In the halcyon days of 2018, we were invited to send a piece for a collection of texts that would respond to the curatorial brief of an architecture biennial pavilion. The following piece was our submission, at the point of a stalemate. We had good editors to whom we are grateful, and the text below reflects their contributions to some extent. However, we left the piece —an archival artifact, at this point— unfinished; any errors or omissions remain our own. At a certain point of the editorial process, an editor (one of several) emailed us that: “We’re confident that the first section is getting there, but perhaps the second half, or at least the extensive US/Israel analogy which forms its basis, should be cut.” We then decided to pull our submission at that stage.
While we recognize that this essay could have been sharpened much further, we decided that we were not willing to remove the case study of Palestine. The section on state killings of Palestinian stone-throwers was and is (we believe) necessary to establish the connection between active shooters in the context of the United States empire and the state violence of the U.S., its own borders, and Israel (financed and protected by the U.S.). In other words, we had to make sense of the individual active shooter within an imperial formation erected on state terror. The individual enacts such terror. Civic readiness accepts this valuation of life – or lack thereof. Thus, we could not dispense with the example.
With the most recent horrific events of mass shootings at (and including, but not limited to) Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, and the Buffalo supermarket—as militarized police have stood by, or worse—we came back to revisit our thesis. Now more than ever, we are convinced that seemingly chaotic and individually-wielded terror has to be analyzed—and banished—through a conceptualization that is equally against the state and its own myriad incorporations of violence into its spatial formations. The fact is that the phenomenon itself has only become so much more prolific and normalized over recent years, like the DNA of empire corroding on the surface of itself. Proposals for design modifications to thwart shooters and the imposition of preparedness and readiness as the imperial subjects’ affective disposition to (with luck) survive the permanent setting of civil war only serve to reify the bloody warfare that empires feast upon.
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issues the following no-nonsense instructions to survive an “Active Shooter Event:”
Run.
Hide.
Fight.
In their instructional materials, DHS breaks down each imperative into further individual activities, like “keep your hands visible” and “blockade the door with heavy furniture.” Altogether, these commands represent a subjective and ableist spatial calculus; this math has to be executed by perfectly-trained and capable subjects during the extreme distress of a mass shooting.
The protocol to follow these commands depends on the relative proximity of oneself—as the potential target—to the Active Shooter. And this protocol thus assumes exacting knowledge of one’s environment, like discerning where the sound of shots is coming from and how far could a viable exit be.
First you run. If you can’t escape, you hide. And if you are in “imminent danger,” you fight — including, if possible, turning the weapon against the shooter and, “committing to your actions.” In other words, you pull the trigger, if you can.
In other parts of the world it would be entirely unimaginable—offensive and nauseating, in fact—to have to engage in this macabre thought experiment. But the phenomenon of Active Shooter scenarios has become common enough in this century and in this country, the United States, to constitute a domain of national security preparedness. This “national security affect,” along with mantras like “If You See Something, Say Something,” and the entire apparatus of emergency anticipation, helps to reinforce what we’ll refer to as Ready Citizenship and its very own Ready Citizen.
Readiness as Field of Battle
Active Shooter tableaus have been on an upward trend for the past 17 years, roughly marking an eerie wake to this latest era of US colonial wars and intensified border militarization. According to an FBI report, there were 30 Active Shootings in 2017, with 138 people killed and 593 wounded.
Senseless and horrific as these killings seem, however, Active Shooter Events constitute a small sliver of gun violence in the United States, and a tiny fraction of the scale of mass death that the United States has delivered over the same 17 year period to the rest of the world. More people died in American schools last year than in its wars — if we were to only count the American troop casualties, that is.
Meanwhile, in the United States it is statistically more fatal to break up with an abuser, give birth to a child, or work in construction than to die in an Active Shooter Event. And for a Black or Brown person, encounters with the police prove to be more fatal than Active Shooter events, as well.
This is not to minimize the terror of the ghastly scenes that have played out over the last several years in schools like Sandy Hook, Parkland or Santa Fe, the names that have simultaneously become synonymous with student activism for gun control. Rather, this gruesome comparison brings an analytical gaze upon why such cultural effort is placed on this anticipatory preparation without going further to repair the conditions at the root of violence.
A whole lot of work goes into naturalizing this horrific symptom (the Active Shooter) without further questioning the virulent lifeblood of brutality—what Adriana Cavarero terms horrorism—that courses through this country every day. Here, we want to problematize this citizenship formation, shaped by such an anticipatory culture; a culture of preparedness that is smoothly compatible with violence, including official state violence. A vivid illustration of this phenomenon, as Amanda Fortini reports, is a movement that has emerged to “Stop the Bleed;” a national campaign begun after the Sandy Hook shooting “to train laypeople to become rescuers instead of just witnesses to tragedy.”
