The Extraordinary Ethics of Self-Defence: Embodied Vulnerability and Gun Rights among Transgender Shooters in the United States

Abstract

Ethical ways of being form in response to bodily perceptions of vulnerability. Arguments that position firearms as defensive tools have become increasingly common in debates about gun legislation over the last two decades. This rhetoric has its origin in counter-hegemonic movements like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, which argued that African-Americans need guns to resist state-sanctioned violence from the police. For white men and women, as well as transgender gun rights activists in San Diego, California, vulnerability forms a key part of the argument for expanding access to guns as defensive weapons. This ‘vulnerability politics’ (Carlson [2014a]. From Gun Politics to Self-Defence Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate. Violence Against Women, 20(3):369–377) represents both a lived experience and ideological lens that informs ethical behaviour. Firearms owners fashion an ethical self through a combination of the prescribed, normative politics of gun rights rhetoric and creatively innovate with these scripts through their embodied experiences of threat.