Good [Black] Guys With Guns: Performance and the Anti-Black Logic of US Gun Culture

When a man entered the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama on Thanksgiving night and began shooting at shoppers, E. J. Bradford ran away from the sound of gunfire. After a few seconds, though, Bradford turned back toward the scene of the shooting, took out the concealed firearm he was carrying, and prepared to use it to defend himself and others from the assailant. In doing so, Bradford enacted a long-mythologized tradition of American “do-it-yourself-defense.”¹ A holder of a concealed carry permit, a former member of the US Army, and the son of a correctional officer, Bradford was the epitome of a “good guy with a gun.”² Moments after Bradford began chasing the assailant, however, a Hoover police officer spotted him wielding a gun and assumed Bradford was the attacker. The officer shot twenty-one-year-old Bradford three times. An autopsy determined that, contrary to initial reports from the police department, Bradford had been running away when he was shot.³ Police initially told reporters that Bradford, who had been shopping with a friend, was a suspect in the shooting and that he had “brandished” the gun before the officer killed him; they later rescinded both claims.⁴ Embedded in the police’s claims that Bradford had comported himself as if he were a criminal (by being in the vicinity of the original shooting and brandishing a gun), was an unacknowledged yet vital visual clue as to why the officer may have suspected that Bradford was not a good guy, but instead a bad guy, with a gun: E. J. Bradford was Black.⁵

Nearly two and a half months after Bradford was killed, the Alabama attorney general’s office released a report absolving the officer involved of any wrongdoing. The report begins and ends on the same argument: although the officer shot and killed Bradford, he did not commit a crime by doing so. The first page of the report establishes this claim: “After an extensive investigation and review, the Attorney General has determined that Officer 1 did not commit a crime under Alabama law when he shot and killed E. J. Bradford.”⁶ The final page of the report reiterates it: “Officer 1 reasonably exercised his official duties, powers, or functions when he shot E.J. Bradford on the night of November 22, 2018.”⁷ The report is meant to “provide maximum transparency” and assuage community fears that police used unnecessary force when they killed Bradford; it offers photographic evidence and eyewitness testimony to support Officer 1’s misidentification of Bradford as the shooter rather than an innocent bystander.⁸ At the same time, the report resists transparency by failing to include other eyewitness’ claims that Bradford was guiding people safely out of the mall.⁹ Both the report itself and the event it ostensibly illuminates rely on descriptions of embodied behaviors—performances—that are classified as innocent or as criminal under the law. These performances then shape who is identified as a “good” wielder of a gun and who is identified as a “bad” wielder of a gun and can trigger deadly choreographies between law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers, scripted by centuries of racialized thinking.

The United States is a country bristling with firearms.¹⁰ It is also a country with a robust gun culture rooted in a violent political founding that required the subjugation of enslaved Africans and the forcible displacement and genocide of Indigenous nations for its success.¹¹ These deep and broad histories of white supremacy, which are entrenched in the founding documents, juridical structures, cultural myths, and individual performances of US American identity, shape what is possible and probable within a culture of widespread civilian gun ownership. For Black Americans, the exceptionally high rate of civilian gun ownership coupled with the pervasive devaluing of Black life throughout US history contributes to a higher likelihood of death by civilian firearm and of death at the hands of a police officer.¹² This gun violence is an example of the “quotidian catastrophic events” that Christina Sharpe argues contribute to and reproduce “antiblackness as total climate.”¹³

One of the primary modalities of contemporary gun culture is identifying gun users as either good guys or bad guys. This concept roots gun use in a steadfast ontological binary; you are either a good guy (with a gun) or not. The exact phrasing is a result of both reductive thinking and political marketing. In a 1997 interview on Meet the Press, Charlton Heston, the soon-to-be-president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), articulated an early version of the idea: “Let me make a short, opening, blanket comment,” he told Tim Russert. “There are no ‘good guns.’ There are no ‘bad guns.’ Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anyone—except bad people.”¹⁴ Fifteen years later, following the murder of twenty first-graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the NRA held a press conference to respond to the mass murder. In his speech, Wayne LaPierre, the Executive Vice President of the NRA, riffed on Heston’s earlier statement and emphasized an ontological “goodness” that adhered to some gun owners and a “badness” that adhered to others. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” he exclaimed, “is a good guy with a gun.”¹⁵ According to the NRA, this pithy phrase has become a “motto for Second Amendment support across the nation.”¹⁶ This assessment is at least anecdotally true; gun culture groups with this tagline proliferate on Facebook and other social media sites, offering spaces for participants to “share stories about real life incidents where law abiding citizens have used firearms to defend themselves or others from violent crime,” and the NRA sells merchandise with the phrase emblazoned on it.¹⁷

