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This essay examines the commonplace argument that particular weapons have the power to end war forever. I argue that the basic form of the durable memetic phrasal pattern that emerges from the commonplace’s many iterations is Weapon X makes war impossible. I call this meme the perpetual peace weapons snowclone. Snowclones are formulaic communication patterns that enable users to swap out words, phrases, or images for one another without breaking the original pattern. To understand how and why the perpetual peace weapons snowclone remains cogent for weapons advocacy, I connect Erasmus’s concept of copia to the contemporary concept of snowclones. Taken together, collective copia and snowclones demonstrate how simultaneous linguistic flexibility and rigidity help memes and other rhetorical commonplaces to replicate. I then trace the perpetual peace weapons snowclone’s replication with a historical survey of the oft-repeated commonplace through the development of the atomic bomb, at which point the pe...

In this chapter, as a means to assess the ongoing, complex, and intertwined histories of communication and security, I examine securitizing speech acts concerning weapons. I argue that speech acts that grant, restrict, and prohibit the possession of weapons enact a type of transformative access that alters reality for particular populations by determining who may legally and knowledgeably possess guns, and thereby creates both security and insecurity, or in/security, for particular populations. A historical series of reinterpretations of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court and state gun-control laws exemplify how granting legal access to guns has helped to create in/security, for instance for the political struggles of African Americans and the contemporary culture of mass shootings.