Employing four incendiary examples of onstage gun use from within the American musical canon, theatre historian Meredith Conti appraises how the popular performance genre variously reinforces and resists enduring tropes imbedded within the nation’s gun culture. In particular, Conti considers the centering and decentering of the country’s naturalized gun handler—the white, Christian, cisgender man—within the musicals’ narratives and spatiotemporal settings, as well as the ways in which theatre artists have utilized the American gun, an object of profound material, political, and symbolic force, as a means of plotting (and spectacularizing) divergent histories of the United States.