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

Missouri is an important state for gun violence prevention researchers because of its long history of gun ownership and usage, paired with the careful regulation of handguns. In the early 2000s, Missouri relaxed many of these requirements, including requirements for background checks, lowering the minimum age for carrying a concealed weapon, and approving open carry laws for public spaces. In 2016, the state passed the “so-called guns everywhere bill” (24), which removed requirements like training and background checks and expanded the “Castle Doctrine” and “stand-your-ground” laws. Advocates for gun rights believed these changes would make the state safer; however, a rise in gun-related injuries and deaths followed, earning Missouri the nickname of the “Shoot Me State.”

In 2016, against the backdrop of the Trump/Clinton presidential race, Metzl visited Missouri to study people’s experiences living with unregulated firearms. Metzl grew up in Kansas City and was familiar with the state and its citizens; he saw Missouri become “increasing[ly] tense, polarized, and ever-more-heavily armed” (26). As Metzl spoke to Missourians about the ever-increasing number of guns in the state, some claimed that the ability to carry a firearm made them feel safer. Others expressed concern and anxiety seeing men openly carrying weapons in public spaces. One Black man told Metzl that he no longer shopped at Sam’s Club because of armed white men, illustrating the “double standard” for gun ownership in the United States: White men with guns are viewed as “protectors,” while Black gun owners are seen as “threats.”

In Missouri, Metzl visited Cape Girardeau. Located in the southeastern part of the state, the region was overwhelmingly white and Republican. Guns occupied a central position in the lives of the Cape’s citizens, and Metzl immediately noticed an abundance of camouflage clothing in the regional airport. In the Cape, Metzl visited a support group for people who lost loved ones to death by suicide. According to Billie, the group leader, more than 90% of the group was impacted by firearm death by suicide. One couple described finding their son after he shot himself. Another woman’s family had been rattled by five deaths by suicide involving firearms.

In another kind of support group, the bereaved might blame “the commercial or societal forces that enabled their tragedies” (30). However, the Cape group “[focused] entirely on individual-level stressors” (31) and never questioned the role of guns in the community. Eventually, Metzl posed a careful question to the group, asking if their losses changed how they saw guns in everyday life. One group member told Metzl that none of them “blame the gun.” Several others echoed this sentiment and reiterated the important role that guns play in the culture of rural Missouri.

In Cape Girardeau, Metzl wanted to understand the “larger frameworks” behind the personal stories of pain and loss. The first framework he identified was “the contested politics of risk” (35). Death by suicide researchers study factors that put an individual at risk for death by suicide. This research helps develop lists of warning signs, allowing friends, family, and medical professionals to identify and help those at risk. For example, a magnet distributed to members of the Cape Girardeau support group listed warning signs like “feeling hopeless” and “withdrawal from friends and family” (37). Sharing this information saves lives and helps to break the stigma of shame that exists around death by suicide.

However, researchers cannot receive federal funds to investigate risk factors for death by suicide involving guns—the most deadly method of death by suicide in the United States. In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which banned federally-funded gun research, supposedly to prevent biased public health information advocating for gun control. Metzl calls this ban “frustrating” because it creates greater “polarization” and “makes it harder to create common knowledge” about firearms in communities like Cape Girardeau, where guns are a part of people’s everyday lives (41). Ironically, these pro-gun communities would be the ones that benefited most from the research that gun lobbyists have effectively suppressed.

Illness and injury prevention research uses federal funds to create databases where researchers can track various trends. However, no such database exists for gun-related deaths and injuries, so researchers have to use “backdoor strategies” like databases that track causes of death in the United States. This method can provide important data points, but it fails to address many of the subtleties involved in various causes of death and makes it difficult to identify risk factors for gun death by suicide in places like Cape Girardeau.

Gun death by suicide is different from other methods of taking one’s own life because of its “urgent, mercurial linearity.” It is often an “impulsive” form of death by suicide, and very little time can pass between initial suicidal thoughts and the actual attempt. In these impulsive cases, depression might be less of a risk factor than “a history of having been in a physical fight” (43). Furthermore, firearms are one of the most deadly forms of death by suicide, resulting in death in approximately 85% of cases. For these reasons, gun death by suicide “shifts the discourse […] from why to how” (43). Often, gun death by suicide is an impulsive response to “a passing crisis.” Metzl muses that risk factors for “a five-minute, armed impulse” must look much different than risk factors for those individuals who commit death by suicide after “a long history of severe depression” (44). Research could help those in the Cape who have lost loved ones ease the guilt they feel for missing the “warning signs” that “were not wholly relevant in their particular cases” (44).

