When Performance Becomes Jurisdiction

On Authority, Guns, and the Cost of Mistaking Symbols for Mandate

Setting a Strat on fire doesn't make you Hendrix.
Owning a period-appropriate Mosin-Nagant doesn't make you Zaitsev.
And carrying a gun doesn't make you responsible for strangers.

I. The Unease We Keep Misnaming

There is a particular kind of death that doesn’t feel like murder, even when it clearly is. The headlines tell us it was justified, or tragic, or unavoidable. The legal language sorts itself out. Charges are filed or not. Trials end or don’t. But something remains unresolved, like a ledger that never quite balances.

A bystander is killed by someone who thought they were protecting others.
A teenager dies because a man decided it was his responsibility to patrol.
A child hiding behind a wall is struck by a bullet fired by people who were unquestionably authorized to use force.

The arguments that follow are familiar and exhausting. One side insists that the problem is guns themselves—that any tool capable of killing inevitably corrupts its wielder. The other insists the problem is bad actors, lack of training, or moral weakness—that if only the “right” people had been armed, things would have gone differently.

Both sides are arguing past the moment where things actually went wrong.

Because in most of these cases, the failure didn’t begin with malice. It didn’t even begin with violence. It began earlier, quieter, and with much less drama. It began when someone mistook representation for responsibility—and responsibility for jurisdiction.

I don’t think the danger in American gun culture comes primarily from obsession with martial aesthetics, or from people enjoying military history, or even from the ritualization of violence in media. Those things matter, but they aren’t the fulcrum. The fulcrum is what happens when symbols start issuing instructions. When a vest, a rifle, or a role stops being a signifier and starts feeling like a mandate.

Something goes wrong before the trigger is pulled.

II. Performance Is Not the Problem

It’s important to say this plainly: performance, by itself, is not dangerous.

Civil War reenactors are not a threat to public safety. Neither are historical fencing clubs, medieval combat enthusiasts, or the growing subculture of “cloners” who meticulously recreate military rifles from specific conflicts down to the correct optic screws. These groups are often portrayed as ominous in media coverage, as if aesthetic proximity to violence inevitably produces violent intent.

That assumption doesn’t hold up.

Most reenactors know more about the buttons on a uniform than about actual combat. Most cloners are closer to model train hobbyists than insurgents. Their interest is historical, mechanical, aesthetic. They are touching fire without burning the house.

Why does that work?

Because performance is bounded. Everyone involved knows what it is and what it isn’t. There is no claim to authority over others. No assertion that participation grants responsibility for public order. No belief that possessing the symbol confers a right—or obligation—to intervene.

Performance is safe when it stays performance.

The danger doesn’t emerge from pretending to be a soldier. It emerges when pretending quietly turns into deciding.

III. When Symbols Start Giving Orders

There is a moment—often invisible to the person experiencing it—when a symbol stops representing and starts commanding.

The rifle stops being an object and starts feeling like a duty.
The vest stops being visibility and starts being responsibility.
The idea of “protection” stops being descriptive and starts being imperative.

This is meaning-pressure: the psychological force created when objects and roles are imbued with moral narratives strong enough to bypass assessment. Protection. Righteousness. Duty. The fear of being the one who “did nothing.”

Meaning is heavy. Heavier than policy. Heavier than training. Heavier than good intentions.

Once meaning reaches a certain density, it compresses judgment. Hesitation begins to feel like cowardice. Assessment begins to feel like delay. Restraint begins to feel like betrayal—not just of others, but of oneself.

This is the point where performance collapses into jurisdiction.

No one announces the transition. There is no ceremony. It often feels like clarity. Like stepping up. Like finally doing the right thing.

And that is precisely why it is so dangerous.

IV. Four Questions That Separate Authority from Performance

Authority to use force on behalf of others is not self-granting. It is not conferred by equipment, identity, or intention. It is structural. And it can be tested—quietly, in advance—by four questions.

These are not moral questions. They are not about virtue. They are about legitimacy.

1. Who, exactly, are you protecting?

Not “the community.” Not “innocent people.” Not “whoever needs it.”

Specific people. People you could name. People who would recognize you as acting on their behalf.

If the answer dissolves into abstraction, there is no principal—only projection.

2. What are you authorized to do?

What counts as a threat? What responses are permitted? What actions are explicitly out of bounds?

If these answers are being invented in real time, scope has already failed.

3. Who gets to tell you that you were wrong?

Not after someone is dead. Not in the court of public opinion. Not through personal regret.

Who has standing to review your actions and impose consequences before catastrophe becomes the only feedback mechanism?

