What, Exactly, Do Americans Need Guns So Badly For?

Jessica Toal

“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”

– Charlie Kirk, 2023

When the late Charlie Kirk spoke these words, he was not misspeaking. He was articulating, with unsettling clarity, the underlying logic of American gun culture: that preventable deaths are not only expected but acceptable, necessary even, to maintain what many view as a sacred right.

This is not a fringe belief. It is the quiet premise embedded in their national politics, echoed in legislative inaction, judicial interpretation, and cultural discourse. The right to bear arms is defended not despite the carnage, but increasingly, through it. 

So let’s ask the question plainly: What, exactly, do Americans need guns so badly for?

The Myth of Protection

The conventional narrative is straightforward: guns provide safety. They are tools of deterrence, whether against criminals, foreign enemies, or even, hypothetically, one’s own government. 

But decades of empirical data suggest the opposite. Guns in the home are far more likely to be used in suicides, domestic violence, or accidental shootings than in acts of defence. Meanwhile, the United States – with more guns per capita than any other nation on Earth – suffers levels of gun violence incomparable to its democratic peers.

So if guns do not reliably protect in any meaningful empirical sense, what function do they serve? 

Security as Performance

From a constructivist perspective, security is not a condition to be measured in weapons or walls, but a story we tell – a performative claim that legitimises certain actors and policies while rendering others expendable. 

In this narrative, the gun becomes a totem of sovereignty and masculine self-sufficiency. Its bearer is not just protected, but empowered – a guardian, a patriot, a citizen ready to resist tyranny or chaos. It is not the state that secures the citizen, but the armed citizen who secures the state.

Yet this performance is exclusionary by design. It privileges certain bodies and identities, disproportionately white, male, and property-owning, as the rightful wielders of force. Others are marked as threats, often criminalised or racialised in the process. In this schema, Black men with guns are not “defenders”; they are dangerous. Women with guns are novelties. Queer or undocumented gun owners fall entirely outside the bounds of political imagination. 

Structural Violence, Hidden in Plain Sight

Violence is not always spectacular. It is often banal, structural, and quietly endured. American gun culture normalises a slow, grinding violence: domestic partners living in fear of armed abusers, children practicing lockdown drills, entire communities conditioned to treat mass shootings as background noise.

This is not security. It is trauma masquerading as freedom.

And yet, when critics challenge this order, they are often accused of undermining “rights”, as though rights exist outside the social and historical conditions that give them meaning. The Second Amendment is treated as fixed and timeless, rather than as a mutable social construct shaped by evolving ideas about citizenship, identity, and danger. 

Rethinking What We Call “Security”

To ask why Americans need guns so badly is not to ignore real fears. It is to interrogate the political economy that sells security as scarcity, and violence as virtue. It is to ask who benefits from this arrangement, and who pays the price.

Charlie Kirk’s words were not a gaffe. They were a policy worldview rendered bare. They ask us, bluntly: how many deaths are we willing to accept in exchange for a particular reading of one constitutional amendment?

It is a question worth answering. But we must begin with an even deeper one:

What is it, exactly, that Americans are so afraid of?