Joshua’s dissertation and book project, The Armed Individual: Race, Guns, Law, and American Violence (1960–2005), argues that since the formal end of Jim Crow, the American gun debate has long been organized around two dialectical legal figures — the “armed individual,” imagined as white and rights-bearing, and the “armed criminal,” imagined as Black and dangerous. Their construction has enabled a largely unaddressed racial distribution of harm: Black premature death, racialized vulnerability, and the entanglement of entire communities in punitive legal regimes.
Moving beyond Second Amendment debate to examine the full architecture of gun laws, he demonstrates how punitive gun laws drove a substantial and largely invisible portion of American carceral expansion starting in the late 1970s. By the 1990s, the racialization of gun violence, depoliticization of gun deaths by suicide, and armed and discretionary authority of the state had become self-reinforcing features of racial governance and how “public safety” was defined. Aiken demonstrates how the legal categories of suspicion, risk, and dangerousness function as racial schematics rather than empirical predictions. The project draws on government archives, congressional records, gun industry documents, and original empirical and historical methodology to trace how legal systems naturalizes, structures, and rationalizes racialized harm. Casting a shadow over the present, by the 2000s, guns were embedded in American society where “colorblind” liberalism insists that legal institutions remain the proper remedy for all meaningful wrongs.
JOSHUA AIKEN 