The Trope of Innocence: Children's Rights, Race, and the Social Contract After Sandy Hook

Abstract

On December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty Sandy Hook Elementary school students, all between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members. He shot himself as first responders arrived at the Newtown, Connecticut, school. Police later discovered that Lanza also shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home earlier that same morning. Several factors evidently explain Lanza's horrific act of violence. He was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and exhibited symptoms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, all of which led to social isolation and worsening mental health over time. Lanza's Asperger diagnosis did not cause the Sandy Hook shooting (no evidence suggests that children with autistic spectrum disorders are more prone to violence than others¹), but insufficient treatment for his mental health needs likely exacerbated Lanza's preoccupations with firearms, depictions of violence, and access to deadly weapons.

The Sandy Hook murders are the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. elementary school and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The words Sandy Hook and Newtown now tragically symbolize not only the site of mass murder, but the degree to which gun violence disproportionately affects innocent U.S. children.² Those terms are ever-present reference points that frame continuing incidents of horrific gun violence in U.S. schools. From 2012 forward, invocations of innocent children or perceived losses of innocence suffused national discourse about the horror at Sandy Hook and assumed a variety of interrelated forms. Trauma from media coverage of the murders reverberated outward from Newtown to other parts of the nation. The broadcasting of that trauma, centered on graphic details about the murder of innocent children, was so palpable that the National Alliance on Mental Illness advised both the community of Newtown and “our national community” to “be prepared to provide trauma services and resources to all those affected by the tragedy.”³ The diffuse and visceral impact of such reporting partially explains the “call to action” for new federal gun control legislation that followed.⁴

Information about the sheer destructiveness of the firearms that Lanza used in his assault on innocent, or defenseless, human bodies was a crucial element of such broadly disseminated trauma. One should resolutely avoid fetishizing details of that destructiveness. Heightened public awareness regarding the lethality of those firearms, however, suffused intense advocacy efforts for gun control reforms from December 2012 forward. Gun control advocates classify assault rifles like the ones that Lanza used as military-style firearms, weapons of war, that “fire multiple rounds in quick succession—killing people quickly with little effort.”⁵ Trauma surgeons’ graphic accounts of the damage that assault rifles, including Lanza's weapons, inflict on human bodies have become grim features of reporting after nearly every mass shooting in the post-Sandy Hook era.⁶ The effect of such weaponry on small children is unnerving subtext for gun control arguments from advocacy groups and medical experts—an important contextual detail for my analysis in what follows. Widely disseminated information about the horrific destructiveness that Lanza unleashed suggests why many residents of Newtown and journalists alike vocalized a “loss of innocence,” applicable to the nation as well as the local community, after the murders of so many defenseless children and school staff.⁷

Such was the immediate context for two historic addresses in the days following the Sandy Hook shooting: President Barack Obama's remarks at an interfaith prayer vigil in Newtown on December 16, 2012, and a press conference in Washington, DC, held by the National Rifle Association (NRA) on December 21, 2012, which featured NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre. News organizations habituated to narratives of personality-based political clash depicted Obama's and LaPierre's separate remarks as a direct debate in December 2012, asking whose arguments about the lessons of Newtown would prove most persuasive to the political establishment and the electorate at large.⁸ The conceit of this debate shaped public views about the lessons of Newtown and the political prospects of protecting children from gun violence. Prior research has examined either or both of these historic addresses for their significance in recent debates over gun violence, often with particular emphasis on the state of public deliberation concerning gun violence and rhetorical successes or failures in gun control advocacy.⁹ I build on that prior research not so much to intervene in public deliberation and policymaking regarding gun violence, but to understand better how tropes of innocence operate in such contexts. Obama's and LaPierre's remarks, I argue, illustrate how public officials strategically invoke the innocence of children within contests over political power and social influence, with particular emphasis on how the trope of childhood innocence in this context reflects legacies of race and racism in U.S. public culture.

Obama's address, which received nonpartisan praise, offered a somber meditation on the innocence of children in a violent society.¹⁰ Yet his address failed to catalyze modest gun control reforms among federal lawmakers, such as a ban on some assault weapons, stronger background checks for gun purchases, and regulation of high-capacity magazines.¹¹ Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in January 2011, condemned congressional failure to approve even a single new safety measure after “20 first-graders lost their lives in a brutal attack.”¹² Craig Rood describes this counterintuitive outcome as part of a “baffling” yet “familiar routine” that typifies U.S. debates over gun violence.¹³ Obama's Sandy Hook address indicated the slim legislative chances, in the present era, of even moderate and popular arguments¹⁴ for strengthening our social fabric by finding new ways to protect innocent children.

LaPierre's address exemplified entrenched systems of power and privilege that promote the inherent innocence of children precisely to prevent gun control reforms. His post-Newtown remarks constituted a handbook of standard NRA arguments with impressive rhetorical and political influence. The NRA exercises formidable lobbying power at the federal level; it also coordinates at the state level with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates such extremist political initiatives as voter identification bills, anti-immigration measures, anti-environmental legislation, and pro-gun laws.¹⁵ NRA officials’ public statements, which numerous elected officials imitate as a source of political capital, not only rationalize an epidemic of gun violence; their remarks also show how appeals to the innocence of children normalize policies that undermine the well-being of those very children and the liberal-democratic social contract alike.¹⁶

My primary object of analysis in this essay is not the national gun control debate, but political appeals to the innocence of children within it. Obama's and LaPierre's conflicting arguments about the meaning of the Sandy Hook massacre demonstrate that political appeals to the innocence of children are seldom innocent, or politically neutral, themselves. My examination of appeals to children's innocence accordingly contributes to existing rhetorical scholarship on themes of innocence in a variety of forms, especially youth advocacy projects encompassing LGBTQ activism as well as gun control.¹⁷ Even more germane to my analysis, African American Studies research has established that tropes of childhood innocence historically functioned as a racist code, which affirmed the innocence of white, predominantly middle- or upper-class children while defining Black children, falsely, as inherently un-innocent.¹⁸

The tropes that public figures use to argue for protecting children from gun violence therefore have profound material effects. Epidemical levels of gun violence, which reflect both frequent assaults on schools and injuries or murders of young children, manifest a public health crisis¹⁹ and a potential crisis of democratic governance alike. Examining how leaders invoke the innocence of children amid those overlapping crises—particularly if tropes of innocence have long been used to discriminate against children of color—illuminates how such strategic invocations shape political contests over public safety, visions of civic duties, and the terms of our social contract.

