I always thought the gun issue was more cultural than political. Guns are
synonymous with patriotism and freedom from others with guns. And let's
throw in manhood as well. Now that I read this, it is apparent that guns are
now and have been used to protect political and economic power.. So...even
if I had a gun and successfully used it to stop an intruder, the empire
builders would have the same power as always. My gun wouldn't deter them
from stealing my earned benefits.
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 6:24 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Guns and Liberty
Guns and Liberty
Chris Hedges
A White House protest held by Teens for Gun Reform last week in the wake of
the Florida school massacre. (Lorie Shaull / Flickr)
The proliferation of guns in American society is not only profitable for gun
manufacturers, it fools the disempowered into fetishizing weapons as a
guarantor of political agency. Guns buttress the myth of a rugged
individualism that atomizes Americans, disdains organization and obliterates
community, compounding powerlessness. Gun ownership in the United States,
largely criminalized for poor people of color, is a potent tool of
oppression. It does not protect us from tyranny. It is an instrument of
tyranny.
"Second Amendment cultists truly believe that guns are political power,"
writes Mark Ames, the author of "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion:
From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond." "[They believe
that] guns in fact are the only source of political power. That's why,
despite loving guns, and despite being so right-wing, they betray such a
paranoid fear and hatred of armed agents of the government (minus Border
Guards, they all tend to love our Border Guards). If you think guns, rather
than concentrated wealth, equals political power, then you'd resent
government power far more than you'd resent billionaires' power or
corporations' hyper-concentrated wealth/power, because government will
always have more and bigger guns. In fact you'd see pro-gun, anti-government
billionaires like the Kochs as your natural political allies in your
gun-centric notion of political struggle against the concentrated gun power
of government."
American violence has always been primarily vigilante violence. It is a
product of the colonial militias; the U.S. Army, which carried out campaigns
of genocide against Native Americans; slave patrols; hired mercenaries and
gunslingers; the Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detective agencies; gangs of
strikebreakers; the Iron and Coal Police; company militias; the American
Legion veterans of World War I who attacked union agitators; the White
Citizens' Council; the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia; and
the Ku Klux Klan, which controlled some states. These vigilante groups
carried out atrocities, mostly against people of color and radicals, within
our borders that later characterized our savage subjugation of the
Philippines, interventions in Latin America, the wars in Korea and Vietnam
and our current debacles in the Middle East. Gen. Jacob H. Smith summed up
American attitudes about wholesale violence in the Philippines when he
ordered his troops to turn the island of Samar, defended by Filipino
insurgents, into "a howling wilderness."
Mass culture and most historians do not acknowledge the patterns of violence
that have played out over and over since the founding of the nation. This
historical amnesia blinds us to the endemic violence that defines our
culture and is encoded in our national myth. As historian Richard Slotkin
writes in "Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier 1600-1860," the first of his three magisterial works on violence in
American society, our Jacksonian form of democracy was defined by "the
western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker; [in a time]
when racist irrationalism and a falsely conceived economics prolonged and
intensified slavery in the teeth of American democratic idealism; and when
men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national
aspirations in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so
many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust."
"The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their
fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation," he
writes, "but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of
violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the
structuring metaphor of the American experience."
"A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though
the world around that people may change and demand changes in their
psychology, their ethics and their institutions," Slotkin writes.
The metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves are rooted in this
national myth. We explain our history and our experience and seek our
identity in this myth. This myth connects us to the forces that shape and
give meaning to our lives. It bridges, as Slotkin writes, "the gap between
the world of the mind and the world of affairs, between dream and reality,
between impulse or desire and action. It draws on the content of individual
and collective memory, structures it, and develops it from imperatives for
belief and action."
The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book "Loaded: A Disarming History
of the Second Amendment" also illustrates how the racist, white settler
vision of the world continues to color our perception of reality. She
writes:
"
The populist frontier ideology has served the U.S. ruling class well for its
entire history and once again found tremendous resonance in the Vietnam War
as another Indian war. A key to John F. Kennedy's political success was that
he revived the "frontier" as a trope of populist imperialism, speaking of
the "settling" of the continent and "taming" a different sort of
"wilderness." In Kennedy's acceptance speech in Los Angeles at the 1960
Democratic Convention, he said: "I stand tonight facing west on what was
once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me,
the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their
lives to build a new world here in the West. . We stand today on the edge of
a new frontier." The metaphor described Kennedy's plan for employing
political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States.
Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Richard Slotkin calls "a
heroic engagement in the 'long twilight struggle' against communism," to
which the nation was summoned by Kennedy in his inaugural address. Soon
after he took office, that struggle took the form of the counterinsurgency
program in Vietnam and his creation of the Green Beret Special Forces.
"Seven years after Kennedy's nomination," Slotkin reminds us, "American
troops would be describing Vietnam as 'Indian Country' and
search-and-destroy missions as a game of 'Cowboys and Indians'; and
Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation
by citing the necessity of moving the 'Indians' away from the 'fort' so that
the 'settlers' could plant 'corn.' "
The gun culture permits a dispossessed public, sheared of economic and
political power, to buy a firearm and revel in feelings of omnipotence. A
gun reminds Americans that they are divine agents of purification, anointed
by God and Western civilization to remake the world in their own image.
Violence in America is not about the defense of liberty or radical change.
It is an expression of domination, racism and hate. American vigilantes are
the shock troops of capitalism. They butcher the weak on behalf of the
strong. "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,"
the English novelist and essayist D.H. Lawrence wrote. "It has never yet
melted."
There are some 310 million firearms in the United States, including 114
million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns. The number of
military-style assault weapons in private hands-including the AR-15
semi-automatic rifles used in the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Fla., and at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Conn.-is estimated at 1.5 million. The United States has the
highest rate of gun ownership in the world, an average of 90 firearms per
100 people.
"Total gun deaths in the United States average around 37,000 a year, with
two-thirds of those deaths being suicides, leaving approximately 12,000
homicides, a thousand of those at the hands of the police," writes
Dunbar-Ortiz. "Mass shootings-ones that leave four or more people wounded or
dead-now occur in the United States, on average, at the pace of one or more
per day. Disturbing as that fact is, mass shootings currently account for
only 2 percent of gun killings annually. The number of gun deaths-37,000-is
roughly equal to death-by-vehicle incidents in the United States per year."
If the ruling elites feared an armed uprising, a draconian form of gun
control would instantly be law. But the engine of gun ownership is not the
fear of government. It is the fear by white people of the black and brown
underclass, an underclass many whites are convinced will threaten them as
society breaks down. Guns, largely in the hands of whites, have rarely been
deployed against the state. In this, the United States is an exception. It
has a heavily armed population and yet maintains political stability. The
few armed rebellions-the 1786 and 1787 Shays' Rebellion, the 1921 armed
uprising by 10,000 coal miners at Blair Mountain in West Virginia-were
swiftly and brutally put down by militias and armed vigilantes hired by
capitalists. These uprisings were about specific grievances, not systemic
change. Revolution is foreign to our intellectual tradition.
As jobs and manufacturing are shipped overseas, communities crumble, despair
grips much of the country and chronic poverty plagues American families, the
gun seems to be the last tangible relic of a free and mythic America. It
offers the illusion of power, protection and freedom. This is why the
powerless will not give it up.
"In the heartland, these are people who feel they've been the victims of
sustained economic violence at the hands of tyrannical governments of both
parties," writer and editor Daniel Hayes wrote in The New York Times in
2016. "In 2008, Barack Obama's notorious misstep got one thing right: Rural
people will 'cling' to guns. Not because they are sad or misguided, but
because it is the last right they feel they still have: a liberty at least,
in place of opportunity."
"Outsourcing and guns: These are the twin issues animating Trump voters in
rural Kentucky," he wrote. "The two are linked and feed off each other; the
only difference between them is that white rural voters see outsourcing as a
losing battle, whereas protecting and expanding Second Amendment rights is
the only policy they've been able to get politicians to move on. For that
reason alone, it is totemic."
The Second Amendment, as Dunbar-Ortiz makes clear in her book, was never
about protecting individual freedom. It was about codifying white vigilante
violence into law.
"The elephant in the room in these debates has long been what the armed
militias of the Second Amendment were to be used for," Dunbar-Ortiz writes.
"The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment had long
existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary
roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the armed march
to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the enslaved African
population. ."
Attacks on the gun culture and the gun violence that plagues the nation are
seen by many gun owners as an attack on their national identity. The more
powerful the weapon, the more powerful the gun owner feels. There are those
among the marginalized and enraged who are tempted, especially because of
easy access to assault-style weapons, to use their guns in mass killings to
cleanse the world. The lone killer, almost always a white male, is
celebrated by Hollywood and in our national myth and "frontier psychology."
This peculiar American veneration of violence, Slotkin writes, "reaches out
of the past to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the living."
Chris Hedges