Gun death by suicide has a deep connection to “whiteness in general and white maleness in particular” (44). Suicidal ideation affects most demographics equally, even if trends of death by suicide attempts vary across demographic groups. However, white Americans top death-by-suicide statistics due to the prevalence of white male firearm suicides. Between 2009 and 2015, non-Hispanic white Americans accounted for 92% of all gun death by suicides in the United States, a “shocking” trend, even when adjusted to account for total population. Of these deaths, white men made up the vast majority, equaling almost 80% of total gun deaths by suicide in the United States while only accounting for less than 35% of the total population.

Race is also an important factor in other categories of firearm deaths. For example, a Black person in the United States is around five times more likely to be shot by someone else than to commit death by suicide with a gun, while the reverse is true for white people. Death by firearm suicide, driven by white male deaths, has been steadily rising over the years, while homicide rates have been declining. However, these trends remain largely “invisible” as public discourse remains focused on stereotypes that drive fears of violent crime and gun homicide.

The “racial disparities” between death by suicide and homicide statistics reflect how “Americans talk about race, violence, and morality more broadly” (49). Some scientists try to link “aggression or violence” involving Black people to “biology” or “culture” (49). However, no one would question if white men are somehow genetically predisposed to firearm death by suicide. Metzl argues that “politics shape outcomes much more than do genes” (50) and returns to the concept of risk. The “interactions of race, gender, and violence” (50) can help inform research, identify who is at risk, and prevent them from coming to harm.

Metzl argues that risk is “particularly complicated” in the case of white firearm death by suicide and the “knowledge vacuum” imposed by the ban on federally- funded research. Lacking information, the public discourse turns to the idea of a “crisis” of white identity in a changing cultural and economic world to explain the prevalence of white gun deaths by suicide. Metzl cites sociologist Durkheim, who introduced the idea of anomie in the 1890s, describing “a crisis of disconnect that emerged between personal lives and social structures” (51). This often resulted in “anomic suicide” as individuals lost “a sense of usefulness and of where they fit in with their societies” (51).

This concept of anomie applies to modern-day Missouri and other parts of rural America as jobs and ways of life vanish in the face of globalization and shifting cultural norms. Those who formally occupied a privileged position on the social hierarchy experience an identity crisis in the face of “upended power structures.” Metzl cites, for example, the “crisis of masculinity” that resulted from feminist movements. Men were suddenly threatened with losing their “automatic authority” and “faced more competition and enjoyed less prestige” (52). However, this definition of “crisis” is born from “an imagined sense of nostalgia” (53)— meaning, for example, that most men never enjoyed the power that was supposedly taken away from them.

In this context, Metzl begins to contemplate the relationship between guns and white masculinity. Relying on death statistics alone overlooks the connection between firearms and “particular forms of authority or power” (53), which, when studied, suggest that “the armed defense of this notion of white male authority itself became a potent form of risk” (54).

Metzl interviews a 47-year-old white father who lost his 26-year-old son, Connor, to a gun death by suicide. The father describes Connor as “a very happy person” who “laughed and joked all the time” (55). He was dating a girl at the time of his death, but she was seeing someone else. The night he died, Connor drove the girl into town, but she wanted to be with the other man. On his way home, Connor bought some whiskey. He drank the alcohol, then shot himself in the mouth with a rifle.

Connor’s father reflects that he “didn’t realize that [Connor] was probably dealing with depression at the time” (56). Connor died instantaneously, but Connor’s father is left with “impossible questions,” wondering if there was anything he could have done to prevent the tragedy. He tells Metzl that firearm death by suicide is complicated for survivors because of the state in which it leaves the body. Even though he comes from “a big family of hunters” (58), Connor’s father isn’t sure if he could still shoot an animal, and he wonders what would have happened “if the gun hadn’t been there” (59) the night his son died.

Metzl starts by describing an advertising campaign that Bushmaster Firearms used to sell its .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle. After answering a series of questions and buying the rifle, consumers received a “Man Card” certifying their masculinity. The campaign received national attention in 2014 when Adam Lanza used a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle to kill 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Man Card campaign became a central point in the public debate around the connection between high-caliber firearms and American masculinity. However, Metzl suggests that the public discourse failed to comment on the Man Card campaign’s “explicit claims […] about privilege” (62). The card itself declared that the bearer was “a man” and, therefore, “fully entitled to all of the rights and privileges duly afforded” (62).