I pursue this argument by explaining, first, the interrelated political and historical significance of appeals to the innocence of children in debates over gun violence, highlighting the well-documented racial coding of innocence as a feature of childhood in the process. I then delineate Obama's argument that the tragedy of Newtown compels us to recommit to our basic social contract, in terms consistent with the American jeremiad, by making the comprehensive protection of children and their rights a national priority. Even Obama's idealistic argument for structural change, I further contend, could not escape the legacy of racial encoding that has shaped discourses of childhood innocence for generations. I subsequently show how LaPierre simultaneously invoked the semblance of innocent children, and blatantly exploited such racial encoding, for strikingly different purposes: to promote arguments about police order and vigilantism consistent with proto-authoritarian rhetoric.

My analysis of how powerful figures appeal to the innocence of children in disputes over gun violence generates two important scholarly contributions. First, the analysis underscores how leaders and institutions use depictions of children to support networks of power and privilege—especially the entrenched influence of gun lobbying power over public policy, the school-to-prison pipeline, and systemic racist biases of presumptive guilt rather than innocence for children of color. Pro-gun extremists do not ignore the vulnerability of children to gun violence; they invoke tropes of innocence to normalize programs that undermine the rights and safety of many children, particularly children of color, and even democratic governance itself.

Such findings support a second, more extensive contribution: Comparing how politically opposed officials speak of children as innocent subjects shows that innocence in such cases is not a neutral term or concept. The racially encoded meaning of childhood innocence in U.S. history is one of the most vivid illustrations of this rhetorical phenomenon. Depictions of children as innocent, and therefore broadly sympathetic, subjects are intrinsically connected to political stratagems. The rhetorical ends to which powerful political figures turn commonplace tropes of childhood innocence reflect patterns of sense-making about rights, authority, and systemic violence.

My case study of such political sense-making after the Sandy Hook shooting also speaks to the present moment. The cynical and fear-based politics of allegedly protecting innocent children from a host of perceived, and typically manufactured, threats—such as LGBTQ people, sex education, online predators, critical race theory, educational indoctrination, and digital technology—is increasingly popular now. In this context, my analysis demonstrates how some political figures invoke the innocence of children to support arguments for expanding their rights in a manner consistent with a reinvigorated social contract while other leaders make superficially similar appeals to define children as passive wards of the state consistent with authoritarian embraces of police order.

The Political and Historical Salience of Innocence

The language of innocence offers a rich rhetorical and political meeting point between contemporary debates over gun violence and historically ingrained perceptions of children as social subjects. Present-day advocates for stronger firearms regulation cite the disproportionate vulnerability of children to gun violence and the number of mass shootings in U.S. schools since the late twentieth century, unique among so-called advanced industrialized societies.²⁰ Gun violence, “on average, leaves a child bleeding or dead every hour.”²¹ School shootings represent “a tiny fraction” of all U.S. gun violence, but their frequency is increasing.²² Every day in the United States, numerous schools also conduct traumatizing active shooter drills.²³ Innocent children, gun control advocates contend, should not bear the burden of a persistent state of emergency.

Ascriptions of innocence to children in gun control debates, moreover, stem from prior equations of innocence with children or childhood in the history of Western modernity. Scholarship on the history of childhood demonstrates that the subject position of an inherently innocent child who requires protection and nurturing from adult society is a modern Western construct.²⁴ “The early Puritan view of children as ‘depraved and polluted’ and in need of strong guidance if their souls were not to be lost,” Cheryl-Jorgensen Earp and Lori Lanzilotti explain, “has completely given over to the view of childhood as a time of purity and innocence.”²⁵ The nineteenth-century “idea of ‘the special child’” marked a crucial phase of this transformation in normative ideals of children or childhood and inspired enduring metanarratives and rituals “to deal emotionally with the death of children” when rates of mortality for children were much higher than they are today.²⁶

Invocations of childhood innocence are also a recurrent feature of modern proposals for sociopolitical change. Historian and social scientist Alice Smuts calls the 1920s “the decade of the child”: Leaders of reform movements in that era cited “collaborative efforts” across the social sciences, as “improving the child was perceived as the key to improving the nation.”²⁷ Such commitments influenced modern assumptions that childhood should be a period of innocence protected by nurturing adults. Similar connotations of innocence, which posit children as special or set apart from the rest of society, suffuse a variety of contemporary social and political reform movements, from gun control debates to anti-abortion campaigns and beyond.

Prior scholarship, however, has established that the trope of innocence historically operated as a fundamentally racial category. The “special child” is, by rhetorical design, not a value-neutral trope, but a bigoted one. This historical encoding infuses contemporary arguments for protecting innocent children from gun violence with a legacy of racist connotations that assign putative innocence to white children while denying it to Black children. “Representations of black children” throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “were increasingly and overwhelmingly evacuated of innocence,” according to Robin Bernstein: “As popular culture purged innocence from representations of African American children, the black child was redefined as a nonchild.”²⁸ The immediate post-Civil War era in the United States, suffused with uncertainties about the long-term effects of emancipation from slavery and the meaning of Black freedom, forged many of these representations. “The meanings attached to the black child” at this time, Mary Niall Mitchell explains, “reflected the multiplicity of imagined consequences of black freedom from slavery,” including “threats to white nationalism and white supremacy [and] the assertion of black autonomy and equality.”²⁹ Bernstein puts it bluntly: Innocence in this era “was raced white.”³⁰ The trope of childhood innocence remains powerfully sympathetic today, frequently invoked in numerous sociopolitical debates, yet it originated from systems of control intended to assign idealized humanity to white children while denying it to Black children.³¹

