Volume 106
Date
2017

Commentary: Guns, Speech, Charlottesville

by David M. Shapiro

A gun wielded by a marching white supremacist leads a complicated double life, for it is at once deadly and expressive. Displayed in the context of the August 2017 marches in Charlottesville, the protesters’ firearms expressed something—something too diffuse to call a proposition but still recognizable as a cluster of themes and ideologies: anger, suspicion of the government, white supremacy, a fear of being replaced, admiration of the Confederacy, “sic semper tyrannis,” nativism, and other associated emotions and ideas. In Charlottesville, these and other strands of meaning came together in the glint of muzzles in the mid-morning sun.

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