Gun Lust: An Investigation into America's Sordid Gun Addiction

ABSTRACT

The essay investigates America's sordid gun addiction. It reviews actual gun usage during colonial times and the early independence decades to understand the rationale for the Second Amendment. Patriotic arguments by gun advocates that guns protect citizens from external invasion and internal tyranny are examined and found to be flawed and not believable. The issue of “gun equality” as personal self-defense as well as the widespread disbursal of handguns as a form of societal “gun détente” is also examined and found to be fallacious. Handgun distribution in the United States is argued to be a hidden form of class and race warfare, while the widespread disbursement of guns and military armament across the globe since World War II and increasing global violence represents the long-term failure of a gun obsessed American foreign policy. The Hobbesian state is explored as the ultimate dystopian refuge of gun rights proponents.

KEYWORDS:

• Gun lust
• American history
• Second Amendment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Thomas Powell is a sculptor, art history lecturer, exhibition curator, and writer. His 1995 curatorial exhibition, “Peace Art Show: Art from the Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb,” commemorated the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb, and was exhibited in the New Mexico cities of Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and the Japanese cities of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo.

Notes

¹ The conference was organized by the Center for Gun Policy Research of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

² This project to expand the subject matter of gun debate began with the publication of my essay, “Gun Lust in Hollywood” (Powell 2015). The essay examines the role of handguns as they are depicted through Hollywood movie genre in the formation of American cultural ideology.

³ The neutral term, “social construct” has been recruited to replace and expand the concept of “ideology” in the discourse of psychology and social theory to investigate how ideological beliefs (as unquestioned assumptions about the real) penetrate one's own political society and culture. In traditional Marxist thought, ideology is the false political beliefs of the “other” as the brainwashing project of class warfare. This focus on the other imposes limitations to Marxist self-critique. Althusser's contribution was to draw attention to the ideological creation of the individual's identity as interpellated through the state apparatus (the “always already”). Žižek proposes that individuals buy into the state ideological fiction not because they are stupid or easily misled, but for complex psychological rationales which he bundles into the concept of “jouissance” (roughly meaning enjoyment). Subjects recognize themselves as beneficiaries of state politics and culture, even if its claims about reality are not always credible.

⁴ Many scientists have complained about the misrepresentation of visual data in graphs. Stephen Jay Gould devotes a whole chapter to the tree of biological diversity, which he dubs the “iconography of expectation” in Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Gould 1989).

⁵ Lott's highly acclaimed book is exactly the kind of false logic prevalent in pro-gun arguments. In case after case of “justifiable self-defense” Lott discusses, defenders use guns to shoot attackers who are likewise armed with guns. Lott never realizes that these attacks might not have occurred in the first place if handguns were much more difficult to acquire.

⁶ The extra-judicial murder of young Black men by White men peaks and recedes and follows a periodic cycle of race repression across American history (Martinot 2012).

⁷ Visual misrepresentation of data is a consistent problem in Lott's book. The “before and after” graphs, figure 4.5–4.10 (Lott 1998, 77–79) and figure 7.1–7.9 (136–43) have the additional flaw of promoting the notion of single-factor causality in the model of Arthur Lovejoy's requiem, The Great Chain of Being (1960). This classical modality does not reflect current assumptions of multiple causes for any quantifiable effect.

⁸ Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, represents this view, see chapter 2, “Guns and Why We Have Them” (2014).

⁹ “The total costs of gun violence to society are approximately $100 billion per year, of which $15 billion is attributable to gun violence against youth” (Cook and Ludwig 2013).

¹⁰ Gun manufacturing became a leading technology industry of the nineteenth century American Industrial Revolution through key innovations in gun loading, magazines, bullets, precision machine milling and interchangeable parts. The American gun industry has enjoyed strong federal government patronage from the War of Independence to the present moment.

¹¹ The authors report on the research findings of the General Social Survey conducted annually by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a research institute at the University of Chicago, which has tracked household gun ownership in America for the past 30 years. Household gun ownership is down from 50% in 1973 to 35% in 2013, a 15% decline. The article offers various explanations for this trend. However, the accompanying photograph of shoppers at a recent gun show in Chantilly, VA, gives clear visual evidence of the prevalence of white male gun-buyers in the marketplace. A consistent problem remains with statistics relating to guns, gun owners, and gun incidents. The collection and interpretation of data has been endlessly controversial and has become so contentious as to detract from the larger social and moral issues involved.

¹² “If there is such a thing as settled constitutional law, the Second Amendment may have been its quintessential example. The US Supreme Court addressed the amendment three times—in 1876, 1886 and 1939—and on each occasion held that it granted the people the right to bear arms only within the militia” (Bogus 2000, 1). The 2008 Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller overturned precedent. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion that the Second Amendment grants individual gun ownership in the home for self-protection. District of Columbia could not outright ban personal handguns in homes within city limits, but the ability of jurisdictions to regulate sales and categories of weapons for public safety concerns remained. In the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago decision, Justice Alito wrote that the Second Amendment's individual right to keep and bear arms as asserted by the Court two years earlier is further incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore applies to state jurisdictions as well. This has been the impetus behind the flurry of recent “conceal carry” and “stand your ground” state legislation.

