American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

Guns have never before been as important in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns focus on either the gun as a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended, with most debates deadlocking on the ultimate role of humans in causing gun violence-that, as the cliche goes, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." And yet for all this attention, too much of the discussions on gun violence and gun control take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from science studies, law, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as a technology and thus as an object with its own power and agency. In approaching guns from a tech perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these specific objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together a great breadth of perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues, ultimately broadening our conception of what counts as an issue in these debates.