• Joseph Blocher
• Darrell A. H. Miller

2026

Public Law & Legal Theory Research

A primary task of law is to control violence. Nearly every imaginable rule-of-law value depends on the success of that endeavor, and some of the most foundational works in legal and political theory begin with an effort to understand the relationship between law and violence. Many of those works were written during periods where the lines between law and violence were blurred, and current threats to the rule of law have sparked renewed interest in the structural interactions between law, violence, and the state.

Missing from this discussion has been a comparably deep analysis of the relationship between law and the instruments of violence: weapons. At a basic level, weapons are to violence what language is to communication— such a seamless and seemingly natural means to an end that it is easy to mistake one for the other. Weapons are not violence, but they do make violence “cheap” by lowering the practical and psychological costs of inflicting it. And while scholars have explored the costs and benefits of what many call “cheap speech,” cheap violence has yet to receive similarly thorough treatment. The democratized and decentralized ability to inflict physical harm is sometimes morally or legally justified (as with valid self- defense and law enforcement) and sometimes not (as with criminal violence). Weapons thus present challenges for law and legal theory— challenges that are intertwined with, but distinct from, the centuries-old task of theorizing the relationship between law and violence—and which are especially pertinent to contemporary legal debates.

This Article is an effort to identify and to address those challenges. It begins in Part I by conceptualizing barriers to violence as a set of costs from the perspective of those who would engage in it. Those practical and psychological costs exist even in the state of nature, but they are substantially adjusted in various ways by the state, which itself is both a regulator and a producer of violence.

Part II shows how weapons alter those costs. They cheapen violence in a practical sense by increasing the individual capacity to inflict it, and they cheapen violence in a psychological sense by facilitating the impulses that characterize most violent conflicts. Law and norms can respond to the cost structure of weapon-facilitated violence in various ways, for example by imposing formal or social sanctions for the misuse of weapons.

Finally, Part III begins to identify concrete legal implications of the analysis by suggesting how law and scholarship might better address the distinctive American weapon: the gun. One such implication is that the debate must be understood as one of risk regulation, forcing hard questions about acceptable tradeoffs—what we call the “n Dead Men” problem. A second implication is the need for increased attention to what we call violence intermediaries. In roughly the same way that platforms and other speech intermediaries have transformed the micro-economics of speech, weapons manufacturers and sellers, norm entrepreneurs, and others have transformed the costs of violence. A third implication is that centering the role of weapons as such helps to clarify fundamental questions about the right to keep and bear arms, including whether and how various Second Amendment theories—autonomy, safety, and anti-tyranny—can accommodate the increasing democratization, decentralization, and capacity of lethal violence.

Blocher, Joseph and Miller, Darrell A. H., "Cheap Violence: Weapons and the Law" (2026). Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers. .
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/public_law_and_legal_theory/989

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