This chapter examines the two YouTube videos that have elicited the strongest reactions within the Facebook community of the student-led “Cocks Not Glocks” gun control movement against Campus Carry. Made from the perspective of gun rights, these videos advocated for the Campus Carry law (SB 11) at The University of Texas in 2016. One presents a publicly staged mock shooting on the streets of Austin, close to campus premises, while the other is a short film that caricatures a prominent student activist from the “Cocks Not Glocks” group.¹ By analyzing such popularly created visual artifacts, the chapter contributes to the study of “vernacular security,”² and posits the notion of visual vernacular imaginaries as a conceptual tool for analyzing issues of security and insecurity.³ The gun imaginary I explore here supports Campus Carry and presents guns in a favorable light. It is operated through audiovisual narratives that were performed in a street protest or made specifically for circulation through YouTube. The imaginary aims toward constitutional carry where guns represent a constitutional right and freedom, and provide for protection in a world where anywhere is potentially dangerous. From this viewpoint, university campuses and buildings are the same as any other space, and therefore concealed carry should be allowed in them, too.

While my focus is on the online visual vernacular of localized security imaginaries involved in Campus Carry at UT Austin, this chapter also benefits from fieldwork conducted in 2018 and 2019.⁴ These materials provide context for my investigation of how security is articulated through visual means by particular individuals and groups on the Campus Carry issue. Because security vernaculars have mainly been studied ethnographically⁵ or with focus group interviews,⁶ the exploration of “visual vernaculars” that include non-institutional or popular videos and visual performances is a new opening for this approach. Indeed, the greatest focus of even critically engaged security studies has been on “high politics”⁷ or the societal fields of “security experts.”⁸ The security constructions of “diverse publics,”⁹ including those who are not “experts” or in official political positions, are also vital for gaining understanding of the politics of security in societies. Indeed, visualities are a vital part of today’s online vernaculars. Online environments are among the crucial sites and arenas where issues of everyday security are contested and negotiated by individuals and communities. As we will see below, this has also been the case for the pro-gun position in the debate about UT Campus Carry.

The contestation of Campus Carry is embedded in a larger societal shift in U.S. gun culture. David Yamane has noted both attitudinal and regulatory transformations in the “culture of armed citizenship” in the United States.¹⁰ Indeed, self-defense replaced hunting as the primary reason for gun ownership in the 2010s. This coincided with the liberalization of both carrying firearms—either openly or in concealment—and legally using lethal force.¹¹ Campus Carry joins and reinforces this general trajectory in the United States. In relation to this, Harel Shapira and Samantha Simon¹² argue that gun carrying is not only about a set of attitudes,¹³ meanings,¹⁴ or ideology toward guns, but that the identities formed in it are produced through an embodied practice.¹⁵ Imaginaries play an important role here, too, as they are among the things that provide people with motivations, rationales, and legitimization for carrying a gun. Indeed, what both security and insecurity mean and how they are understood derive from socially constructed and culturally mediated worldviews.¹⁶ In this way, the chapter argues that imaginaries shape how public morality and a sense of virtue relate to such contentious issues. They mediate socially constructed meanings and understandings of both security and insecurity, and thereby allow exploration of visions of the political that are contained in them.