The analysis to come shows how this historically ingrained racial coding of innocence exploits the underlying semantic complexity of the term itself as part of larger political strategies. Both the Old French inocent and the Latin innocentem, from which the modern English term descends, endow contemporary deliberations about the innocence of children with rich accumulated meanings.³²Innocence can mean that children are blameless for the systemic violence that threatens them; defenseless victims of that violence; developmentally inexperienced or unlearned in worldly realities; or purer than (special and set apart from) adult society. Leaders who invoke these primary connotations in disputes about children and gun violence either implicitly or explicitly communicate a host of closely related ideas and judgments. Professing the blamelessness of children amid systemic gun violence can simultaneously indicate who or what is allegedly to blame—who or what is guilty—for that violence.

Understood through historically accumulated layers of discriminatory encoding, these contrasting senses of blame or guilt rhetorically hew to established lines of racial differentiation. The historically specific rhetoric of childhood innocence in modern U.S. society, according to Toby Rollo, consistently “denie[s] protective childhood”—or presumptive innocence—to “Black youth” while assigning to white youth “the juridical presumption of legal innocence.”³³ One can certainly invoke the innocence of children as grounds for proposing better ways to defend or protect all young people with good intentions. Yet it matters how, or to what sociopolitical ends, one does so—especially, my analysis shows, whether one deploys the trope of innocence by acknowledging its rhetorical legacy within systems of discrimination or as a tool for perpetuating and capitalizing politically on that legacy.

The historically accumulated racial connotations of childhood innocence provide a crucial basis for understanding, more generally, how various political appeals to the common trope of childhood innocence can support competing political agendas. On this basis, I show in what follows how the semantic complexity of appeals to the innocence of children in debates over gun violence mandates against treating such devices as natural or universally sympathetic tropes. I examine appeals to the innocence of children as rhetorical signatures of politically manipulable and historically ingrained idioms that public officials like Obama and LaPierre use to rationalize larger visions of rights, order, safety, and authority. Obama's and LaPierre's respective arguments about the safety of innocent children after Sandy Hook not only reflect political contests over public policy. Those arguments also reveal a contest over the social contract itself, or the idea that a founding civic agreement obligates members of society to defend one another's rights and well-being as a perpetual project of collaborative governance.

Innocence, Children, and a New Social Contract

Scholars and pundits frequently emphasize that President Obama's remarks on the murder of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary was the beginning of an advocacy effort that failed to produce new firearms regulations.³⁴ That pragmatic legislative goal, however, derived its meaning from an even more comprehensive, yet comparatively unnoticed, rhetorical and political telos that Obama outlined in his Newtown eulogy: to establish a new social contract predicated on the safety and rights of children. The mass murder of innocents, and perceived losses of collective innocence in its wake, held ultimate significance in Obama's remarks—not only as a warrant for new regulations, but also as proof of an eroded social contract.

Obama's proposed reinvention of the social contract holds that protecting and nurturing children is not simply the work of parents or families, but an essential component of liberal-democratic community. One commentator described the public reception of Obama's recommended “foundation for new legislation and renewed efforts” to curb gun violence as “almost all positive.”³⁵ In 2020, the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission found Obama's address fitting enough to approve the incorporation of an inscription from it into a permanent local memorial to the tragedy.³⁶ As such, Obama's remarks at the interfaith prayer vigil continue to offer a compelling rhetorical and political resource worthy of examination. The ideal of reinvigorated democratic community that Obama promoted, with affirmations of safety and rights for children at its center, remains a provocative template of public argument, regardless of near-term legislative failures that overshadowed that ideal.³⁷

President Obama began his rationale for a reinvigorated social contract by quoting from Corinthians 2. The selected passages described a grave test of faith and promised heavenly salvation amid earthly ruin.³⁸ Obama thus aligned his remarks with traditions of U.S. protestant lamentation, especially the American jeremiad, often inspired by a specific scriptural text. Such generic resemblances indicated a telling rhetorical choice: Obama evoked the conventional jeremiadic framework to argue that the vulnerability of children to gun violence warrants solemn communal meditation on the health of the polity itself. The president's chosen form of address offered eulogistic consolation, but not resolution. Obama heeded the imperative to mourn the murder of innocents while indicting public institutions at large for tolerating mass violence against them. In doing so, he sought to remind the community about uninfringeable tenets of its social contract and to dramatize the intertwined spiritual and material costs of failing to honor it.

The historical role of the American jeremiad in reinforcing the terms of the prevailing social contract is well documented. Literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch chronicles how “political sermons” in Puritan New England, modeled on the biblical prophet Jeremiah, “played a major role in fashioning the myth of America.”³⁹ In scripture, Jeremiah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem as God's punishment for sin. Puritan leaders in colonial New England who imitated his example reminded followers of their sacred mission or “errand” in the secular world: to personify righteousness and a “New Jerusalem.”⁴⁰

Obama revivified the jeremiadic form after the tragedy of Newtown by incorporating popular twenty-first-century tropes of post-September 11 memorialization. He replicated secular gestures common to contemporary therapeutic rituals of memorialization throughout his remarks at the Newtown prayer vigil. The president identified Newtown with the nation: “twenty beautiful children and six remarkable adults . . . lost their lives in a school that could have been any school; in a quiet town full of good and decent people that could be any town in America.” Obama further narrated and personified such model qualities of virtue and community in a manner consistent with late-modern therapeutic memorials. He named every murdered child and adult, reminiscent of visitors’ ability to see and touch the engraved names of those lost to violence or tragedy at many contemporary public memorials (such as the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, or the National September 11 Memorial in New York City). Obama related the actions of those students and teachers, praising school staff who acted “with courage and with love, giving their lives to protect the children in their care,” and of children themselves, “helping one another, holding each other, dutifully following instructions” during overwhelming terror. He implied that the differentiated victims of the Sandy Hook shooting personify courage and virtue, which “inspired” the rest of the United States “with stories of strength and resolve and sacrifice.” The president thus described Newtown as a community that honors the social contract to care for one another even in circumstances of pure horror.

