In the two decades since Bruno Latour imagined the “gun-citizen” as an emergent combination of human and object, the number of US civilians carrying firearms daily has increased fivefold. This essay analyzes discourses of “carry culture” and argues that within it good citizenship comprises the twinned acts of submission to the gun and aggression toward othered groups, defining carry culture as fundamentally authoritarian. The essay further argues that carriers’ submission to their weapons is a corrupted form of care, prompting rhetoricians to reconsider what constitutes ethical relations with objects. Viewing guns in these ways reveals carrying, despite gun culture’s preoccupation with “freedom,” as physically and mentally constricting and puts forth the idea that firearms carried in public are dangerous whether or not they are ever fired.

Recent scholarship at the intersection of new materialism and environmental rhetoric advances our understanding of human/nonhuman rhetorics, but some of this work retreats from conservation efforts and environmental politics, driving a wedge between scholars of rhetoric and those laboring on conservation’s front lines. This essay critiques and builds on Thomas Rickert’s and Nathaniel A. Rivers’s uses of the notion of “withdrawal” and on Rivers’s concept of “deep ambivalence” to argue that rhetoricians should embrace forms of anthropocentrism and human control of the nonhuman. To illustrate how this viewpoint might interact with conservation efforts, this essay examines the work of mid-twentieth-century forester and wildlife researcher Aldo Leopold and further explores the current mission of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, a conservationist organization developing a pluralistic, productive land community. At stake in this essay is an environmental rhetoric that can be both theoretically invigorating and practically compatible with on-the-ground conservation.