Lone gunmen redux

In Masculinities, RW Connell tends to see most dominant political issues-- national security, family values, corporate profit, or religion, or freedom--as implicitly reinforcing masculinity. These issues are masculine by default, the argument goes, because the institutions and practices they tend to affirm primarily concern men. To take one example, national security relates directly to military spending, and the military continues to be dominated by men at all levels. When men--and women--argue for greater focus on national security, then, they are reinforcing the power of men, or masculinity, without needing to do so overtly. Connell's reading here fits with his more general framework of masculine hegemony, as something that "happens" through historically-formed practices and institutions, and so which seldom needs to be named, unlike feminist struggles, all of which must occur in the name of woman.

The one exception to this rule, for Connell, is gun politics:

Gun organizations are conventionally masculine in cultural style; hunting and gun magazines dress their models in check shirts and boots to emphasize their masculinity. The gun lobby hardly has to labour the inference that politicians trying to take away our guns are emasculating us. At both symbolic and practical levels, the defence of gun ownership is a defence of hegemonic masculinity (212).

Obviously, this derives partly from a left-wing prejudice against guns, and the continued depiction of guns as anathema to all things progressive. But is Connell onto something? He cites the "gun is penis" idea dismissively, but also invokes William James Gibson's well-researched, and ambivalent, study of gun cultures Warrior Dreams. If Connell is right--that gun politics is about masculinity--this adds an additional (though painfully obvious) dimension to my reading of the "lone gunman"--every man with a gun is ultimately alone, defending his home and family against a hostile world (shades of the frontier, particularly the frontier invoked by Richard Slotkin, here). So when the phrase "lone gunman" circulates, it carries with it all the fantasies of gun ownership.