Two children were killed and 17 more people were injured when a gunman shot them through the window of the school while they were attending mass at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis several weeks ago. The shooter had at least three firearms with him, suggesting he intended to kill as many people as he could. He was wearing cargo pants and black gear, suggesting a look of “tactical gear.” This was a man perceiving himself at war.

The gun used to kill these children was not employed as a “tool” like a spoon or a hammer, a claim made by gun rights enthusiasts to defend their right to keep guns. The gun was used precisely for its ability to kill. We may not yet know the motive of the shooter, but we do know he meant to kill people. While it’s true that guns can be used for hunting or preserved as heirlooms, they are much more often used as a form of violent, murderous speech. One reasons guns are so dangerous is this their jittery tension. An unshot gun is an unsung note.

To choose not to shoot one’s gun is to be always in suspense, a kind of apocalyptic dangling—in which the precipice of abrupt change hangs just beyond the horizon. In our increasingly violent world, the gun is a proxy mouth, intended to express violent rejection of another person’s point of view. It’s a way to express denial of the community around us, even the humanity of another person. The gun is a one-keyed typewriter saying only “no.” It hangs between us, a reminder of America’s broken promises. It is hard to imagine the shooter did not mean to say something with his proxy mouth, the bullets communicating rejection of the children themselves and what they symbolized while praying.

The use of guns as a means of violent communication is addressed in my new book Cowboy Apocalypse. I describe a powerful mythic narrative that runs throughout American culture and media, positing the imminent collapse of society as a violent resolution to contemporary global challenges. According to the cowboy apocalypse, the world will be rebuilt after its collapse on the violent model of the American frontier. The gun and its owner are propelled into a desired, imminent future in which violence is the means to prove one’s convictions right. In a world where certainty and justice seem so hard to come by, the idea of authenticating one’s perspective with irrevocable certainty can be seductive. Death is one of few remaining known absolutes.

Guns are made for ending things, including the challenges of difference, culture, gender, and religion. Whereas some people use guns simply for hunting or home protection, others use guns as symbols for the fantasy of violence as a curative for social conflict. Guns are at the center of American culture, as symbolic as apple pie, baseball, and Bibles. To hear about the shooting of these children today had a sick predictability to it. Mass shootings have been taking place almost every day for years in America. It was only a matter of time before a shooting would capture America’s imagination long enough to tell the tired old story again of “evil” and inevitability, without talking about gun control.

A gun is not just a gun. Sometimes it is a ritual object, a family heirloom, or a work of art. A gun can be a prop, a relic, a symbol, or a prize. Guns can function as a ritualized way of asserting dominance, a means of imagining oneself tasked with saving the world. Many of us think we know what a gun is. But there are at least thirteen ways of looking at a gun and probably many more.

1. Gun as Tool

Gun owners commonly refer to their guns as tools, separate from their users and having specific mechanical functions. When viewed as a tool, the gun is described in passive, neutral ways disconnected from the person who fires it. But tools are designed for specific purposes—and not all tools are the same. A shovel or a stove could be used as a weapon. People are more likely to use guns for shooting than for cooking. Guns are tools, but they are not just tools like any other. There is a reason that soldiers carry guns instead of sticks. It matters who is holding a gun and why.

2. Gun as Deterrent

Guns are often described as deterrents against crime. In pioneer contexts, guns kept people safe in hostile conditions. Guns were a proxy for law since they “could quickly punish.” The Colt six-shooter and the Winchester carbine rifle were called “peacemakers” and the Colt was called “Judge Colt and his jury of six.” The abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher called the breech-loading rifle more moral than “a hundred Bibles.” In Safe: The Responsible American's Guide to Home and Family Security, former executive vice president of the NRA Wayne LaPierre claims that the sight of a firearm is enough to deter most criminal attacks. Just as Calvinists could assure themselves of salvation by pointing to their own material comfort as a sign of God’s favor, so today’s gun owners can look at a pile of weapons or bullets and see a sign of their own latent heroism. Each bullet is already a bad guy taken down. The history of guns from the Native American perspective would surely look very different.

3. Gun as Symbol

Actor Charlton Heston says guns are the “symbol of what makes this country great.” Guns are associated with freedom, masculinity, agency, and power. Guns can be linked with initiation rituals of manhood involving tests of fortitude and endurance. But guns also symbolize the worst horrors of the twenty-first century: the massacres at Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, the Las Vegas concert, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The gun is a material and symbolic reaction against interdependence, since it individualizes the user’s own violent authority. A gun can be viewed as a movement from the networked world to the angry, atomized self.

