Taking Aim: Rhetorical Conspiracism, Far-Right Extremism, and the Narrative Politics of Guns

In this dissertation, I interrogate the conventional culture of gun violence in the United States by
providing a rhetorical history of how that culture has evolved from the 1990s to the present. I
demonstrate through my analysis how extremist and “mainstream” gun advocates have concurrently
given life to U.S. gun violence culture through conspiracy narratives rooted to this country’s settler-
colonialist history. This project thereby situates the U.S.’s longstanding saturation in gun violence
with recent trends in far-right mobilization and violent white-Christian ethnonationalism worldwide.
Building on interest in rhetoric and communication studies in the policy-oriented discourses of guns
and gun rights, this dissertation relies on racial rhetorical criticism and narrative analysis to scrutinize
a range of far-right extremist and/as mainstream narratives as they circulate within their pro-gun
communities, particularly as those narratives intersect with white-male supremacist and ultimately
eliminationist rhetorics that have global reach. I contend this approach is necessary to substantively
address the diverse harms of gun violence culture as it festers in the U.S., without committing to
terms of engagement that only accommodate the minoritarian interests of white, gun-hoarding
citizens.
Through case-driven analyses, I develop my argument by linking digital and historical
archives of right-wing advocacy to demonstrate how pro-gun narratives have evolved from
“militia”-based defense against governmental tyranny to racialized urgencies for armed “self-
defense.” Moving chronologically, my case studies traverse through contexts including the
newsletters of civilian militias in the 1990s, a recent multimedia advocacy campaign from the
National Rifle Association of America, and the odious manifestos of contemporary white
supremacist terrorists worldwide. Overall, my analyses trouble pro-gun advocates’ ongoing attempts
to naturalize a heavily-armed citizenry through claims of constitutional mandates or imperatives for
individual self-protection in all spaces, stances that only further privilege white-male supremacist

mechanisms of political control. I then conclude this project by considering the rhetorical means by
which advocates might resist a violent culture of gun-facilitated vigilantism as it expands into other
issues like reproductive rights and education.
“Taking Aim” ultimately extends the interdisciplinary conversation surrounding guns and
gun violence by situating the narratives of firearm advocacy within recent manifestations of far-right
extremism and white supremacist mobilization. By drawing attention to the rhetorical commonalities
in these domains, this project underscores how the distinct harms of a rampant gun violence culture
are not contained within the U.S., but in fact contribute to transnational violence targeting
communities frequently deemed to be enemies of white domination. This project also offers a novel
framework for using narrative analysis in political contexts as a methodology to deconstruct harmful
discourses as they pervade fringe digital networks and mainstream political conversations. This
approach scrutinizes how far-right movements give form to their communities through longstanding
justifications for violent, antidemocratic interventions according to principles of “liberty.” Though
such principles claim to apply to “the” people, this project shows how othered communities are
violently excluded from the full protections—including the right to bear arms—that privilege white
citizens.