Post-hoc consequences are not accountability. They are wreckage.

4. Did anyone ask you to do this?

Consent matters. Explicitly. Implicitly. Structurally.

Self-appointment feels noble right up until someone bleeds.

If you cannot answer all four questions clearly and affirmatively, what you have is not authority. It is performance claiming the right to decide.

V. Two Deaths, Two Different Failures

Consider two cases. They are not identical. Treating them as identical would be dishonest. But placing them side by side reveals something important about how authority fails.

The Peacekeeper

At a protest, a self-appointed armed “peacekeeper” scanned the crowd for threats. He saw a man carrying a rifle. Without issuing a verbal command, without confirming intent, without clear scope or consent, he fired into the crowd.

A bystander—unarmed, uninvolved, recording video—was killed.

This man had no principal he could name. No defined scope. No prior accountability. No consent. He had symbols, meaning-pressure, and a story about protection.

Nothing about this required malice. Only certainty without permission.

The vest was representation. He treated it as jurisdiction. Someone else paid the price.

The Police Shooting

In a clothing store, police officers responded to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon. They confronted a suspect actively attacking a victim. They fired. The suspect was killed. A bullet passed through a wall and struck a fourteen-year-old girl hiding in a dressing room.

The officers had legitimate authority. They had a principal. They had scope. They had consent. They had accountability—albeit imperfectly applied.

And yet a child died.

Why?

Because legitimacy of authority does not guarantee proper exercise of authority. Meaning-pressure still operates. The duty to stop the threat compressed assessment. The suspect became the entire frame. What lay beyond him disappeared.

One man had no authority and killed a bystander. Another had authority and killed a child. Different failures. Same cost.

VI. The Gray Zone Most of Us Actually Live In

Most real life does not look like either of those cases. Most people who carry firearms never fire them in defense. Most defensive gun uses end with no shots fired at all. A draw, a command, a presence—bark, not bite.

Most of the time, the best defensive decision is even simpler: don't open the door. When the doorbell rings unexpectedly, the instinct to pause, assess, and decline engagement isn't paranoia—it's universal human risk management. The person who checks the camera and doesn't answer is doing the same thing millions of unarmed people do every day: avoiding unnecessary interaction.

The difference is that when you're armed, that decision becomes even more important. Because answering the door with a visible gun doesn't make you safer—it dramatically increases the probability you'll be shot by police, create a confrontation that didn't need to exist, or force yourself into a role you never agreed to occupy.

This matters.

The goal of carrying responsibly is not readiness to kill. It is readiness to avoid killing whenever possible. Bark is retractable. Bite is permanent.

The mistake gun culture often makes is training almost exclusively for the bite. Draw speed. Shot placement. Failure drills. These are not unimportant. But they are incomplete.

What goes undertrained is judgment under ambiguity. Verbal command. Distance management. Knowing when not to act even when you legally could.

Moral urgency does not expand your jurisdiction. It increases your obligation to hesitate.

There are edge cases—real ones—where moral pressure is extreme. Witnessing a violent crime. Protecting your child. Being the only armed adult present when something goes wrong.

In these moments, there may be reasons to act despite incomplete authority. But that does not transform ambiguity into legitimacy. It demands more caution, not less. More assessment. More restraint. A clear-eyed acceptance that even the right action can produce the wrong outcome.

What distinguishes these cases from jurisdiction collapse is not heroism. It is humility about one’s limits.

VII. Integrity Inside a System We Can’t Escape

We live inside a constitutional structure that produces both rights and tribute. You can neither accept one without the other nor opt out entirely. Carrying a firearm is participation in that structure, whether you like it or not.

The work, then, is not purification. It is orientation.

Refusing roles you were not given.
Resisting symbols that whisper imperatives.
Preferring exit to engagement.
Understanding that restraint is not abdication.

Complicity acknowledged is not absolution. It is a starting point.

The most dangerous people are not the ones who love guns too much. They are the ones who believe love confers responsibility—and responsibility confers jurisdiction.

VIII. Closing Entry

Performance is easy. Authority is heavy.

Performance can be put down. Authority cannot. Performance ends when the event ends. Authority follows you home.

The line between them is not aesthetic. It is structural. It is drawn by principals, scope, accountability, and consent. When that line blurs, people die who never volunteered.

The work is not to become purer or braver or louder. It is to become harder to mistake for authority. To bark clearly and bite rarely. To know when the symbol is only a symbol—and to refuse it when it starts issuing orders.

The ledger does not balance. It never will. But it can at least be kept honestly.

That has to be enough.