The United States was built on guns — and on the power to control them. During the colonial period, settlers banned indigenous and enslaved people from owning weaponry while distributing guns to marginalized groups who allied and traded with them. More recently, pro-police politicians from both parties have cracked down on gun possession among felons and in ghettoized neighborhoods while keeping it simple for angry young men, such as the Uvalde shooter, to purchase AR-15s.

Patrick Blanchfield is the author of Gunpower: The Structure of American Violence, forthcoming from Verso Books. In his book and in articles for n+1, the New Republic, the Nation, and other publications, Blanchfield uses the insights of psychoanalysis and deep history to understand the United States’ addiction to violence. For Blanchfield, it is “chronically fucked” to frame the issue of mass shootings solely in terms of consumer-side gun control, which too often becomes a vehicle for right-wing reaction and the expansion of policing. Instead, we need to take on our country’s militaristic arms industry and our culture’s insatiable death drive.

Earlier this month, Daniel Denvir interviewed Blanchfield for The Dig, a Jacobin Radio podcast. In their discussion, Blanchfield and Denvir attempt to find a new way to think about guns in a country whose history is deeply saturated with resentment, dispossession, and violence.