REBROADCAST / American Diagnosis / Good Guys with Guns & Bad Guys with Guns

Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. I'm the host of The Epidemic Podcast. Thanks for listening to the show. We're on break this month, but we'll be back with new episodes after Labor Day. In the meantime, we're replaying some episodes of our sister podcast, American Diagnosis, formerly known as In Sickness and in Health. The United States has been suffering from dueling pandemics in 2020: the coronavirus and structural racism. In our last season of American Diagnosis on gun violence, race was very much at the heart of a lot of the topics we covered. Nowhere was it more clear than the question of who's a good guy or a bad guy with a gun. Thanks for listening. Here's the show.

Good guys carrying guns can and do make a difference.

White males are arming themselves ostensibly about— it's about fear of crime, and yet they are so much less likely to be victims of crime. We're in a situation today where gun rights have become the par excellence white decide right who's deserving of violence and who's deserving of being at the other end of your firearm.

Welcome back to In Sickness and in Health, a podcast about health and social justice. I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. This season, we're looking at gun violence in America. Last episode, we looked at how things turn out differently for men and women who use guns to defend themselves. Today we're going to look at this idea of the, quote, "good guy with a gun" and the role race plays in determining what a good guy looks like. The only thing, the only way, the best way, the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, is a good woman with a gun. Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association. This line became a national talking point for gun rights activists after a speech Wayne LaPierre gave after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The idea of a, quote, "good guy with a gun"—an armed civilian who runs towards a fight, not away from it—is central to the gun rights movement and especially to concealed carry. Many call it being a, quote, sheepdog.

In America, I would submit to you, there's a higher ratio of sheepdogs than most other nations around the planet. People who have chosen to train themselves, to arm themselves, to prepare themselves. This is retired U.S.

Army Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. Here he is explaining the sheepdog metaphor on a podcast in 2017.

And so there are sheep, the vast majority truly are, are just gentle creatures and only hurt by action, extreme provocation.

In the sheepdog narrative, anyone who doesn't carry a gun is a sheep—people who go about their lives oblivious to the dangers around them, people who need others like soldiers, police, or other civilians carrying guns, the sheepdogs, to protect them from evil wolves.

And then there are wolves. The wolves were feeding the sheep without mercy. And then there are sheepdogs. The sheepdogs are those who are dedicated to protecting the flock. We've got state-of-the-art tools, we've got state-of-the-art training, we're given the authority to administer life and death. That sheep mindset is really pretty pathetic.

Race doesn't factor explicitly into the sheepdog narrative, but white America's perception of whether someone's a sheepdog, a self-appointed good guy here to help, or a criminal wolf has a lot to do with race. We did a study on that. This is Alexandra Phyllindra. She's a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

We showed people the picture of a black guy with a gun and the picture of a white guy with a gun. And we asked them, here are some descriptors, how much do they describe this person? So is this a good citizen? Is this person a gang member? Patriotic? Criminal? Trustworthy? And predictably, there is a huge difference in the percentage of white people who think that the black guy is a criminal versus the white guy is a criminal, and who think that the white guy is patriotic and a good citizen versus the black guy.

Alexandra's research found that respondents' views on who the so-called sheepdogs were had a lot to do with race.

"So yes, we have very deeply ingrained stereotypes that a Black guy with a gun is a criminal and a white guy with a gun is a patriot." Alexander says this is nothing new. "That's the narrative that has been played in the country since the revolution. I mean, the term patriot comes from the white guys during the revolution at Concord who fired the first shot, right? That's the mental image of a patriot." of the white good guy and with the white gun owner. By comparison, a Black guy with a gun in the early part of the century was mortal danger because it was a slave who had gotten themselves a gun and was going to kill white people.

This idea that Black people are a threat to white folk is a deeply rooted racist stereotype in American culture, and it informs how self-appointed sheepdogs react when they interact with people of color. Angela Stroud is a professor at Northland College who studies concealed carry and race. She's also the author of Good Guys with Guns. In researching her book, Angela interviewed almost 40 concealed handgun license holders in Texas. Almost all her interview subjects were white, male, heterosexual, and middle or upper-middle class. Those interviews showed Angela how the "good guy" narrative can run aground when it comes to Black people.

That was one of the really fascinating things, I think, that I found in my research is how often the people I interviewed who were— you know, I focused on white people intentionally— they would say, you know, "I carry a gun legally. I'm a good guy. I follow the rules." During the interviews, it would come up, well, actually, there was many times they carried illegally, either by carrying in places where guns were not allowed, or they carried before they had a license.

