Psychiatrists like me sometimes think that men who outsource their sense of power onto external objects—and particularly onto objects shaped like guns—do so in ways that convey deeper, gendered insecurities about potency and perhaps even racial insecurities or projected guilt. Projecting such profound gender and racial meanings onto objects might then render men subject to the maneuvers of marketers, sellers, lobbyists, politicians, and other manipulators of common sense.
