The Good Man Shooting Well: Authoritarian Submission and Aggression in the “Gun-Citizen” Daniel A. Cryer Johnson County Community College Citation: “The Good Man Shooting Well: Authoritarian Submission and Aggression in the ‘Gun-Citizen.’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly vol. 50, no. 4 (2020): 254-67. Link to e-version: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SREBTEAPAJEIM4EZKCFG/full?target=10.1080/02773945.2020.1748219 This version may differ slightly from published one Abstract: In the two decades since Bruno Latour imagined the “gun-citizen” as an emergent combination of human and object, the number of U.S. civilians carrying firearms daily has increased five-fold. This essay analyzes discourses of “carry culture” and argues that within it good citizenship comprises the twinned acts of submission to the gun and aggression toward othered groups, defining carry culture as fundamentally authoritarian. It further argues that carriers’ submission to their weapons is a corrupted form of care, prompting rhetoricians to reconsider what constitutes ethical relations with objects. Viewing guns in these ways reveals carrying, despite gun culture’s preoccupation with “freedom,” as physically and mentally constricting and puts forth the idea that firearms carried in public are dangerous whether or not they are ever fired. Keywords: guns, materiality, authoritarianism, care “When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.” - Jill Lepore, “Battleground America”