One example was a white woman Angela interviewed who she calls Christy.

And Christy was one of those who, she's like, oh yeah, I carried all the time before I got a license. And she was also one who emphasized being law-abiding. So I would ask about that, you know, well, how did it feel carrying a gun without a license? Were you ever worried about getting caught? And she said, oh no, you have to give them a reason to get caught. Meaning the police, you have to give the police a reason to get caught, and I don't need to worry about it. And if I ever get caught, then I'll just say, you know, well, I needed this to protect myself. And it's— I find so fascinating is that sense of entitlement to breaking the law, to not feeling like the law really applies to you. At the same time, they often characterize particularly young Black males as carrying guns illegally. And so you again have this like good guy, bad guy idea, you know, where the bad guys are the ones who carry guns illegally, even though white people do it too. But of course they're not bad guys. They're doing good-guy illegal things, which, you know, that's one of those sort of paradoxes that has to be explained in terms of what it says about racism.

Again, here's that dichotomy between an armed white person, even if they're carrying a weapon illegally, the good guy, versus the hypothetical Black person, the bad guy, the criminal, the threat. Angela's research showed that race influenced not only how white concealed carry holders saw themselves, but those around them, too. She told me a story about one interview subject named Jack.

That's another moment that I think really reveals the worldview on concealed carry. Jack generally tried to avoid the, quote, "bad side of town." And he says he was driving around in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and he got lost. And a car stopped ahead of him. And he didn't know what was going on, so he pulled his gun out. And he held it, you know, by the door. And a man came up to the window and said, "I don't know how to get to the freeway. I'm lost. Could you help me?" He said, "No, don't know. Can't help you." And so he says the guy walked and said, "God bless you," and walked back to his car. And Jack says, "I don't know what that was, if he was actually trying to do something or what, but I was prepared just in case." Both guys were lost.

But one was a good guy, and one maybe not. But which was which?

I used that story to set it in contrast to what I heard from other people, who said, "Concealed carry holders, these are the good guys. They're the ones who are going to stop and help and render aid. They're the ones who are going to be pack leaders in Boy Scouts, and they're going to have first aid kits in their cars. And if you ever need them, they're there for you." And I was like, "Well, not in this case, not in a poor neighborhood, not when a Black person who's lost is asking for directions." In that moment, that person is a threat. And Jack wants to be armed and in fact pulls his gun just in case. And so, you know, it really calls into question, well, when you talk about being ready to help and render aid, who are you talking about? You know, who's actually considered someone who's deserving of help? And who's deserving of violence? I find that is incredibly problematic, you know, justifying and rationalizing using a gun for self-defense because you're afraid of certain neighborhoods, seeing some people as inherently criminal because of race and class. That's the kind of worldview stuff that I think is much more significant even than the number of people who are carrying guns legally. Take the case of Bernard Goetz.

"At train 57th Street, step in, watch the doors please." In 1984, Bernard Goetz was riding the subway in New York City. Crime was rampant in New York City subways in the 1980s. Bernard had been attacked and robbed in a subway station before, so he started carrying a gun, even though his application for a concealed weapon had been denied. One day, Bernard was on the subway when 4 Black teenagers approached him. One of the teenagers asked Bernard for $5. Bernard told police that the way one of the kids smiled at him made him afraid. So he reached into his jacket, pulled out a.38 Smith Wesson revolver, and shot each of the 4 teenagers. In Bernard's statement to police, captured in the documentary The Confession of Bernard Goetz, He said the only thing stopping him from shooting more was that he ran out of bullets.

Look, if I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets. I was going to gouge one of the guys' eyes out with my keys afterwards. I ran up to the first two to check that they were on the ground, the first two that I had shot. They were taken care of. It's all very cold-blooded. And this is going to offend everyone. I went back to the other two to check on them. And I said, you seem to be doing all right. Here's another.

The Manhattan District Attorney at the time tried Bernard with attempted murder. Bernard, who was called a subway vigilante, was vilified but also celebrated by New Yorkers. A jury made up of 10 white people and 2 Black people acquitted him on all charges except one: illegal weapons possession. Bernard served 8 months of a 1-year jail sentence.

We tend to excuse and to mitigate and to even praise white men's use of violence, particularly gun violence. This is Mary Anne Franks.

She's a law professor at the University of Miami. We spoke with her in our last episode on gun violence and gender. Maryann points out that often the use of a gun comes down to the perception of threat, and race is central to that calculus.

