"Stand Your Ground" As Secessionist Treason

When the democratic left spinelessly abandoned the struggle for sensible gun control regulations in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when his support of some gun control measures was interpreted as a chief cause of Al Gore's defeat in his home state of Tennessee and, hence, of his defeat in the general election (an election Al Gore actually won, one should never tire of pointing out, and in which partisan Republican members of the Supreme Court outrageously irresponsibly selected the loser of that election, George W. Bush, as President in what amounted to a bloodless putsch that would eventuate in an orgy of bloodletting around the world and in a host of crises of institutional illegitimacy from which the nation has yet to recover), the space opened up by that abandonment of common sense and common decency was quickly filled with still deliriously proliferating "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Laws" lobbied for and often literally crafted by right-wing anti-civilizational organizations like ALEC and the NRA. These are laws endorsing lawlessness, inevitably advocated by means of a rhetoric precisely as inverted as their result: peddled as defenses of a right to self-defense, a self-defense usually falsely and even paranoiacally portrayed as under attack, these laws function in fact as licenses to unaccountable individual vigilantism.

The way the intuition that every person has a right to defend themselves from bodily harm bleeds apparently so seamlessly into the intuition that every person's home is their castle to be likewise defended is in fact an expression of the fraught vulnerable permeable boundary of bodily selfhood. The defensive shell of self can expand into the space of the domestic zone or retreat into the theatrum philosophicum of the mind in the skull at will or under threat as circumstances demand or allow, a passive-aggressive permeability figuratively exploited by laws extending this selfhood as a kind of missile into the wider world through the en-castlement of cars on the road, from within which prosthetically enshelled selves can continue aggressively to defend themselves, or contracting inward into the individual genius of the romantic author the sweat of whose thinking brow presumably mixes with its original works to own them, however indispensably they arise from the living archive of culture in fact.

Of course, what is crucial in the state endorsement of self-defense is that it seems to provide for an exception to what is normally the state's jealously guarded monopoly on the legitimate recourse to violence. In tyrannical states this monopoly is functionally a sanction of state violence and crimes (eg, murder becomes execution, gangs becomes armies, exploitation becomes occupation and structural adjustment, and so on) suffered either because of the perceived hopelessness of rebellion or tolerated because it is accompanied by the maintenance of an order from which people consider themselves comparatively more likely to benefit than they are to be abused. This endorsement of self-defense is different but no less fraught in democratic states, for which the legitimacy of their monopoly recourse to violence depends precisely on a state's maintenance of nonviolent alternatives for the transfer of authority, for the adjudication of disputes, for the redress of grievances and violations, and support of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent (for which the provision of extensive welfare entitlements is indispensable) to the terms on which we relate to one another in our interpersonal affairs.

In cases of self-defense, whether what is defended is the bodily person or the prosthetically-extended person of their "castle," the self defending itself is usually at once marginalized and, crucially, immobilized from access to the state-sanctioned violence on which it normally depends for its security, and is hence defending itself in an exceptional state that can easily be accommodated as an exception or even as an expression (via a kind of momentary deputization) of the state's monopoly. But when the self-space of this defensive appropriation of violence is expanded via the en-castlement of cars in motion and so on into a near co-extensivity with the whole territory of the state as such this once exceptional state becomes curiously competitive with the universality of the state in ways that render the making of an exception for it increasingly coincident with calling itself into crisis. I suppose I should add right away that I do not happen to think it is wrong to treat cars as quasi-castles from which we have the same right to defend ourselves as we do from our homes, but I am simply saying that this and other extensions may have contributed to some unanticipated consequences or to have facilitated some dangerous developments.

Together with a host of laws insisting that people have the right to carry arms in visible and even conspicuous ways in ever more public place –- in churches, in bars (what could possibly go wrong?), nearer and nearer schools, and so on –- "Stand Your Ground" Laws treat the simple attachment of a gun to your bodily person as a kind of en-castlement of the citizen-self into a permanent exception to the rule of law, a permanently prostheticized anarch and agency of a kind of counter-law or alter-law. Under the regime of "Stand Your Ground" the gun functions as a prosthetic augmentation of a paranoid-defensive sovereignty that substitutes itself for and so subverts the sovereignty of the state (a sovereignty no less prone to paranoid defensiveness whenever it is not accountable to enfranchised and educated citizens). Wherever "Stand Your Ground" laws are on the books, the ground on which a gun-toting self stands is transformed for as long as the gun-holder stands on it from the land of the country its law-abiding citizens share to mere ground occupied by those who would be laws-unto-themselves. This is especially so in states where "Stand Your Ground" circumscribes the action or rationalizes the inaction of legitimate law enforcement that should arrest people or at least question them or at the very least divest them of their guns and other potential evidence in the aftermath of lethally violent exchanges simply because they invoke the right of self-defense in its newly capacious and aggressive sense.

There is no question at all that United States citizens have a second amendment right to bear arms (a right that was qualified and regulated before, during, and long after the birth of the republic and certainly should be far more circumscribed and regulated today in a time of readily and cheaply available massively-murderous assault weapons). And there is no question that plenty of perfectly good and sensible people like to hunt and to shoot guns for sport (and I say this as a life-long vegetarian and a person trained in nonviolence by the King Center who would never want a gun in my home) and that all United States citizens have a right to do so. The aggressive advocacy of ALEC and the NRA these days has nothing at all to do with the support of such practices and citizens' rights to them, but is conjuring up phony crises as pretexts to implement a profound dismantlement of lawful civilization (in this, these organizations are functioning precisely in the way that right-wing efforts to combat non-existing "voter fraud" are the pretext for widespread voter disenfranchisement and the dismantlement of voting rights), indeed, far from supporting everyday law-abiding gun ownership and uses, "Stand Your Ground" laws are transforming gun-owners, whatever their own feelings on the matter, into nodes in a network of anti-civilizational lawlessness, into avatars of anarchy wherever they happen to stand with a gun at hand, into secessionists from the country of laws many of them profess so loudly to love and which at least some of them actually do. All decent law abiding citizens, whether they own guns or not, should abhor "Stand Your Ground" lawlessness and should forcefully and permanently renounce organizations like ALEC and the NRA which are using law abiding gun owners as pawns in an effort to dismantle the rule of law.