Obama used standard rhetorical characteristics from the American jeremiad, supplemented with tropes of contemporary therapeutic and post-September 11 memorialization, to convey dispiriting lessons about the condition of innocent children and the state of the nation alike. The well-being of children, he proposed, is a prime index of the strength of our social fabric and civic commitments. Obama described “the joy and anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your body all the time, walking around.” He characterized this ostensibly innate joy and anxiety, a warning system in parents’ nervous systems about the well-being of their children, as a source of “hard questions” not only for parents and families, but also for “we, as a nation.” The condition of children, Obama reasoned, is a baseline measure of our social condition; the seriousness of our communal obligations to their welfare reveals the seriousness of our obligations to safe communities. Obama further proposed that helping children “to become self-reliant and capable and resilient,” the “job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.” Maintaining a society conducive to these ends, he argued, is “our first task”—a simultaneously parental and civic calling.

Getting right with the bedrock moral injunction to protect children, Obama suggested, requires the nation to alter present institutions. His argument for intrinsic links among children, parenting, and society warranted prolonged social and political advocacy, likely encompassing policy reforms in public education, mental health, social welfare services, and more. The president's words implied social and political restructuring, a putative rebirth of the liberal-democratic social contract, rather than limited reforms: “Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children—all of them—safe from harm? . . . Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?” Obama posed these rhetorical questions to suggest deep-seated communal failures or even guilt. The president did not simply recommend lessons in the wake of historic tragedy; he asked for judgment. How we care for children, Obama said, is “how, as a society, we will be judged.”

The prospect of severe judgment for profound social failures, in Obama's logic, provides a warrant for reinventing our basic social contract—the source of democratic politics itself. “Are we really prepared to say that we're powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard,” he asked, or “that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” Our judgment in the wake of Newtown, Obama posited, should be that we need a significantly reformed, if not substantially new, understanding of politics, public safety, and freedom itself. Social and political action, not spiritual reckoning, is the remedy for the nation's errancy from its fundamental calling to protect innocents. The motivational core of Obama's message was not spiritual or moral reform, but reinvigorated civic advocacy and enhanced federal leadership on behalf of children.

The question of what rights innocent children possess was directly pertinent to the substance of Obama's eulogy. Elements of Obama's address notably mirrored topoi in literature on children's rights, which reinforces the premise that he advocated not only legislative reform, but a renewed social contract centered on the well-being of children. Advocates for the rights of children often cite their nascent capacities for constructive thought, feeling, and action. Obama portrayed Sandy Hook students as agents alongside adults—as empathic humans who attempted to participate in organized self-defense, to the best of their limited capacities, amid abject terror. This depiction of children as individuals capable of self-defensive or mutually protective behaviors is consistent with arguments for respecting the agency of children as equal human beings. The relationship between caring for children and caring for society that Obama established similarly echoed literature on the rights of children. Empirical studies indicate that collaborative social and political commitments to the comprehensive well-being of children—their right “to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose,” in Obama's words—can engender more democratic and pluralistic communities.⁴¹ Obama's admonishment to let children “know they are loved” aligned with academic arguments that define a child's access to loving relationships as a measurable good. Children have a right to be loved, in this perspective, precisely because they enter the world in a state of innocence. In theory, the experience of love as a child implies morally obligatory nurturing relationships in which parents, family members, or other adults invest time and resources in the well-being and development of that child.⁴² Such time and resources typically involve access to developmental goods that should be, according to some scholars, the rightful benefits of love for all children: health care, education, socialization, and psychological support.⁴³

Obama's proposed lessons from the horrors of the Sandy Hook shooting proved “eloquent and consoling” to many commentators.⁴⁴ Yet his appeals did not persuade enough powerholders to act on those lessons with substantive reforms. Obama's justification for structural change intended to protect innocent children, moreover, arguably conflicts with the fact that tropes of innocence have been used to maintain structural inequalities among white and Black children for generations—to both affirm and deny the rights of different children via racist logic. The major predicates for codifying the putative rights of children universally that he cited—their nascent capacities for intelligence and agency, the social benefits of children's welfare, and children's right to be loved—have all been used to deny the rights of Black children based on a presumed lack of intelligence and purposeful agency, the alleged social benefits of racial inequities, and refusals to express empathy for children of all colors. Advocating a reinvention of liberal-democratic politics with a trope that was traditionally used to bar a sizeable portion of humanity from such politics presents a logical contradiction in terms.

To his credit, and only months after his eulogy at Newtown, Obama publicly lamented that presumptive innocence is often denied to children of color while commenting on the acquittal of George Zimmerman, in July 2013, after being tried for the murder of seventeen-year-old Travyon Martin. I return to those equally historic posttrial remarks, which influence how we now understand the significance of his memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, later in this essay. In order to fully appreciate Obama's contrasting remarks on those two separate occasions, however, I first examine a critical source of rhetorical and political resistance to Obama's discourse on the intertwined well-being of children and U.S. civil society—a different rhetoric of innocent children and gun violence, the signature tropes of which undermine the rights and safety of children while seeking to delegitimize democratically elected authority. Obama's invocation of childhood innocence could not escape the well-established discriminatory connotations of that trope, but NRA leaders and their supporters actively exploited those connotations in their own responses to Sandy Hook.