The word “privileges” refers to “benefits enjoyed by the few and beyond the reach of the many” (62), and its use has steadily declined over the last two 200 years. It stands to reason that the concept of “privilege” has also steadily declined. The use of the word on the Man Card is important because, for most of American history, only white men had the privilege of owning firearms in the United States. Exploring the intersecting history of “guns, whiteness, and privilege” is important to understand the “particular meanings” that guns have for certain demographics and why the issue of gun control has become so politically charged.

In colonial America, guns were the “armaments of white upper-class power” (64) and an important tool for separating lower-class white people from people of color. Only wealthy gentlemen were allowed to own guns in England, but the privilege was extended to all white men in the New World and was even included in the Bill of Rights as the Second Amendment. During the antebellum period, many states passed laws that protected white gun owners while restricting access to people of color.

The “racial divides in civilian gun rights” (66) widened after the Civil War, and white terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan used their firearms to threaten, intimidate, and kill Black citizens. The quest for “black disarmament” continued throughout the civil rights movement, and Black people who attempted to defend themselves were met with violence and condemnation. Several high-profile assassinations in the 1960s led to the Gun Control Act of 1968, which brought “federal oversight to the buying, selling, and tracking of guns” (68). At the same time, the NRA began its “transformation […] into a powerful corporate lobby” (68) by supporting the universal, constitutional right to bear arms as stated in the Second Amendment.

Gun sales skyrocketed, and by 2015, nearly 42% of the world’s privately-held guns belonged to Americans. However, gun ownership remained concentrated among “non-Hispanic, white, male self-identified conservative Republicans over the age of 35,” representing a continuation of three centuries of history in which guns represented “a privilege afforded primarily to white men” (69).

In the early 2010s, “racial tensions surrounding gun ownership” were highlighted when states around the country passed “guns everywhere bills,” allowing the open carry of firearms in public places (70). In many instances, these laws emphasized the racial divide between gun owners. For example, white gun owners marched unimpeded through African American neighborhoods of St. Louis with their weapons prominently displayed while a Black man with a legally- owned pistol was tackled by “a white vigilante” in a Florida Walmart.

The concept of “implicit bias” entered the public discourse surrounding gun ownership, suggesting that individuals reacted differently to Black and white gun owners due to “differing reflex assumptions about race” (72). However, this discussion often excluded the long history of American gun laws and traditions that “coded armed white men as defenders and armed black men as threats” (72). Drawing on the romanticized connection between gun ownership and white masculinity, gun marketing shifted from presenting firearms as “useful tools” to promoting guns as a way to “help men recover their status, power, and respect” (73).

Beginning in the 1960s, working-class white men experienced a drop in their dominant status as women and people of color began entering the labor force in greater numbers. To reclaim their imagined glory, white men turned to guns’ promise of “idealized” masculinity. By the early 2000s, views on why guns were necessary also began to shift. More gun owners claimed they needed their firearms for “protection” rather than sport or hunting. This perceived need for protection was often based on “white gun owners’ […] anxieties about persons of color” (75), with “imagined” scenarios about the need for a firearm often including “darker-skinned” individuals.

For many, guns are “weapons, totems, and transitional objects that promise autonomy, protection, and self-reliance” (76). However, the gendered and racially-charged history of firearms in the United States illustrates how guns are connected to rural America’s “deepest privileges and biases and insecurities” (77), which can make it difficult to see the dangers that unregulated access to firearms present, even to the population that most supports gun ownership.

Metzl interviews the 55-year-old white son of a gun dealer. The interviewee grew up outside of St. Louis, where guns were an important part of the culture. However, he didn’t grow up with guns in the house, even though his father was an ammunition executive. The speaker describes how his father never had an interest in gun ownership until the “Ferguson uprising.” After the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, there was a “weird sort of mentality amongst the rural white folk that we gotta take up arms because the protesters might be coming for us” (80).

Even though his father lived in a safe neighborhood, the speaker was shocked to come home to find his father and his wife loading guns on the living room floor. His father insisted the weapons were necessary for “protection” and voiced fears about “the world changing.” The speaker muses that the anti-police protests that spread across the country were “confirmatory evidence” to people like his father, who felt they had to protect their families as “white Americans” (81). Metzl asks if the interviewee’s father’s pro-gun stance was “racially motivated,” and the speaker replies that it “probably” was.

