ABSTRACT
In October 2015, the same year that the white supremacist Dylann Roof purchased a gun and shot dead nine African Americans in downtown Charleston (South Carolina), the National Rifle Association (NRA) released a video narrated by its executive vice president and CEO, Wayne LaPierre. In that video – in which Roof received no mention – LaPierre informed viewers of the “urgent need” to incarcerate the “criminal gangbanger” (a term he used four times in the four minute and fifty-one second feature) of (multi-racial) Chicago in order to “stop violent crime,” rather than disarm the “good” farm dwellers of (the largely white) Nebraska and Oklahoma. 1 One month later and throughout his presidential campaign, the NRA-endorsed Donald Trump maintained such racialized, and encompassed gendered, rhetoric into his speeches, including a reference to “bad guys” with guns. 2 Trump insists, “We have gangs roaming the street and in many cases they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants, and they have guns and they shoot people.” 3