Innocence, Security, and Authority

NRA representatives also encouraged the public to understand the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary as a justification for social and political reordering. Their remarks during a press conference on December 21, 2012, were combative, not eulogistic. NRA President LaPierre's speech, the centerpiece of the press conference, condemned public criticism of the NRA rather than mourning the victims of mass murder or promoting civic dialogue regarding the sociopolitical implications of their fate.⁴⁵

LaPierre's defense of the NRA appeared to share premises about the innocence and vulnerability of children with Obama's eulogy at Newtown. LaPierre called children “our most beloved, innocent, and vulnerable members of the American family” and said that the issue of how “we protect our children now” is “the most important, pressing and immediate question we face.” He claimed, like Obama, that the horrors of Newtown showed how “our nation's priorities [have] gotten so far out of order.” Although Obama cited tropes of innocence to justify a renewed social contract, however, LaPierre invoked the innocence of children to propose further erosion of that contract. Obama's address exemplified appeals to innocence designed to protect the rights of children as a means of enhancing our social contract; LaPierre's address proposed to protect innocent children by replacing participatory social and political institutions with essentially authoritarian and technocratic agencies.

Protecting children, in the NRA's logic, was not a social and political imperative based on a recognition of reciprocal civic obligations. LaPierre asserted that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting justified heightened NRA authority over public policy based on its leaders’ expertise with firearms. Newtown illustrated, according to him, the failings of journalists and politicians. “The media,” LaPierre inveighed, are “complicit co-conspirators” in constant portrayals of violence to young people, which “demonize lawful gun owners” and promote “misinformation and dishonest thinking” that leads to ineffective gun laws. News organizations supposedly market a false reality of what causes that violence and how it can be stopped—“they don't know what they're talking about,” LaPierre objected—in contrast to alleged NRA expertise.

The term “politicians” held closely related negative connotations in LaPierre's discourse. “Politicians” and “the media” allegedly act in concert to profit from a false reality. LaPierre claimed that dishonest and inept politicians cause mass gun violence against children: “Politicians pass laws for gun free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them” and “tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.” The NRA and its members form the putative in-group that understands firearms and how to protect innocent members of society; “politicians” and “the media” form the out-group that supposedly expresses only ignorance about guns and exacerbates gun violence against innocents with failed policies.⁴⁶ LaPierre insisted that democratically elected representatives “have no business and no authority denying us the right, the ability, and the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.” He identified journalists and popularly elected officials, standard targets of pro-authoritarian rhetoric, as blameworthy parties for escalating mass violence because they limit the authority and expertise of the NRA.⁴⁷

LaPierre's proposal for sweeping reform accordingly involved a heavily armed regime of social control and public safety dictated by NRA officials. The NRA proposal to protect schoolchildren with police order and socially sanctioned vigilantism is antithetical to the idea that strengthening our sociopolitical obligations to one another at the communal level can make communities safer for children. The vulnerability of schools to gun violence, LaPierre insisted, is a public emergency that elected officials have created, which allegedly requires armed volunteerism instead of legislative reforms:

This sweeping plan to encircle schools with armed personnel implied a de facto martial order for those sites. LaPierre's call for Congress “to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation” was authoritarian in tone. Congress has no such direct power; police operate under local control in the United States. NRA leadership thereby proposed to establish itself as an unelected, unaccountable authority for “blanket safety” through “armed security” in every school. The idea that public safety measures should reflect the popular will has no place in this model of comprehensive security based on organizationally sanctioned vigilantism.

The specter of post-September 11 society also informed LaPierre's security proposal—in the form of a militarized, homeland security model for schools. His description of the NRA as a coordinating agency for school security through mass voluntary armaments reflected terminologies of military surveillance and bureaucratic logistics associated with both domestic security and U.S. military deployments in the post-September 11 era:

This description of the “national schools shield emergency response program” mirrors the idioms of post-September 11 homeland security. The Department of Homeland Security originally proposed to shield the United States from international terrorism through a combination of physical surveillance and architectural design, technological capabilities, and added security forces. LaPierre confirmed that department as a conscious model for post-Newtown NRA school security proposals by announcing that “former Congressman Asa Hutchinson” would serve “as national director of the National Model School Shield Program” based on his “experience as United States attorney, director of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” This proffered solution to mass shootings in schools was also authoritarian in spirit. The NRA proposed that a publicly unaccountable and technocratic agency, based on corporate-funded mythologies of heavily armed heroic individuals, should operate as a central authority overseeing the safety of innocent children.

The conceit of innocent children in need of armed protection was therefore essential to the NRA's advocacy for unchecked authority over public policy after Sandy Hook.⁴⁸ LaPierre's depiction of children in his post-Newtown remarks further evinced the authoritarian tenor of his rhetoric. That depiction denied schoolchildren meaningful participation in the social contract. Children were not agents in LaPierre's discourse; defining them as inherently passive subjects was important to his argument. He called children “utterly defenseless” and likened them to inanimate objects, buildings, or physical sites: “We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, court houses, even sports stadiums are all protected by armed security.” LaPierre thus classified children alongside buildings or other physical sites in post-September 11 surveillance society that ostensibly require layers of armed security.

The passivity of children in this discourse, their innocence and muteness, accentuated the allegedly omnipresent threat of “deranged” and “evil” people. The active agents in LaPierre's description of recurrent gun violence were “people that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them.” Such people, the NRA president declared, are omnipresent threats to “utterly defenseless” children; protecting children supposedly required extraordinary security measures and a nationwide surge of armed volunteers. LaPierre's vocabulary for these “deranged” individuals was vivid and plentiful: “monsters,” “copycats,” “killers, robbers, rapists, gang members.” The uniform threat of these “evil” individuals was so dire, in LaPierre's account, that it obviated any discussion of the rights of children within.

