A Foucaultian analysis of framing gun violence as a public health issue

Doug Henwood, author of the wonderful book Wall Street, editor of the Left Business Observer, and blogger at LBO-News, recently broadcast a phone interview with Mark Ames,  author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, on the history of rampage killings, up to and including the Newtown massacre. Toward the end of the interview Henwood claims that right wing anti-gun control fits explicitly into their coherent political philosophy of competitive / possessive individualism, but that neoliberal Democrats can't admit their neoliberalism (that is, their own competitive individualism) and so flounder about looking for a rationale for their gun control efforts.

The mention of neoliberalism reminded me that a week or two ago I briefly discussed Bernard Harcourt's seminar in which François Ewald, alongside Gary Becker himself, discussed Foucault's reading of Becker's human capital theory. Ewald is a specialist in social risk management and has written extensively on the history of insurance in France.

Bringing the two together I'm going to try to work out a Foucaultian reading of the strategy in which Democrats pose gun-control legislation under the rubric of handling public health or public safety risks.

I'm always on the lookout when things are phrased in "public health" terms as some of the talking heads do with gun control, as the public health vs individual health question is one of the key points of Foucault's notion of biopower. Now Foucault's work in the late 70s (e.g., Security, Territory, Population and Birth of Biopolitics) brings risk into the story he was constructing of "governmental rationalities." (Governmentality is the "conduct of conduct," that is, the way in which individuals are taught / encouraged / induced to manage their lives as various types of "subjects," as "sexual subjects," for instance, or in neoliberalism as "self-entrepreneurs" [hence the interest in Becker's human capital theory].) In the angle relevant here, he tried to theorize the way neoliberal governments try to get folks to manage risk / reward calculations individually for the most part (a huge change in American society occured with the "Great Risk Shift" toward individual finance decisions), but still maintain the ability to step in to do it when the overall risks and / or the informational asymmetries are too great.

So you get to read ingredient labels so you can judge the risks of your individual food consumption patterns (that is, the government requires that you have access to certain bits of information so you can judge your risks), but non-physicians can't prescribe drugs as they are deemed unable to make the proper risk / reward calculations. So here governments manage individual health decisions. 

The intersection of individual and public health occurs with infectious disease. So the government can demand vaccination for entry to public school, because individuals don't have the information to be able to judge the risks of sending kids to a school in which some of the kids are not vaccinated since you don't know how many are not vaccinated and you don't know which vaccines they've skipped.

So with guns, the public health rationality would be that you can't judge the risk of living next to somebody with a huge arsenal, because you don't know its contents or your neighbors training. So the government can manage that for you under the rubric of public health, either by outlawing certain types of guns (on the model of certain drugs that are too dangerous) or by requiring training and registration (on the model of requiring vaccination).

 A few last points:

• I'm not necessarily advocating this move; I'm trying to see how it would fit into a Foucaultian genealogy of neoliberal governmental rationality as management of the borderline between individual and public risk / reward calculations.
• I'm leaving out any discussion of mental health care, with the political affect of the American "culture of violence," and with their intersection. 
• Thanks to a number of friends on Facebook and email for their contributions in helping me formulate this.
• It's obviously still very rough, so critical comments are most welcome.