Places like Cape Girardeau are in great need of information about firearm risk, but the “social, political, and historical framework” of firearms created a “knowledge vacuum” that brings an “invisibility” to the impact of guns on the lives of rural white Americans (83). Risk is “an algorithm” that is easily quantifiable; however, attempts to research firearm risk are met with “absurdity,” such as critiques that established statistical methods are “unscientific.” For example, Metzl describes two studies examining gun regulations in Missouri and Connecticut, states that took opposite approaches to gun ownership

Missouri has a long and important culture of gun ownership. However, the state also historically imposed regulations on handgun sales to ensure that the guns were sold only to “low-risk” individuals. Buyers needed an interview and background check at a local sheriff’s office, which searched for several risk factors, such as a history of violent crimes, domestic violence, or high death by suicide risk. Despite the pro-gun nature of the state, many Missourians didn’t complain about these regulations, feeling they were “far from intrusive.” In 2007, Missouri repealed the permit-to-purchase law, and in 2016, the state passed legislation for “permitless carry” of firearms in public places.

Connecticut, meanwhile, passed permit-to-purchase legislation in 1995, obliging all prospective handgun buyers to undergo background checks and complete training. In 1999, the state implemented a program that authorized police to remove guns from individuals who seemed at high risk of hurting themselves or others. In 2012, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, the state passed strict gun control legislation, banning assault rifles and imposing mandatory background checks.

By pulling data from the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), researchers from Johns Hopkins University discovered that Connecticut’s PTP law was associated with a 15.4% reduction in firearm death by suicide rates. In comparison, the repeal of Missouri’s similar law was associated with a 16.1% increase in firearm death by suicide. The researchers presented their work in “a cautious tone” full of “conditional sentences” but were still attacked by gun rights advocates for “iffy” methodology and an “overreliance on death data” (89). The researchers themselves echoed these criticisms, as the ban on federally-funded gun research left them with limited resources. However, “the most glaring problem” with the study was “its lack of analysis of race” (90). In studies on violent crime, race was often an important analytical category, but in this study of death by suicide, it was invisible.

Metz interviews a 54-year-old woman who lost her 12-year-old nephew to firearm death by suicide.

The interviewee says that her nephew was diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. However, she believes he was “misdiagnosed” and suffered from depression and “just felt like he didn't have any other way out” (92). There was “some speculation” that her nephew’s death was accidental, but she doesn't believe it. The boy’s stepfather was “a gun fanatic,” and the boy had easy access to a loaded handgun on his parents’ bedside table. The kids grew up around guns and knew about “gun safety,” but her nephew “clearly had some things going through his head that he didn't share with” his family (93).

There is “a huge guilt” hanging over the family, who wonders if they could have prevented the tragedy. The tragedy has “absolutely not changed her view about guns” (93), but part of her does “blame the parents” for leaving the loaded handgun within the boy’s reach. She says it is a parent’s responsibility to protect their child, and that she would strongly support passing a law that holds parents criminally responsible for a child’s firearm death in the home.

Leaving Missouri, Metzl had two questions: 1) Did being a white man in Missouri put a person at higher risk for gun death by suicide, and 2) how was the risk affected by loosening gun laws? Metzl conducted some of his own research to dig into these questions.

Metzl and a small team used the same WISQARS database that researchers from the Johns Hopkins study relied on. They set the parameters to fatal injury, death by suicide, and firearms, then ran the data through other variables, such as region, state, sex, age, race, and ethnicity. The trends they found were similar to those in the Johns Hopkins study. Death by suicide rates in Missouri steadily increased beginning in the early 2000s with the loosening of gun restrictions and steadily dropped in Connecticut following the tightening of gun restrictions. Metzl was particularly interested in instances of white male firearm death by suicide, so he further analyzed trends by race and gender. His analysis showed white males were vastly overrepresented, so much so that they “served as primary drivers of all overall suicide rates in each state” (100).

Loosening gun restrictions in states like Missouri should mean that access to firearms increases across all demographic groups, and one would expect firearm death by suicide rates to follow a similar trend. However, rates of gun death by suicide remained concentrated among white men. In 2015, white men made up approximately 40% of Missouri’s population; however, they represented almost 80% of gun deaths by suicides. Rates of gun death by suicide among white men were higher than men of all other demographic groups combined and far outpaced women of all backgrounds. Many cultural differences between Missouri and Connecticut contribute to their differing firearm regulations and death-by-suicide projections; however, it is difficult “to dismiss the suggestion that differing gun policies catalyzed different white male suicide rates” (101).