Ample evidence supports the hypothesis that enhanced school security measures can curtail the rights of children—and undermine the ability of children to advocate for their interests. News organizations reported LaPierre's plan to fortress schools as a shocking, out-of-the-mainstream proposition.⁴⁹ Yet that proposal represented a logical extension of many existing school safety policies. The language of “school resource officers” and “school safety” has been normalized in school districts over recent decades. Many students, including young elementary-school children, already experience schools as heavily policed environments. Physical security and surveillance technologies in those settings represent “a thriving business,” an estimated “$2.7 billion market,” which does not include “billions more spent on armed campus police officers.”⁵⁰ Armed police officers outnumber educational and developmental counselors and have assumed a host of their typical duties in numerous schools.⁵¹ “School districts,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explains, “have shown a near obsession with ‘hardening’ schools despite federal data revealing that the real crisis of schools isn't violence, but a broad failure to hire enough support staff to serve students’ mental health needs.”⁵² Hence, many school districts have already decided to treat developmental or behavioral issues among students as strictly disciplinary matters and criminal offenses.

Data show disturbing outcomes of these trends, culminating in the rise of the school-to-prison pipeline. Increased police presence in schools often leads to rising incidents of physical force against children and arrests in schools, especially when police assist in the daily behavioral management of students.⁵³ As in the criminal justice system writ large, police punish and arrest Black as well as developmentally disabled students at much higher rates than white students.⁵⁴ Thus, data shows that “hardened” school systems are often more violent as well as more discriminatory.⁵⁵ The rhetoric of school safety that the NRA promoted in December 2012, and continues to promote today, intensified arguments that had already been used to suppress the rights of children. As in many classic treatises on suspensions of civil liberties during states of emergency, or exchanges of rights for security, the NRA would have schools become heavily armed environments at the cost of further erosions to the rights of children.

Declines in taxpayer-funded counseling services and increases in funding for physical security are directly relevant to the community of Newtown. Adam Lanza's mother reportedly struggled to secure long-term local health and developmental services for her son, who succumbed to social isolation and apparently found a semblance of belonging in firearms culture. Long-term changes in Newtown and surrounding communities prior to the Sandy Hook shooting mirror structural transformations in many communities over recent decades, including diminished funds for mental health services, and scores of care facilities shuttered, leading to persistent mental health crises that broadly correlate with a national epidemic of gun violence.⁵⁶ No one can say whether anyone or anything could have thwarted Adam Lanza's path to committing mass murder. Yet abundant evidence indicates that addressing systemic deficiencies in local mental health resources would contribute to protecting innocent members of numerous communities as much as, if not more than, intensified school security and disciplinary measures.

The vision of secure schools that LaPierre and other NRA officials advocated is therefore strategically misleading. Basic facts about security measures in effect at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012, further highlight the disregard for, and danger to, the rights and safety of children embedded in LaPierre's discourse. The school was equipped with notable security measures; staff and children reportedly followed their emergency training well; emergency response units in Newtown and neighboring localities mobilized quickly.⁵⁷ Adam Lanza's firepower on that day simply obliterated a locked and seemingly secure front entrance, then overwhelmed emergency protocols inside the school. He arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary armed with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle, and two pistols.⁵⁸ “Adam hesitated briefly at the entrance,” Lysiak reports. “Then he stepped back, pointed the rifle at the large plate-glass window to the right of the door, and pulled the trigger eight times. In less than a second, six .223-caliber bullets shattered the glass, creating a hole large enough for him to walk through.”⁵⁹ In a literal instant, Lanza's weaponry neutralized physical security and safety training intended to protect children and school staff; his massacre took only five minutes.⁶⁰

Sandy Hook Elementary possessed protective measures implemented to accomplish the goal of substantial physical security that LaPierre proposed in December 2012 as a seemingly new tactic. The lethal weaponry that Lanza possessed might have overwhelmed formidable security measures at many seemingly secure schools throughout the nation; this likelihood undermines the argument that schools can be fortressed to guarantee protection for innocent children against any violent threat.⁶¹ Tragically, a wave of horrific mass shootings in U.S. schools in recent years provides additional evidence of this contention. From the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida (February 14, 2018), to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas (May 24, 2022), and beyond, allegedly hardened schools and scores of security personnel continue to be overwhelmed by extraordinarily lethal weapons in the hands of mass murderers.⁶² Such facts strongly suggest that the elaborate and seemingly officious school security proposals of NRA officials, which wield enormous influence over state and federal policies, reflect degrees of unempirical speculation and unrealistic vigilante fantasies. The most plausible outcome of arguments for additionally fortressing schools would not be guaranteed school safety, much less a stronger social fabric designed to protect innocent members of society, but additional infringements on the rights of children, as well as heightened threats to their mental and physical health. The dangers of this likelihood are especially acute when one considers how the trope of innocence has long been coded in ways used to endanger and dehumanize, rather than protect and care for, children of color.

Innocence, Guilt, and Race

A series of implications follow from my analysis of competing appeals to the innocence of children in the wake of Sandy Hook. First, public figures may use customarily similar appeals to protecting innocent children in politically antithetical ways—especially insofar as discourses of childhood innocence continue to operate as discriminatory codes. The infamous verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, only months after Sandy Hook, further exemplified how political actors invoke tropes of childhood innocence to discursively regulate which young people, from which racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, do or do not qualify as innocent children in need of protection.

Zimmerman—a “neighborhood watch captain” in The Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community in Sanford, Florida—shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. He claimed that Martin, who did not live in the community, attacked him after Zimmerman approached the adolescent while walking on the street, and that he shot Martin only in self-defense.⁶³ Martin's death inspired more public controversy than unqualified commitments to protect all innocent children during the ensuing police investigation into Zimmerman's actions and subsequent criminal trial. Allegations that Martin skipped school, or was suspended from school for vandalism, and that medical personnel found potential traces of marijuana in Martin's body circulated in news media.⁶⁴ Media organizations and political figures cited these allegations to portray Martin in criminal undertones; they claimed that he was suspicious, threatening, and did not belong in the gated community. This rhetoric transformed “George Zimmerman from a stalker-y adult into a victim” and turned seventeen-year-old Martin into a putatively guilty figure.⁶⁵

On July 13, 2013, a jury found Zimmerman not guilty of both possible criminal charges in his trial (second-degree murder and manslaughter). In the White House press briefing room, President Obama spoke about Zimmerman's acquittal, only six months after Sandy Hook, with a different discourse on children and gun violence than the one that he offered at Newtown.⁶⁶ Obama stipulated that the trial was conducted properly, yet he also emphasized that “the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history” of Black men and boys “being followed” and suspected of criminal behavior in public spaces. “The African American community,” Obama added, knows the “history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws.” His attempt to cast painful divisions over the outcome of the Zimmerman trial as a nationwide teachable moment raised the question of how privileged white groups and members of governing institutions reflexively perceive young Black people along axes of innocence and guilt. Obama used terms associated with childhood to describe Martin. He emphasized how “African American boys” are often publicly surveilled as criminals-in-waiting and observed that Martin “could have been my son.”

