Concealed Carry, Agency, and Attention in a Technocratic Context

Abstract

Standard discussions about guns as technologies focus on whether guns influence free choices or mediate sociocultural dynamics related to race, class, or gender. This article resituates these questions in a broader context by approaching guns from the perspective of Pope Francis’s critique of the “technocratic paradigm” as a general sociocultural force in its own right. Specifically, the article examines how concealed-carry armed citizenship participates in or resists the technocratic construal of the world as raw material to be freely manipulated for the utility and security of an unsituated autonomous subject. While armed citizenship clearly participates in the technocratic paradigm in its consistent depiction of potential assailants as irrational outsiders to be controlled through technical force, it also appears to resist that paradigm in its active search for meaningful skilled agency and in its potentially world-disclosing practice of “situational awareness.” Closer reflection reveals that in both latter cases concealed carry is caught in a cycle of failed resistance. Its search for skilled agency is thwarted by a myth of unsituated responsibility that undercuts the sociocultural conditions for such agency. Meanwhile, situational awareness fails to disclose the world (and resist distorting influences) because it anticipates for actions one cannot regularly practice.