Articulations of the “good guy with a gun” theory—that you can prevent gun violence by carrying a gun—assume that the definition of a “law abiding citizen” is ontologically stable, self-evident, and easily discernable in a moment of violent confrontation. In fact, such moments often happen in a matter of seconds as police officers (and others) make split-second decisions about who in the situation is the aggressor and who is the victim. In media accounts of police killings, the racialized thinking that influences these kind of instantaneous decisions is often called “implicit bias.”¹⁸ I propose that a more complete way to understand this often subconscious racism, and the actions it provokes, is as restored behavior, a term Richard Schechner defines as “performed actions that people train for and rehearse.”¹⁹ Importantly, the concept of restored behavior emphasizes the iterative embodied actions that are a corollary to the attitudes articulated by implicit bias. Schechner goes on to explain that, though such rehearsal is easier to identify in art and ritual, this same standard can be applied to everyday life: that is, we rehearse our identities everyday by remixing and performing that which we have seen, and even sensed, before.²⁰ Importantly, “restored behavior” implies an embodied, rote dimension to our everyday performances of self. We learn by repetition, and that repetition soon begins to feel natural, though it remains, essentially, a performance. Rather than devaluing behavior by considering it “performance,” the concept of restored behavior argues that all embodied actions are repetitions of earlier performed behavior, including things like how we hold our bodies when we walk, how we interact with other people, and how we “read” a room when we enter it. Thus, police officers “rehearse” not just through formalized training of their bodies in preparation for encounters with the public they are tasked to protect, but also through their own familial and cultural histories, which they bring to the job. Police officers in the United States carry histories of white supremacy and antiblackness with them into the field, and those cultural histories are embedded in their bodily movements and split-second decisions. In this way, white supremacy is transformed, even in the absence of conscious malice, into police violence against Black Americans.

The idea of all behavior as restored also helps explain why the law-as-text—for example, the law that Bradford could legally carry his firearm and use it for self-defense because he was licensed to do so in the state of Alabama—is so often quite different from the law-in-action. Though the text may say one thing, the repetition of certain behaviors creates the conditions for legitimate legality, or the possibility for citizens to actually partake of the rights assured by law. The attorney general’s report is a clear example of this principle in action: the entire document is a process of interpreting the law-as-text through the prism of the night’s events in order to arrive at an explanation of the law-in-action. Although shooting and killing someone who is not a danger to others would seem to be a crime, the report determines that Officer 1’s actions were “justified and not criminal,” and that he acted as a “reasonable officer would have under the circumstances.”²¹ In this way, the report is also a process of interpreting the law-as-text through the prism of expectations of restored behavior—that any “reasonable” officer would interpret an armed Black man’s performance in this given situation as already criminal, regardless of what laws, if any, are being broken. The text of the law is always subjugated to the performance of the law in determining actual applicability.

When it identifies the officer’s response as a “reasonable” performance of duty, the report relies on an ill-defined guideline of what is reasonable behavior. Objective reasonableness, which was determined as the appropriate standard for assessing claims of excessive force against police in the Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor (1989), is left purposely vague in the final decision, written by Justice William Rehnquist. Citing an earlier case, Rehnquist argues that “the test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application.”²² While the standard is, in legal terms, meant to allow for flexibility in determining an acceptable level of force in any given encounter with the police, in practice it results in encounters that repeat previous choreographies of engagement. Actions become authorized or legitimated through repetition—the more often that Black people are killed or brutalized by police, and the more often that such treatment is circulated via social media and traditional news platforms, the more such treatment can be interpreted as “reasonable” and dismissed.²³ The restored behaviors of centuries of abusive and oppressive policing of Black communities come to feel natural, or, in legal parlance, “reasonable.” As one officer who was at the mall that night, but did not witness the shooting, testified, he “believed Officer 1 perceived that E. J. Bradford posed a threat and took enforcement action, as every law enforcement officer would have done in that situation.”²⁴ The standard of objective reasonableness in this statement becomes a tautology: the officer was right because the officer chose to do what he did—which made it right.

Conjoined with the covert restored behaviors that devalue Black life, particularly during police encounters, officers also train in overtly performed behaviors in an attempt to embed these behaviors in their own bodies, or to make them second-nature. These trainings are essentially rehearsals in which officers learn to rapidly quantify a situation and classify participants according to threat level. This tactical training is outlined in the attorney general’s report and used to bolster the claim that the officer behaved reasonably. The report describes Officer 1’s training in the Texas State University-sponsored active shooter training program, Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT).²⁵ During ALERRT instruction, officers are “trained how to scan persons at an active shooting scene to differentiate between innocent civilians, first responders, and actors/suspects.”²⁶ The training requires that officers “‘recognize that innocent life must be defended above all” and that officers must “eliminate any threat posed by actors or suspects toward innocent civilians.”²⁷ Such training presents a similar problem as the designation of a good guy or a law-abiding citizen with a gun. How should one identify who qualifies as an innocent civilian and who qualifies as an actor? ALERRT trains officers to “scan” people on the scene of an active shooting and ask the following questions: 1) is the person “postured and moving like another first responder, victim, or shooter?” 2) “Is he wearing a uniform that identifies him as another first responder?” and 3) “Do you recognize this person as a non-combatant?”²⁸