Obama's reflections on the history of “racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws” conformed to scholarship on this topic. “In their categorization as children,” Toby Rollo explains, “Black peoples had also been cast as criminally deviant” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The physical maturity of adult Black men combined with the criminality of child races remains a persistent source of cultural fear and anxiety for White society.”⁶⁷ Bernstein documents, at length, how popular discourse throughout U.S. history has supported “the libel that African American juveniles were invulnerable, did not suffer, and were not victims.”⁶⁸ President Obama's comments on the implications of the George Zimmerman verdict for Black youth were not, therefore, rooted in mere opinion; they resonated with extant research that documents how norms of sociopolitical discourse throughout U.S. history have frequently denied presumptive innocence from those youth—or, conversely, attributed presumptive guilt to them.

The verdict of the jury that acquitted Zimmerman validated the legal defense that seventeen-year-old Martin threatened the adult Zimmerman enough to warrant lethal self-defense. Obama's subsequent remarks posed the question of why members of privileged white communities and members of governing institutions frequently fail to perceive young Black people and children of color in a presumptively innocent manner. The murdered children of Sandy Hook Elementary were unequivocally innocent, vulnerable to violence, and in need of protection. Obama's remarks highlighted systemic social and political hostilities to presuming the proportional innocence and vulnerability of young Black people like Martin.⁶⁹ Numerous empirical studies show that the judicial system incarcerates Black people, including young Black men and boys, at a disproportionately high rate compared to other demographic groups—so high that the number cannot be explained as a random statistical occurrence.⁷⁰ Data indicates that relatively privileged white communities and law enforcement agencies often perceive Black boys and adolescents like Martin not as children, but as criminal threats or predators—as dangerous proto-adults.

This expanded analytic context for post-Newtown arguments about children and gun violence indicates, as a second major implication, that powerful sociopolitical groups are actively invested in denying presumptive innocence to specific children—even as those groups claim a desire to protect vulnerable members of society. Angry responses to Obama's remarks on unequal treatments of “African American boys” substantiate this claim. Pundits called Obama the “Race-Baiter-in-Chief” and said that he “reracialize[d]” controversy over the Zimmerman trial.⁷¹ NRA spokespersons and their political allies castigated Obama for questioning whether a Black adolescent like Martin was a serious threat to Zimmerman, an armed adult, much less a criminal whose actions justified deadly self-defense.

Denials of innocence to young Black victims of violence reflect engrained rhetorical patterns, not an isolated event. Self-described conservative commentators have routinely responded to public controversies over the killings of numerous Black boys in recent years by reasoning that those boys posed threats or committed minor offenses that made them justifiable targets of lethal force. In 2014, for example, Cleveland police officers responded to a 911 call reporting that “a juvenile” was pointing a “probably fake” gun at people near a city recreation center. Police officers shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy air pellet gun, “within two seconds” after “arriving on the scene.”⁷² NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch argued that Rice was partially to blame for his own death.⁷³ In doing so, she recited gun extremists’ standard rationalizations for why Black child or adolescent victims of gun violence supposedly share blame, in many cases, for armed violence against them: lack of proper firearm training and failure to comply with police orders. “[Rice's] actions,” Loesch said, indicated “that he either has never been taught gun safety . . . or he chose to disregard it.”⁷⁴ This kind of rationalization, previously noted in the case of Trayvon Martin, is now common in public debates over who was to blame and who was innocent—Black adolescents or police officers—amid deadly uses of force against young people like Rice, Michael Brown, Elijah McClain, Ma'Khia Bryant, and more.⁷⁵ Many pundits and politicians now assume that such young people of color were to blame for their own deaths, devoid of innocence, because they lacked gun safety training or failed to comply with police directives. This extremist logic presupposes that firearms training and automatic compliance with authority ensure equal rights and protection, not adhering to the terms of a mutually binding social contract.

Contemporary representations of Black children among pundits and politicians echo long-standing figurations of Black youth as inherently threatening, as automatic threats to public safety. The figure of the “pickaninny,” which Bernstein calls “a major figure in U.S. cultural history,” has traditionally personified this rhetorically manufactured perception of inherent threat: “an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence.”⁷⁶ Some empirical studies locate the lethal rhetorical legacy of these dehumanizing representations in “the testimony of police who claim to have been intimidated by the immense size and strength of Black children” and resorted to “deadly force in self-defense.”⁷⁷ The trope of idealized childhood innocence has a horrific sociopolitical underside: historically accumulated representations of Black children as inherently guilty, less than fully human, predisposed to violence and lawlessness.

The preceding, historically engrained rationalizations for gun violence against Black children and adolescents are a form of dangerous disinformation. Those rationalizations impede constructive deliberations about public safety and the rights of children. Researchers at Children's National Hospital analyzed data documenting police uses of firearms against adolescents of all racial or ethnic groups across the nation. They “found that NH [non-Hispanic] Black and Hispanic adolescents are disproportionate victims in fatal police shootings,” which amounts to “an ongoing public health crisis.”⁷⁸ Such data indicates that “Black children were six times more likely to be shot to death by police than white children. Hispanic children's risk of death was almost three times higher than that of white children.”⁷⁹ Sound statistical analysis tells us that such gross disparities among population groups cannot be random, unstructured outcomes. Pundits and politicians who reserve degrees of presumptive blame rather than innocence for young Black victims of police violence may rhetorically costume their arguments in the terminology of firearms and law enforcement expertise, but ample data shows these to be propagandistic obfuscations.