Not only does Active Shooter Preparedness reward rescuers and police with yet another setting—in addition to events like tributes to cops at sporting events or the White House—to maximize their masculine displays of performative bravery. But now too, groups like school children have to practice extreme survival tactics to endure random shootings, while also maintaining their composure when SWAT teams storm the school (“raise hands and all fingers”), lest they perish in the armed “solution” to the problem. But as has been widely reported, even with armed officers and preparedness training, ten eight people died [n.b. eight students and two teachers] in the Santa Fe, Texas shooting.
Similarly, colleges organize Active Shooter drills that bring police officers to campus, taking real education time out of the day to teach how to escape, or if necessary, “incapacitate” a shooter. These drills are held regardless of the fact that a number of students and staff cannot risk to be in the close presence of these cops due to undocumented status, previous criminalization, or past trauma at the hands of the state.
Active Shooter programs attempt to regulate students and teachers through certain behavioral practices. Participants learn a response that is shaped within police and military doctrines, under the standoff mentality of self-possessed behavioral exercises. And yet, school is not a drill nor boot camp. As such, Active Shooter preparedness individualizes the target. Whereas soldiers prepare to survive in battle as a fighting unit, preparedness addresses individuals alone. It's battle without unity. It teaches individualistic responsibility, not collective sacrifice, and as such, is quintessentially neoliberal. And as the fog of war reveals time and again, actual events fail to match prediction models.
Instead, the rehearsal serves to govern the consent to the state of affairs. This amounts to a kind of radicalization in its own right. The radicalization of the school space and its acting bodies is the forging of a space to also accept the violent radicalization of young men, the shooters whom often turn out to be white nationalists and/or pro-misogyny activists. The school perversely becomes part of an insurgency training grounds. The guiding principle is that if gun threats exist, they define the civil war terrain as a new normal within schools, while also normalizing school killings at the hands of social reactionaries and white supremacists; everything else must be hard-coded to accommodate the shooter’s rage. Active Shooter preparedness is the “political plastic,” to borrow Eyal Weizman’s phrase, for the Ready Citizen to exist within.
This inversion of the school, curiously, flips the panoptic model of power so that the students exercise vigilance over the school, doing so in such a way that moves the school away from the prison but closer to the geometries of the battlefield.
Citizenship’s Terms of Service
When we began to notice this case of the Ready Citizen, we had started our path to get here by first thinking about the larger meaning of the ever-present Terms of Service encountered through every app or credit card. To be a Ready Citizen is to experience a reflexive defense to the volatile conditions of modernity in all its environmental, social, and economic precarity, evocative of what Ulrich Beck called the Risk Society.
The Ready Citizen learns, like an anthem or a bill of rights, how to soberly respond to the supremacy of gun violence. After shootings like the Las Vegas concert, mourning is filled by the noise of shock jocks like Alex Jones that assert these shootings are hoaxes populated by “crisis actors” to take their guns away — yet these same powerful and rich right-wing extremists do not oppose the Terms of Service of preparedness themselves. In fact, these nihilist extremists simply call for arming everyone even more. Presumably, the Ready Citizen recites in their own mind all the Homeland Security imperatives, and in the correct order, no less. Accepting only some of the Terms and not others is not an option. Such selectiveness can mean certain death. Accept All and Continue.
But lived realities are fraught with contradiction through the politics of wartime affect. How does one decide to abandon a friend when instructed to do so; how does one decide if a peer can be assisted to escape or they have to be left behind in a state of frozen panic; how does one discern the threat from what the aid is dressed or armed as? How does 'fight back' transpire across different experiences?
The emotional labor of readiness demands sacrifice. It forges the citizen that is prepared to become target for the sake of the Terms of Service; for the sake of the higher calling of belonging to this citizenship formation, individualistic to the core. Furthermore, any deviation from this formation of readiness might constitute another threat, another inadvertent level of violence seen by the state as rogue.
The State as Active Shooter
In our conversations as we discussed this piece with one another, we came around to thinking about the latest school shooting in parallel to the simultaneous news coming from Gaza and we noticed some unavoidable commonalities.
We examined Active Shooter logics against the backdrop of the Israeli military, connected with its largest backer of state terror, the United States. Israel represents an illustration of possible futures in which the battlefield replaces the prison as organizing model of life. Whereas Israeli citizenship can be attained through the Law of Return for members of the Jewish diaspora, Palestinians, ethnically cleansed off the same land, cannot appeal to the same rights. This disparity structures readiness around compulsory military service and the zionist logic of ethnic supremacy and territorial dominance. The pervasive behavioral habitus is to always be prepared for racial Others: suicide bombers, shooters, terrorists, and refugees.