4. Gun as Totem

According to French sociologist Émile Durkheim, humans define themselves in relation to groups to which they belong. Durkheim proposes the shared identity of a group can be represented in the form of a totem that sits at the center of a society’s religious practices. Read as a totem, the gun gives owners a sense of belonging and purpose. Gun fans come together as hobbyists at gun shows, NRA events, and cowboy role-plays. Today in America, gun shows take place nearly every weekend of the year. The gun can be seen as a kind of relic connecting its enthusiasts with American forefathers and the stories they tell about them.

5. Gun as Ritual Object

“You would get a far better understanding,” Warren Cassidy of the NRA says, “if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.” For those who view the world as corrupted by evil, guns can become ritual objects of purification for the world itself: supernatural tools of cleansing. For those preppers expecting society to collapse soon, guns take on an apocalyptic hue in expectation of a refreshed frontier, in which white men will again exercise dominance via gun violence. Guns can become sacramental in this sense, linking the world today with the hoped-for world of a new frontier. Guns, like other ritual objects, are cherished, cleaned, caressed, and cradled.

6. Gun as Souvenir

Writer Susan Stewart says that a souvenir is an evocative set of memories aroused through the agency of a special object. So what happens when we think of the gun as souvenir? Dark tourism is characterized by a fascination with death and atrocity, as people are drawn to physical locations where horrible events occurred. For example, people who tour the Manson house are given a piece of masonry from the fireplace near the bodies of his victims. We could consider dark souvenirs associated with the murders at Auschwitz. Not all guns are dark souvenirs, but some are. The gun used to shoot Trayvon Martin is a dark souvenir. A gun of this type is typically worth only a few hundred dollars but Zimmerman sold it for over $100,000. What made the gun special was its souvenir status, evoking a disturbing nostalgia that in this case can only be read as viciously racist. To view the gun as souvenir is to ask how the gun’s identity shapes the way people think about it and the stories they tell.

7. Gun as Toy

Like a souvenir, a toy gun physically embodies a larger narrative, but the story evoked is usually imaginary. A toy is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for playful narrative. Toys are for experimentation, for imagining what is possible. Some claim that playing with guns isn’t practicing violence. But things aren’t so simple. Toy guns are modeled on the real thing, and by design invite a kind of play that points toward the real thing. Even though they don’t shoot real bullets, toy guns can be as symbolic, as totemic, and as ritually powerful as real guns. When toy guns are used to symbolically evoke the experiences of mass shootings, they gesture toward the real, no matter how brightly colored the plastic barrel might be.

8. Gun as Person

In the early nineteenth century, sailors on frigates named their cannons and affixed Bibles to them. These sailors associated firepower with divine will, a practice imitated when gun owners say they name their weapons things like Deterrence, Doombringer, or Breath of God. Guns are sometimes personified as loyal companions. Daniel Boone named his rifle Tick Licker for its accuracy. Davy Crockett is said to have named all his rifles Betsy. The practice of giving guns agency through personification sits in tension with the claim that “guns don’t kill people” because they have no agency. If Davy Crockett’s gun kills turkeys all by itself, what does Davy do? The claim that guns act violently all by themselves, like the claim that people act violently all by themselves, is too simple. It actually matters what kind of weapon a person is holding, just as it matters why that person holds the weapon.

9. Gun as Network

French anthropologist Bruno Latour says: “things do not exist without being full of people, and the more modern and complicated they are, the more people swarm through them.” Latour uses the example of a projector, which we consider as a single thing until it breaks. Suddenly, it consists of dozens of parts. In one essay, Latour speaks explicitly about guns as social objects, refusing simplistic claims on gun control. One group, he says, instrumentalizes the gun at the expense of the person: “Guns kill people!” The other group instrumentalizes the person at the expense of the gun: “Guns don’t kill. People do!” We can’t only blame the gun, since it is held by a human who must choose to shoot it. Nor can we only blame the human, because it matters if that human is holding a gun or not, or if that human is filled with rage, sorrow, or gratitude. Instead, we should think of the gun and the person holding it as a hybrid unit, a network of sorts. Only when placed within the hands of someone wishing to fire it does a gun-human hybrid become an operational machine. A gun is a network of a million moments, of numerous human bodies, of designers and workers, and of course the desires of the person who might shoot it.

