On 25 August 2020, amid widespread protests, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse freely roamed the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15. In extended altercations late that night, he shot three protesters, killing two. Despite repeatedly encountering police before and after he discharged his firearm, he was never reprimanded by authorities.

Policing the Second Amendment, Jennifer Carlson’s second book on the sociology of guns in the United States, helps address a central puzzle at the heart of the Rittenhouse affair: why are American police generally supportive of firearm proliferation, when it ostensibly makes the job of keeping social order more challenging?

Drawing on extensive historical research on the National Rifle Association (NRA), 79 interviews with police chiefs in three states, and direct observations of public gun board hearings, Carlson provides answers that go beyond the binary of gun rights and gun control.

Her argument is that police draw on dual ideologies, “gun militarism” and “gun populism,” to inform how they think about firearms in society. Gun militarism frames heavily armed cops as valiant warriors in a desperate war against rampant criminal violence. Gun populism holds that law-abiding private citizens can and should become de facto