And what that has meant historically is that the perspective of that reasonable person is very heavily, one could say, racially classified. That we've seen over time that Black men especially, but Black people generally, their bodies and their emotions and their presence is seen as much more threatening than the bodies of other people.

Marianne says this has only gotten worse with stand-your-ground laws.

We are encouraging white men who are scared, effectively, of Black men, we're encouraging them to act on those impulses and to think that their intuition should fill in for facts. And what that leads to, especially in situations of high conflict, are encouraging men to engage in violent tactics before they know everything that they need to know.

This dynamic played out tragically in the shooting death of Jordan Davis. In 2012, 4 teenage boys pulled into a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. The teenagers were listening to loud rap music while their friend was inside the gas station convenience store. Then Michael Dunn and his girlfriend at the time parked next to them. Michael was white, 45, and reportedly told his girlfriend he didn't like the music. He told police he asked the kids to turn it down.

I rolled down my window and I thought I was polite. I asked them nicely. I didn't demand. I didn't— or else. I said, "Hey, would you guys mind turning that down?" And they shut it off. I was like, "Thank you." And the guy that was in the back is getting really agitated. And my window's up. I can't hear everything he's saying, but, you know, there's a lot of fuck him and fuck that and fuck that bitch.

And then the music comes back on. Then Michael claims Jordan Davis, the teenager in the back of the SUV, ducked down to the floor of the vehicle and pulled up a shotgun.

I saw a barrel come up on the window like a single-shot shotgun where There's a barrel, and it's either a barrel or a stick.

But, sir, they're like, we're going to kill you. A witness said they heard Michael Dunn say, you're not going to talk to me like that.

And then they said, you're dead, bitch. I mean, I didn't wait to look to see if they were going to point it at me. And I'm shitting bricks. But that's when I reached in my glove box, unholstered my pistol. And so quicker than a flash, I had a round chambered in it, and I shot.

Michael shot 3 times into the teenagers' SUV. As the teenagers drove away, Michael fired several more shots at the SUV. Michael's girlfriend came out of the store to see what was happening.

And she doesn't know what's going on. She come outside to see what was up. And I was just like, get in the car, we have to go. I just didn't feel safe there.

Michael Dunn drives off. Meanwhile, the teenagers realize their friend Jordan is struggling to breathe. Michael Dunn had shot him 3 times. Jordan died at the scene. Police found no weapons in the teenager's car and no evidence that Jordan got out of the SUV to confront Michael Dunn.

We've seen this in many high-profile cases. You'll have a white man saying, I felt threatened by this Black person. Now, I didn't see a gun, but I imagined that maybe he would have one, or I thought it was likely that he would and that he meant me harm, or I'm quite sure that he meant me harm. And it turns out that the evidence for that knowledge is not objective, but actually my feeling was that he's dangerous.

But in contrast, the Bernard Goetz case, a jury convicted Michael Dunn of first-degree murder for the killing of Jordan Davis. He was sentenced to life in prison.

He obviously can't say on the stand, I shot him because he disobeyed me, or I shot him because of the music. He said, I was in fear of my life and I saw a gun come out of the back seat. Now, in this case, it turns out he doesn't convince the jury that this is what happened, and he does get convicted, but Even if we could consider that to be at least not another miscarriage of justice, at least in terms of his trial, the fact of the matter is Jordan Davis is still dead. And he's partly dead because of the fact that this man thought that he was entitled to use deadly force in a situation that did not call for it by any objective measure.

Both Bernard Goetz and Michael Dunn were white men who used guns because they were afraid of Black crime. But one researcher I spoke with thinks white Americans' attachment to guns isn't fundamentally about fear of crime. According to Dr. Alexandra Filindra, the researcher we heard from at the top of the show, guns and gun rights have taken on a social dimension beyond the Second Amendment and debates about individual freedoms.

And we know that because we actually, in a survey, we asked people to rank a variety of government-given rights, such as the right to freedom of religion, the right of freedom of speech, the right to vote, the right to a lawyer, and the right right to bear arms. And we asked them to rank them in terms of 1, 2, or 3. The right to bear arms among whites is actually more important than the right to vote, than the right of freedom of speech. It is quite astonishing to see how much they have elevated this attachment to firearms. And this is because this has become an expression of white identity.

Alexander says this because Americans' views on guns correlate with their views towards people of color, what's called racial resentment. But before we go too much further, we should explain what that is.

Racial resentment is a theory that, uh, suggests that the way that whites think about African Americans changed in the 1960s.