¹³ The Creek Indian Land Concession following their defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend amounted to 22 million acres, approximately one-half their aboriginal lands which stretched from the Atlantic Coast westward past the Alabama River. Creek land concessions include: Augusta, 1773; New York, 1790; Ft. Wilkinson, 1802; Washington, 1805; Ft. Mitchell, 1818; Indian Springs, 1821; Washington, 1826; Creek Agency, 1827; Removal, 1832 (Green 1973, 30–37; Debo 1941).

¹⁴ “For over 200 years, from the First English settlement of America to the disasters of the War of 1812—Bladensburg and Queenstown Heights—the colonies and the United States of America relied for their defense on an armed citizenry capable of coalescing into military units to act against a foreign or internal foe. Throughout two centuries of our early history, colonial garrisons, British regiments of the line, and, after 1775, the regular army of an independent United States played but a secondary role to the armed citizen” (Rutman 1959, 1). The meaning of the word “arms” in colonial times referred to the entire inventory of military weaponry, not specifically firearms. In “The Origins of Gun Culture in America, 1760–1865,” Michael Bellesîles (1996) inventories official gun census lists, letters of colonial administrators, and press stories claiming that functional firearms were rare in colonial America, and that colonial militia were not sufficiently supplied or trained with firearms to be effective as military forces. Bellesîles's research was discredited most notably by Cramer, resulting in charges of academic fraud. Morgan's (1988, 153–73) assessment of the “guerilla warfare” tactics of militia combat is probably the most accurate. Colonial militia wars prosecuted against Native American tribes include the Pequot War (1636–38) and King Phillip's War (1675–76), see also Lee (2001).

¹⁵ Kestnbaum describes the class distinction within the militia structure. Conscription and/or voluntary enlistment in the military have long been a path to citizenship in the United States.

¹⁶ The institution of militia has had a checkered history of usefulness throughout English civil and military history, but it was the Elizabethan version of the militia which was imported into America as a “universally armed citizenry, geographically organized on a local level, but centrally controlled by the appointment of the senior officer by the crown; a division into ‘ready’ units, trained and organized, and what might be called a ‘general reserve’ made up of the remainder of able-bodied male populace; and a system of military maintenance in which the citizen supplied his own weapons and equipment, but received the wherewithal to train and fight from the public purse” (Rutman 1959, 27 and chapter 8). A broader view of the actual effectiveness of militias in the American colonies in combat duty is presented by Morgan (1988, 153–73) who argues that early colonial settlers waged a form of guerilla warfare against the Indians in which guns and militia organization were the deciding factor, while post-Independence the militia became a form of political patronage which bolstered the class structure of society while simultaneously promoting the myth of the independent yeoman farmer.

¹⁷ Bogus argues that Madison's inclusion of the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights was an effective political strategy to placate anti-federalist in southern states who feared that the state militias which maintained the slave system would be disbanded under a federalist government system (Bogus 1998).

¹⁸ Still the best description of the institution of American slavery and the psychic toll extracted on all parties Black and White (Stowe [1852] 1938).

¹⁹ Shalhope argues that there was a political consensus within the colonies and the thirteen successor states for both the right of individuals to bear arms, and for the defense of the states to be entrusted to the armed citizen militias comprised of “virtuous” landowning yeoman farmers. He traces this political will to three sources: first, the militia experience in England and the long-held fear of standing armies as instruments of political repression of the monarchy; second, both republican (group-interest) and libertarian (self-interest) ideals in the mythology that emerged from the political and legal philosophies of William Blackstone, James Harrington, and Niccolò Machiavelli regarding the virtuous yeoman farmer as defender of the republic; and third, the power struggle between federalist and anti-federalist forces in early US history. Shalhope's position has been endorsed by Cottrol, Halbrook, Reynolds, and other pro-gun advocacy historians as the “standard model.” This paradigm has become widely influential in recent Supreme Court gun law decisions. Shalhope attempts to distance himself from the standard model by pointing to the wide discrepancy between the ideological values of the founders, and the actual gun practices of colonial hunters, Indian fighters and farmers which “gradually destroyed the natural conditions which supported their economic and social freedom as well as their democracy of social mobility” (Shalhope 2000, 29–49). Shalhope's thesis is refuted by Cress (2000, 51–62). Wills vehemently attacks the standard model for shabby scholarship, deliberate misrepresentation of the meaning of important words such as “keep,” “bear,” and “arms,” and the authors' funding ties to the NRA (Wills 1995, 62–73).