10. Gun as Computer Program

Virtual guns are not as dangerous as real guns, for the simple reason that they can’t shoot real bullets. Virtual shooting simply indicates that a particular kind of interface has taken place between the embodied player and the images onscreen. Virtual guns are just images that move in exciting ways. Use of a virtual gun might instigate a desire for real-life shooting. But hefting a real gun is not the same as shooting a virtual one. Virtual bullets have no material manifestation in the player’s living room or anywhere else. And yet to play a videogame is to become, in a sense, a virtual gun. Rather than just watching the avatar shoot, the player is embodied as the gun. While virtual guns can’t shoot real people, first-person shooter video games place the gun at their symbolic center and require repeated imagination of gun violence. To what extent such habits of imaginative experience may shape real-life choices is one of the most difficult and important questions we can ask.

Image by Ashley May. Used with permission.

11. Gun as Prop

Props occupy a sort of in-between space, taking filmed or narrated worlds and allowing a little bit of them to incarnate in the real, lived space of the fan. Props are a way of imagining entry into a desired fictional space, and a way of allowing imagined spaces to materialize in the real world. When people use a prop, they can hold it in the same way as a fictional character does, imagining themselves within the fictional space too. Props are like ritual objects that simultaneously exist in this world and in a world beyond. Fans who handle a replica gun may experience a sense of close connection with the film or videogame from which the gun comes. A prop can seem more real than its virtual counterpart because it has manifested in tangible form in the fan’s own lived experience. To use guns as props can be viewed sometimes as a performance of desire for entry into an idealized frontier past or a post-apocalyptic future. For believers, the gun binds now with then, the undesirable present with a wished-for better future. To interact with a prop is a quasi-religious activity; it is to translate the invisible into the visible.

12. Gun as Sacrament

When I say guns can function sacramentally, I don’t mean anything explicitly Christian by it, except that Christianity offers a good model for the kind of world-bridging at work. A sacrament exists in two places at once: on earth and in heaven. For example, for Catholics, the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ; Christ is simultaneously present both on earth (in the bread and wine) and also in heaven. The gun can also function as something that is both here and now, and which points to a desirable there and then—not heaven exactly, but a yearned-for future nonetheless. What makes sacraments desirable is the promise of contact with a greater reality. Props also have this quality, as we have seen. If sacred objects communicate the presence of something beyond the material world, then to think of the gun sacramentally is to see it as a link between here and a world beyond. As disturbing as it may be to think this way, guns can function sacramentally for those who see them as tangible authentication of the violent cowboy future they envision. This is a hegemonic fantasy with teeth.

13. Guns as Media

The gun is a perfect material instantiation of what scholars Galloway, Thacker, and Wark call “excommunication.” In religious contexts, excommunication consists of the exile of a member of the community. For these scholars, excommunication is any form of communication that is intended to end communication itself. How do you tell someone that you will never speak to them? They call this mode of speaking the silence of “nothing more to say.” Excommunication is intended to disrupt, to reject, to push away. It is the fantasy of an absolute end. Even without being fired, the gun establishes a fixed perimeter, refusing communication. Symbolically, then, the gun is a form of radical, directional flow intended to prevent flow of dialogue. When fired at another person, the gun is a form of speech that kills. The gun as excommunication is an attempt to shut out a world that is too noisy, too complicated, too dangerous. For the cowboy messiah, every gun is a little god, every bullet a tiny apocalypse.

Photo by Anastassia Anufrieva on Unsplash

Does this help us understand the frequency of mass shootings in America? It might, though each situation has its own idiosyncrasies. When used just as a tool for hunting or self-defense, they don’t say much. Sometimes, though, guns are a means of “speaking” loudly to reject a perceived threat. Sometimes they express nostalgia for a vision of America that never really existed. They might be mere blips on a screen with cathartic virtual purposes. And, sometimes, a gun is used by a shooter to amplify his rage. Guns can express fear, disgust, anticipation, and rejection. The easy accessibility of guns means that whatever set of functions a user may have for a gun, the ability to enact it is very likely. And the chance that the shooter will be as happy attacking his enemies with a spoon is very low. Guns are, after all, made to kill.

The man who aimed a rifle through the window at a room full of children was saying something with his gun. Without more investigation, we cannot know if he knew anybody at the school. We do not know his own religious beliefs. But we do know that he meant the gun to kill, and he used it to express violence against children engaged in prayer.

All Americans participate in gun culture whether they own guns or not. We’ve been told a lie when people say we have no stake in the gun debate if we don’t own weapons. Because guns can do such massive damage, because there are millions of guns strapped to Americans’ bodies, and because the story of the cowboy apocalypse has so saturated our media, we all have a stake. Gun culture is American culture.

13 Ways of Looking at a Gun by Rachel Wagner, Ithaca College