Debate

This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy aparticular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gunviolence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a betterunderstanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us tomove beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate.Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activistcommunity in San Diego, California, I use ethnographic data to show thatowning a firearm brings with it an ethical system that makes the prospect ofgiving up guns in the aftermath of a mass shooting even less attractive tomy informants. Furthermore, this article focuses on what has been called“the problem of evil” by demonstrating how my informants orderthe world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” Thisopposition becomes personified into a more general notion of good versusevil, thereby placing particular people in the category of the human andothers in the category of the inhuman, or monstrous.