchal version that centers on the absent masculine protector and the more egalitarian version that emphasizes women’s equal participation in the protection of self and others: The divorce rate is at 50%, and with the single family being so prevalent, I think a woman has to take on her own protection as a responsibility. And I’ll tell you what—the guy is not infallible! Why not have two people that can protect themselves rather than one? These data suggest that gun carriers are not a homogeneous group with respect to whether they promote guns to women on patriarchal or more egalitarian terms (Stiehm, 1982; Young, 2003). Regardless, though, they do so using an inclusive discourse by situating guns as a gender-equalizing tool. But what about other lines of difference, such as race? Although less frequently, gun carry was discussed by interviewees as not only a gender equalizer but also a race equalizer. Brandon, for example, paints guns as “equalizers” in broad strokes: “[Armed] self-defense is a uniting point for men, women, across the political spectrum, across races. It is an equalizer.” The articulation of guns as “equalizers” provided gun carriers with a rhetorical device to embrace guns as a “universal” solution to the problem of crime, allowing them to distance themselves from beliefs, attitudes, and logics that have become stigmatized as explicitly racist (a move that tends to result in “colorblind racism” rather than the elimination of racism; see Bonilla-Silva, 2010). Explicitly taking on the stereotype of gun advocates as racist, Timothy, a White construction contractor in his late 20s from a rural area in Southeast Michigan, told me that: “by and large a responsible firearms owner will stand back-to-back with another man, woman or child of any race, nation or creed to help them defend their own life.” Likewise, Gerald, an African American gun carrier, emphasized that the use of guns for self-defense is “universal” and cuts across social boundaries: “I think its universal, no matter what race you are. You’d be surprised. I’ve talked to preachers, to Mormons. To people that you’d never, ever think would be into it.” During my interviews, a few White gun carriers rather explicitly encouraged law-abiding African Americans to arm themselves; Sam exclaimed later that “People in Detroit—for the love of god, carry something! Anything! It’s the only way that the predators in society are going to learn,” while Dylan, the White technician, told me, “If I was Black, I would have my gun, I would have my concealed pistol license. And most of my friends that are down there [in Detroit] do.” Overall, gun carriers encouraged “honest people”—in the words of Richard—to own and carry guns. This promotion of guns as equalizers reflected their contention that crime is an ever-present threat, and it also allowed them to distance themselves from the overtly sexist and racist connotations often associated with gun politics and gun culture.