In the event, such propaganda also obfuscates concerns about children's mental health, as well as physical safety, in an era of frequent mass school shootings. The trauma of that mass gun violence, as previous portions of this analysis have indicated, is not only widespread; it also leaves young people from communities of color especially vulnerable to false charges of inborn psychological derangement and criminality. Such toxic discourse inhibits empirically sound deliberations over both the horrific realities of systemic gun violence and the full extent of serious mental health concerns that such violence produces.

These observations about sociopolitical commitments to denying children of color presumptive innocence support a third major implication: Seemingly shared sociopolitical promises to protect innocent children in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre were never shared or at all. Stated assurances from groups like the NRA to protect innocent children imply a racially circumscribed definition of which young and vulnerable bodies purportedly deserve protection and which do not. A line of demarcation between young human beings who supposedly qualify as innocent children and those who do not operated in LaPierre's December 2012 address. His argument that demands for stricter gun control only exacerbate crime rested on the assertion that such measures “wouldn't even begin to address the much larger, more lethal criminal class—killers, robbers, rapists, gang members who have spread like cancer in every community.” LaPierre's description of the “real” threat to “our” children was consistent with well-documented racist code. So-called tough-on-crime rhetoric from the desegregation era forward promoted the falsehoods that Black communities disproportionately harbor gangs and drug trafficking; that the criminality in those allegedly lawless urban areas is a spreading “cancer,” which threatens predominantly white suburban communities; and that young Black men and boys are naturally inclined to commit murder, robbery, or rape against white people.⁸⁰ The presence of such code within NRA proposals for secure schools, at a time when the school-to-prison pipeline already correlates with disproportionately high punishments and arrests of Black students, impedes deliberative efforts to strengthen the social contract by affirming the rights and vulnerability of all children as a broad civic priority.

These observations further suggest that the NRA's stated commitments to protect children in schools is also code. Defining children as “our most beloved, innocent, and vulnerable members of the American family” without acknowledging that children of color are statistically more likely to be designated as soon-to-be violent adolescents or near-adults implies a racially circumscribed definition of childhood innocence. Manifest connotations of innocence, vulnerability, and familial belonging in this discourse, as in many historical invocations of such terms, reflect predominantly white middle-class or upper-class value systems.⁸¹ The NRA's post-Newtown proposal to secure every U.S. school and its tendency to speciously justify extrajudicial killings of Black adolescents and children combine to tell a larger story. The sum of these arguments illustrates how a powerful organization polices, in the intertwined rhetorical and material senses of that term, not only which children are deemed either innocent or guilty, but also which human beings allegedly deserve to be described and cared for as children at all.

Finally, such policing of supposedly inborn distinctions between innocence and guilt is consistent with authoritarian rhetoric. Authoritarian figures generate populist support by promising security, order, and protection—but not universally so. Despots accrue power by dividing the populace and treating vulnerable groups like ethnic and religious minorities, women, sexual minorities, or political opponents as unequal and subhuman. Leaders who attempt to achieve control over so-called public safety by vowing to protect already privileged communities from “impure” and “dangerous” others thus speak in a tacitly authoritarian logic.⁸² That logic, in the context of competing arguments about the meaning of Newtown, is inconsistent with visions of a renewed social contract predicated on broadly shared commitments to protecting all innocent children through democratic advocacy. These findings suggest even further areas of rhetorical analysis insofar as the cynical and fear-based politics of allegedly protecting innocent children from a variety of contrived threats—in the form of bathroom bills, book bans, technology bans, and more—is an expanding application of state authority in the current era.

Conclusion

Seemingly common appeals to innocent children in the rhetoric of figures like Obama and LaPierre function, in truth, as both terminological and racial dividing lines. Those dividing lines separate appeals to the innocence of children that promote a revitalized social contract from appeals to the innocence of children that suggest a quasi-authoritarian rationale for centralized control over social order and continued patterns of discrimination against children of color allegedly devoid of innocence.⁸³ The political doctrine that Obama articulated at Newtown locates the innocence of children at the center of an entire public vocabulary suited to defining communitarian spirit, legislative activity, and the rights of children as indispensable civic goods while describing the manifest realities of gun violence as signs of systemic failings. Yet as Obama himself conceded, the trope of innocence has been used historically to limit protections for the persons as well as rights of Black children while advocating the opposite for white children. The proto-authoritarian doctrine that NRA officials promoted in response to the Sandy Hook shooting locates the innocence of children at the center of a public vocabulary suited to defining journalists, media organizations, and democratically elected authorities as threats to children while positing a culture of police order and vigilantism as superior ways to protect them. Both historically significant addresses illustrate how contests over systems of power and privilege can hinge upon the rhetorically manipulable subjectivity of children.

Gun extremists rhetorically police distinctions between so-called inherently innocent and dangerous domestic groups by differentially defining the subjectivity of children: as either innocent or guilty, compliant or noncompliant, naturally childlike or unnaturally mature. NRA rhetoric indicates that such classifications constitute essential proofs for gun extremists’ arguments about police authority, technocratic expertise, school safety, and socially sanctioned vigilantism. Gun extremists do not ignore the plight of innocent children amid horrific gun violence; they exploit tropes of childhood innocence to subvert popular political will while augmenting their organizational power.

In sum, the significance of competing arguments over innocent children and gun violence in the post-Newtown era extends far beyond legislative debates and discrete matters of public policy. Such arguments illustrate comprehensive questions about the state of the social contract, the rights of children within it, and the health of popular government. Understanding how idioms and ideals of innocence function within those competing arguments offers a generative basis for investigating present and future debates over what the relative status of children tells us about the status of civil society in general.

Notes