Editor’s Note

In volume 17:4, we published a forum piece by Laura J. Collins on “The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject: Figuring the Marginalized Subject in Demands for an Unbridled Second Amendment.” As I searched for potential respondents to this essay, it quickly became apparent how very little the field of rhetorical studies has done with regard to Second Amendment issues. Not even our friends in freedom of speech have dared to touch this subject (“speech” being confined, apparently, to the First Amendment). One person who had written about the Second Amendment from a rhetorical perspective was Brett Lunceford. He leads off this series of responses. Since Collins’s essay was grounded in Lacan, as interpreted through the scholarship of Christian Lundberg, I invited our other noted Lacanian, Joshua Gunn, to offer the second response. Finally, I wanted someone who actually knew something about guns, someone familiar with the great outdoors, to offer a third perspective. I found such a person in J. Michael Hogan, who, as Providence would have it, was working with his graduate student Craig Rood on precisely this issue—the issue of Second Amendment rights and responsibilities. They provide a rhetorically inflected public policy perspective to round out the responses. Laura Collins will, of course, have the opportunity to offer a rejoinder in a future issue.