Officer 1, the report argues, put this training into use when he came upon the active shooter scene at the Riverchase Galleria. After assessing the scene, he determined that Bradford was a threat because he did not have on a police uniform, he had his gun out, and he was running toward the victim (who was on the floor, wounded) rather than running away.²⁹ Officer 1’s classification of people at the scene into certain roles, however, relied as much on his own gut feeling about who was a threat as it did any definitive characteristics. Bradford’s “bladed shooting stance,” which demonstrated the firearms training he would have received in the Army, could just as easily identified him as a protector rather than an actor/suspect.³⁰ For the officer, a bladed stance indicated only an intention to engage, rather than evident training in tactical self-defense. The fact that Bradford was sprinting toward the injured person, rather than away from him, likewise could have indicated his defensive engagement with whomever just shot the man on the ground. The actions that police and the attorney general identified as those of an actor/suspect are also the embodied movements taught in Army, concealed carry, and self-defense courses. Though the officer did not realize it at the time, the man on the ground was E. J. Bradford’s friend; Bradford, after first running briefly away from the scene in panic, returned to protect his loved one.

One of the most callous moments in the report comes near the end. The attorney general has laid out his primary claims of absolution, but nevertheless opts to include a final note:

While it is now known that E. J. Bradford did not shoot Brian Wilson [Bradford’s friend], Bradford still posed an immediate deadly threat to persons in the area. Video evidence suggests that Bradford, who was carrying a firearm, was running toward the initial shooter, Erron Brown, who was also carrying a firearm. Multiple shoppers were nearby, including a mother and child directly in between the two armed men. [ . . . ] When recovered, both Bradford’s firearm and Brown’s firearm were loaded with a live round in the chamber. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that both men presented an immediate deadly threat to innocent civilians and first responders inside the Galleria.³¹

The attorney general cannot seem to resist driving home the idea that, even though it was ancillary to his argument about the reasonableness of the shooting, Bradford was dangerous simply because he was a Black man with a gun. It is legal in Alabama to carry a weapon with a round chambered, and, in fact, most people who carry concealed weapons do so with a live round in the chamber so as to be prepared to use their gun quickly, if they deem it necessary.³² Additionally, there is no indication that Bradford would have shot at Brown as he fled, nor that he would have put anyone’s life in danger. The report positions Bradford as criminal, even as it absolves Officer 1, the one who actually shot at Bradford in the direction of the “mother and child directly in between the two armed men.”

E. J. Bradford is just one of the most recent examples of law-abiding Black citizens who should embody “good guys” with guns who are nevertheless killed by police. On November 11, 2018, Jemel Roberson, a security guard at a bar outside of Chicago, stopped an active shooter by subduing the attacker at gunpoint. When police arrived, an officer shot and killed Roberson as he held the suspect to the ground. In video footage of the moments following the shooting, Roberson’s fellow security guard shouts, “your man shot my man! The police shot security. [ . . . ] Do you not see us with vests on?”³³ In one of the highest-profile cases, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop on July 6, 2016. When the officer approached Castile’s window, Castile informed him that he was carrying a licensed firearm in the car. Within forty seconds of initiating the conversation, officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Castile through the window of his car. In all three of these cases, police emphasized the reasonableness of their actions based on the performance of the victims: Roberson allegedly didn’t follow “verbal commands”; Castile allegedly was told to “get his fucking hand off his gun.”³⁴ As with Bradford, police later retracted or revised these statements, and witnesses contradicted police claims.³⁵ It was too late, though. During the encounters, police officers (mis)cast the innocent victims as “actors/suspects,” and thus were granted nearly unimpeded recourse to deadly force.³⁶ Charlton Heston assured viewers that “any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anyone—except bad people.” This view of guns as mere tools meant to carry out the will of their wielders has shaped gun culture ever since, but it necessitates a certain amount of role-playing. When the Alabama attorney general’s office absolved the officer who shot Bradford of any wrongdoing, they cast the officer in the role of the decent person, and cast E. J. Bradford in the other role—that of the bad person. Understanding how performance structures the iterations of racism inherent in deadly police encounters disentangles the mythology behind, and the danger in, the tagline of a “good guy with a gun.” Ultimately, it is not just a question of how “good” is defined in these encounters and who bears the brunt of being marked as “bad,” but who is deserving of the right to live within a pervasive gun culture.