American gun rights: from national defense to self-defense

Abstract

Equally important to the development of American law, as well as the Western's imagination of gunslinging heroics, is the constitutional guarantee of gun possession, a guarantee explored in this chapter by examining key Supreme Court cases. This chapter argues that the modified conception of defense, from a collective duty to an individual right, enforces a rhetorical shift to normativity concomitant with the rise of modernity and the formation of dispersed, interrelated networks of power that create individuated subjects, what Michel Foucault has termed “biopower.”