The Cult of the Gun
Just days before the horrible slaughter of twenty utterly innocent children in Newtown, Connecticut, an idyllic and peaceful town just a few miles from where my wife and I used to live, I found myself driving behind a car plastered with more bumper stickers than I have ever seen. Most had something vaguely to do with the Marine Corps, including every conceivable variation on the phrase “Semper Fidelis.” But one stood out. It read: “One Shot. One Kill. One Thousand Yards.”
In light of what just happened to the children of Newtown, one must ask: What kind of mind would embrace such a thought, let alone advertise it? What explains the seemingly unquenchable fascination so many Americans have for guns and for killing? And more important than all that, how can we put an end to this sick and twisted fascination? How, in short, can we stop the killing?
We must begin by realizing that the terrible event in Newtown was not in any sense unique. It was not the act of a peculiar pathological individual, the result of a particular and isolated set of circumstances. It is not a case of “guns don’t kill, people do.” It is very much the opposite, as all these horrific massacres are. It is nothing less than the latest manifestation of our national obsession with guns and with killing. If we wish to stop this pathology, then we have to recognize it for what it truly is: an epidemic, a plague that must be stamped out before it kills us all.
America’s obsession with guns—unique in the civilized world—has a long, tangled, and unsavory history, deeply entrenched in our prejudices and our mythology. As with so much else that is dysfunctional in our society, a large part of the blame can be traced to the Civil War and its aftermath.
When that awful conflict came to an end, the initial terms of surrender required that rebel soldiers lay down their weapons. That provision didn’t stick, and one Confederate soldier after another marched home, taking his guns and his resentments with him. For many in the South, gun ownership became a symbol of defiance. The North may have won the war. But as long as Southerners kept their guns, they could still resist the will of the federal government that had defeated them. Keeping their guns was one way for the rebels to keep their pride.
It wasn’t long, however, before gun ownership became something far more insidious —an instrument of social and racial control. Throughout much of the old Confederacy, the right to “keep and bear arms” was for decades limited to Whites and forbidden to Blacks. Official slavery had been abolished, but de facto slavery persisted. As long as Whites got to keep their guns, Blacks had to keep their place.
Then came the conquest of the West, which could only be accomplished through the subjugation or extermination of the tribal peoples who inconveniently lived there. From the earliest days of the Republic, indeed long before the Republic was founded, the very idea of Native Americans owning firearms was condemned as a dangerous abomination. Guns were to be reserved for the heroic “pioneers.” Just as they needed axes and ploughs to clear a path through the wilderness, they needed guns to clear the wilderness of Native Americans.
Today, when owning guns is not even remotely necessary or defensible, the cult of the gun feeds almost entirely on the lingering myths created during these two violent and shameful periods in our history. We must keep our guns, the gun lobby tells us, to defend our liberties against an oppressive central government and to defend ourselves against the modern savages who prowl our streets. The National Rifle Association, which for all its lofty rhetoric is nothing but the lobbying organization of the firearms industry, continues to stoke these paranoid myths and terrorize our political process.
For all this, we have not only the NRA but pulp fiction and Hollywood to thank. From John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis, Hollywood continues to lionize gun- toting—and frequently lawless—individuals who stand up to the imaginary forces of evil. The real evil resides in those who insist, against all sense of common decency, on the right to own guns in the first place.
Perhaps the most unsavory chapter in our love affair with the gun came when the five right-wing justices of our current Supreme Court decided to enshrine gun ownership as an absolute right. This had never the case in our modern history until, first in 2008 and then again in 2010, the Court decided to make it so.
The conservatives on the Court claim to pride themselves on following two principles: a “strict construction” of Constitutional language and the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers. Take a moment to lay that claim against the actual words of the Second Amendment, which reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. Neither “strict construction” of the Constitution nor the clearly expressed “intent” of its language can possibly lead to the conclusion that gun ownership is either an individual right or an absolute one.
The Second Amendment is a single sentence with two parts, one of which is contingent on the other. The meaning of that sentence is abundantly clear: the right to keep and bear arms depends entirely on the need for a “well regulated militia” to defend the security of the state. Until the current Supreme Court decided to up-end the Constitution, that understanding of the Second Amendment was the law of the land.
The need for a “well regulated militia” became obsolete generations ago. We have the best professional army in the world. We have innumerable state and local police forces. We have the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. We no longer have any need for the amateur soldiers of Lexington and Concord, let alone self-appointed vigilantes like George Zimmerman, the man who decided to kill an innocent black teenager in a gated Florida community because he looked “suspicious.” Gun ownership no longer protects us; it endangers us. And it just killed twenty utterly innocent children in Newtown, Connecticut.
No honest or decent public figure should any longer tolerate the madness embodied in the words, “One shot. One Kill. One Thousand Yards.”
gracchusdixit 