Before the civil rights movement, racism was justified in biological terms, that the differences between races were innate, inborn, genetic. The civil rights movement changed that. It was no longer acceptable to use biological racism as an excuse to deny equal access and rights to people.

It was more than 100 years ago that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.

The civil rights movement claimed huge victories. Advances in schooling, access to jobs, and military service came. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

"I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote." With the end of Jim Crow, everyone was supposed to be equal before the law.

So the thinking goes.

The law doesn't discriminate anymore against African Americans. And therefore, the fact that much more disadvantaged position is discounted. It's like, from now on, you have all the opportunities that I have. There is nothing separating us from a legal perspective. So there's no reason why you should be advantaged over me.

This is how racial resentment, as opposed to overt racism, emerged.

Racial resentment suggests that African Americans do not value and do not follow the basic rules of the American culture, that American national identity is based on ideas about hard work and individualism, and that people are expected to basically progress on the basis of their own efforts. There is this perception today that African Americans do not adhere by these values, that they have rejected this value system, and that they have sought and received more than they deserve from government.

Think welfare or affirmative action. People who harbor racial resentment don't see these policies as a way to address structural racism, or the disadvantages imposed on African Americans for hundreds of years.

They see them from the perspective of the present and completely discounting the role of history and structures as an unfair advantage to people that they receive because of their race. They're seeing what is really a loss of privilege, they see it as a loss of rights.

The Jim Crow laws were gone, but the prejudices never vanished. So as America changed, so did its racism. It was no longer socially acceptable to be openly racist.

New colorblind, race-neutral categories became stand-ins for race, such as homeowners and gun owners and law-abiding citizens and taxpayers, and there's a variety of groups that were portrayed in different situations depending on the issue as the virtuous group, the group that basically had done everything right but was about to lose out because of another group.

Groups like welfare recipients, criminals, and immigrants.

In the American culture, terms like welfare recipients or criminals are incredibly racialized. We have psychological studies that show that when people think of Black people, they immediately think about crime, and vice versa.

Studies like the one Alexandra mentioned at the top of the show that associate Black people with guns as criminals and whites with guns as patriots. So when Alexandra looked at how attitudes about race and gun regulation intersect, she found something interesting.

I wouldn't say most gun owners are racist. That's not the proper way to express statistical relationships. What we can tell from statistics is that there is a higher probability that if you are racist, you will own a gun than if you're not racist. Our work consistently shows that racial resentment among whites predicts opposition to gun control, even when you control for a variety of other factors.

Alexandra's research is surprising because it reveals that gun ownership in the name of self-defense may not be about crime or fear of being a victim at all. Having a gun might really be about identity.

It's not fear of being harmed by African Americans. It's an identity concern. It is projection of your moral superiority over the other group that's driving people to want their guns. Through guns, they're expressing a positive group identity, a positive white identity, compared to a negative perception of African Americans. And it's not about how scared they are in any kind of realistic terms of African Americans. It is about how much anger and moral contempt they have towards the outgroup. The gun becomes a race-neutral symbol to show how morally superior you are. You're a good guy because you have a gun. And through that, you're also saying to the people who understand the implicit language here that, hey, I am the good guy, and these other people who are not supportive of gun controls and who are not like me are the bad guys.

This finding that gun ownership is more about how people view themselves goes a long way in explaining why gun safety advocates have struggled to gain traction among white Americans.

Public health experts have focused on messaging that emphasizes the costs of gun crime and of just guns in general. So they will have messages, things like, you know, this year alone, 10,000 people were killed by guns, or 3,000 babies were killed by guns, and focus on the cost. But when the key motivator among a group is not cost, but rather identity, these messages just don't have an impact among high racial resenters.

This might be disheartening to some, but it also offers an alternative to the current public health approach to gun safety messaging: find a spokesperson who can address gun violence while also addressing these racial anxieties. A conservative white male.

A member of the group, basically. A gun-owning conservative white male would be even better.

In our next episode, we'll go back in time and explore the rape myth and how that's intersected with race and guns in our nation's history. Today's episode of In Sickness and in Health was produced by Zack Dyer and me. Our theme music is by Alan Best. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. Archival audio heard in this episode came from the podcast Patriot to the Core, the documentary The Confessions of Bernard Goetz, and Michael Dunn's police interview from the Florida Times-Union, all via YouTube. You can learn more about this podcast and how to engage with us on social media at insicknessandinhealthpodcast.com. That's insicknessandinhealthpodcast.com. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find out about the show. I'm Dr. Céline Gounder. This is In Sickness and in Health.