Many studies of gun violence prevention make the mistake of trying to assess the effectiveness of individual pieces of legislation. Instead, Metzl asks: “What would life have looked like if pro-gun legislation had never taken effect?” (102). Metzl imagined that Missouri hadn’t repealed gun regulations in the mid-2000s and recalculated his data to approximate what the level of gun death by suicide would have looked like between 2008 and 2015. Metzl’s data suggested that loosening gun policies in Missouri resulted in approximately 413 more white male deaths between 2008 and 2015. This equates to over 10,500 years of productive white male life, costing Missouri around $414,654,891 (106).

Metzl returns to the concept of risk, considering the risk factors listed on the magnets that the Cape’s support group received. Nearly all of these factors, like “feelings of hopelessness” or “withdrawal from friends, family, and society,” were “individual physiological factors and stressors” (106). However, Metzl argues that risk factors for gun death by suicide often involve “who a person is, what they are, or where they live” (106). In this context, being a white man living in a state with loose gun restrictions became “a profound risk factor” for firearm death by suicide between 2008 and 2015 (106). The risk of white men dying from self-inflicted gunshot was similar to “more well-known causes of death,” such as car accidents or diabetes (107). Most significantly, Meztl’s data showed that white men in Missouri were seven times more likely to die by self-inflicted gunshots than to be fatally shot by the intruders or attackers that they claimed they needed their weapons to protect themselves from.

White men are drawn to firearms’ promise to “increase one’s own privilege, power, safety, and authority” (108). However, data suggest that living with high numbers of firearms is linked to increased death, loss, and pain, especially for pro-gun white individuals. In this context, “privilege itself becomes a liability,” and “white men themselves become the biggest threat to…themselves” (109). When calculating suicide risk, “‘being a white man who lives in Missouri’ emerges as its own high-risk category” (109).

Metzl interviews a 44-year-old white woman who lost her father to firearm death by suicide. The interviewee grew up in the Midwest, where firearms were an important part of her family. She still owns a lot of guns, teaches her children to shoot, and claims, “That’s not gonna change” (111). However, she discusses the particularly traumatic nature of death by suicide by firearm, suggesting that reading the police report and imagining her father‘s death was “a second trauma.” She spoke to her father just hours before he died. He appeared to be in a good mood and was planning a barbecue for the next day. However, after he got off the phone with his daughter, he called his ex-wife and asked if there was anything he could do to fix the marriage. She told him no; he hung up the phone and shot himself.

The interviewee wonders if there’s anything she could have done to save her father or if he might have changed his mind if he “thought about [it] a couple more seconds” (112). Metzl asked the interviewee if her views about guns changed after her loss. She says a gun is “no different than a kitchen knife,” and firearms remain “part of [her] life” (113). While the speaker does “not know honestly” much about the process of buying guns, she thinks there “should definitely be some sort of background check involved in buying a firearm” (113).

Reflecting on his time in Missouri, Metzl describes the “tension” created by “individual and structural explanations of gun suicide” (115). Many survivors felt extreme guilt as they talked about individual-level warning signs that they might have missed, wondering if their loved one was struggling with depression or if the doctor prescribed the wrong medication. There are also many “structural factors” involved in firearm death by suicide, but blaming the gun for a loved one’s death is often seen as a liberal admission or even “a form of heresy” (116).

Missouri taught Metzl about the “complex relationships between the people, the place, their histories, and their guns” (117). For many white Missourians, guns are an important part of culture, family, and history. However, these guns also become symbols of trauma and loss. They are “truly double-edged swords,” representing “imagined privileges,” yet also becoming “suicide enablers in moments of desperation” (117). While a concrete connection between crime rates and guns remains inconclusive, Metzl left Missouri feeling sure that “more guns seemed to connect to disproportionately more despair” (117).

Alone in the car with his host, Dawn, after the Cape’s support group, Dawn tells Metzl she thinks “there needs to be some kind of middle ground” (117). She knows that people in Missouri “love their guns,” but “[having] guns everywhere all the time” is “not making [them] more safe” (117). However, she would never voice her doubts in front of the group.