In this sense, Israel is analogous to the American school. The Active Shooter scenario in the U.S. becomes flipped in Gaza. Israel's snipers and their massacre of Palestinians along the border reverses the Active Shooter; by extension, the state is the Active Shooter and Gazans are locked inside the “school.” Of course, one must also draw the parallels between police and border patrol in the United States, freely targeting Black and Brown individuals in carceral America. As we write this piece, we learn of the killing of Claudia Patricia Gómez González, from San Juan Ostuncalco, Guatemala (a country shaken by the CIA’s covert war), shot in the head by a U.S. Border Patrol agent after she allegedly crossed the border.
The state of Israel hyper-legitimizes this brutality through countless policies and codings of perceivable threat which displaces threat onto the Gazan waving a flag near the border. The state as Active Shooter is radicalized through endless unilateral and disproportionate legal and behavioral rationales. Israeli actions in Gaza can reveal the underlying logic of the Active Shooter preparedness in the United States that advances the police arm as the ultimate power to be the most sovereign Active Shooter.
Through this lens, Israel's Terms of Service represent a crystallization of militarized culture defining citizenship on the basis of differential targethood. In the eyes of Israel, as a flurry of recent opinion pieces in The New York Times attest to, Palestinians cannot be murdered; they can only be made to die. What does it mean to die this selective death?
Colonizing language—Palestinians performed televised mass suicide, practiced martyrdom, spectacularized their own deaths as means for gaining global sympathy—reveal how the Ready Citizen finds meaning in the rightless non-citizen. The citizen and the not-citizen, both, can become target, yes, albeit in very specific and discreet ways. The Ready Citizen is the manifestation of the human shield behind which the state as the true Active Shooter kills non-citizens; bodies stripped into differential targets.
The Gaza massacres are Active Shooter training for the occupation forces, using real rounds and real bullets; real death. Gaza is an Israeli occupation test lab for apartheid warfare. Behind the rhetoric of “self-defense,” Israel performs its role as an Active Shooter while claiming to protect itself. The Israeli model teaches us how the state uses preparedness to give cover to state brutality and its legitimized citizens, together. In the process, Israel continually strips Palestinians of all rights, including the right to be counted in death itself. As Avi Dichter said in the Likud, “The IDF has enough bullets for everyone.” Correspondingly, the unofficial death count in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria is a similar test case of such constitutive externalities to the ideal Ready Citizen; death that goes uncounted. Such structuring fractures in the legal design of citizenship reveal the underlying thanatopolitics of the state: the necessity—and anxiety—of uncountable death, inextricable from the production of the Ready Citizen.
The Ready Stones
To conclude, we now come around to rocks. In Pennsylvania, according to USA Today, the Blue Mountain School District in rural Schuylkill County is “arming students with rocks” as a last resort in case of an Active Shooter. 200 classrooms with 2,700 students have five-gallon buckets full of Pennsylvania river stones.
In Palestine, however, the act of throwing rocks across the “border” at an Israeli tank constitutes justification for the occupation forces to murder the stone-thrower, a legal doctrine upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court. As an aside, we can relate this curious instability in the meaning of rocks to the extensive (and ever-growing) lists of prohibited items at events like right-wing “free speech” rallies at universities. In one context, rocks are for preparedness and survival. In another, rocks become tools of subversion, hostility, protest, and terrorism.
The contradiction of the stones is also the contradiction of the state. Why is one evil and not the other? The Active Shooter preparedness thrives on this contradiction that spawns the Ready Citizen. Readiness anticipates the Active Shooter with dread, while upholding the larger absolute sovereignty of the state to be the legitimate Active Shooter. The stone-thrower knows which one is the most dangerous.
Preparedness unpacked this way may be viewed as an emancipatory lens for understanding 'ready' as something that must be undone below the surface of the Active Shooter's horrorism. 'Ready' practiced in light of the obligatory condition of bracing for perpetual gun violence normalizes such violence, a brutality which savages the subjectivity of each body, and reducing them to a mass of complicit targets. Truly being ready — that is, ready to conscientiously reflect on our collective rationales and systemic biases that condition our everyday reactions — is not having to be ready at all. Ready could be a natural state of willing receptivity, to be open to difference (and the difference that lurks in the self), not as a pernicious mobilization of panic to coerce carceral obedience to a dimension of citizenship.