Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

At the same time, investing such deep authority into externalized objects is complicated. 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. Of course, guns are also incredibly dangerous, but the danger they pose to people who own and carry them and to their families becomes harder to acknowledge or recognize when these objects of potential self-destruction carry such weighted connotations.