²⁰ Switzerland is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. After mandatory military service, Swiss male civilians up to the age of 46 are required to maintain their service rifle and muster into the militia if called.

²¹ The term “vigilante” has been broadly inclusive in use depending upon which author is making the charge. Generally, vigilantism can be any extra-legal action taken by an individual or group acting in their real or perceived self-interest. Burrows (1976, xiii) draws a line at the use or threat of physical violence as the determining factor. Pearce (1976) emphasizes the class warfare component of vigilantism by which violence is utilized by one group to dominate another. Madison (1973, 71–87) argues that the individual vigilant suffers from an intense psychological monomania as the certainty of personal righteousness. He examines the life of Carry A. Nation, founder of the American Temperance Movement as a case study. Abrahams (1998) cites case studies from Russia, Peru, and Tanzania of vigilantism as the community response to rampant crime, lawlessness and ineffectual state authority. He argues that vigilantism, if not a “natural” human response to lawlessness, is at least a “predictable” response to it.

²² Abrahams (1998, 55–62) describes the open conflict between the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1851 with the local sheriff and the state governor. Vigilance committees are often comprised of important and influential citizens such as the San Francisco merchants. The “swift justice” of vigilantes is frequently ignored by local law enforcement officials who prefer to co-opt it rather than prosecute it.

²³ The issue raised here is the profoundly moral and philosophical nature of “right.” Rights are not the same thing as “self-evident truths.” Rights evolve out of human experience, and in most cases they are the response to histories of repression. The United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights ratified in 1948 makes no mention of any individual or collective right to bear arms, nor any right to engage in insurrection or any other armed conflict. It attempts to shelter individuals against the violence and tyranny of states, but offers no right to violence or rebellion as recourse.

²⁴ The influence of Hobbes on J. R. R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings is evident. Peaceful hobbits are the antithesis of aggressive Hobbists.

²⁵ “We emphatically reject this conventional wisdom [aggression theory] for three reasons: first, on the very general premise that no theory of human nature can be so firmly proved as its proponents imply; second, that much of the evidence used to erect this aggression theory is simply not relevant to human behavior; and last, the clues that do impinge on the basic elements of human behavior argue much more persuasively that we are a cooperative rather than an aggressive animal” (Leakey and Lewin 1977, 208).

²⁶ Sub-conscious phallus worship as the psychosexual fixation with guns, power, and violence in regards to Christian, Islamic and Jewish religious fundamentalism will be addressed in a subsequent essay. The political left's obsession with violent revolution will also be examined. The role of the handgun as a surrogate male penis and cultural icon was initiated in “Gun Lust in Hollywood” (Powell 2015).

²⁷ On March 6–7, 2013, Kentucky Senator, Rand Paul, led a Senate filibuster to block confirmation of John Brennan as CIA Director, on the topic of the possible use of drone aircraft against American citizens abroad and on American soil. It is facetious for any candidate for president of the United States to protest that this technology would never be used against Americans on American soil. It exists now and it will be used if circumstances warrant in the opinion of the possessors. If Senator Paul becomes president he will likely be the first to use it.

²⁸ Zarocostas (2015) discusses political pressure on the United Nations to ban pre-programmed killer robots. See also Van Oot (2013) reporting on California's efforts to license the manufacture and commercialization of drone technology.

²⁹ In an interesting clash of culture wars two opposing moral views of the combat role of the military sniper appear in the recent war films Inglourious Basterds, directed by Quentin Tarantino, and American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood. Both shooters serve the same combat role of killing the enemy from an elevated vantage point. In the first movie, the German Nazi Sniper is morally discredited as a murderer and a rapist. In the second movie, the American sniper is portrayed as a deeply troubled but inherently good husband and family man.

³⁰ The possibility of a non-repressive civilization is explored and rejected by Marcuse (1962). While civilization requires the behavioral compulsion of individuals and subgroups, Marcuse does not sufficiently differentiate between coercion and repression, which is a problem of his thesis. This is partly due to his acceptance of Freudian language definitions where “sublimation” means suppression and redirection of the individual's sex drive, which is a form of repression exercised by an external directing authority. In Freud's theory, the psycho-sexual drive of the individual as eros, is sublimated into constructive work. The collective task of civilization is thus built upon eros as redirected sex drive. What then does it mean if civilization as the creation of eros is maintained by guns, which are surrogate phalluses? How does that contribute to gun lust?

³¹ Ruiz (2011) presents an apologetic view of Western civilization arguing that human history is the litany of great disasters—divine, man-made and natural. These memorable horrors are the milestones that create lineal, historical time. It is the great accomplishments of civilization in religion, government, philosophy, science and art, which allow us to temporarily escape from the trauma of our violent history.

³² The viewpoint that welfare institutionalizes poverty has steadily gained traction from both the left and the right following the “welfare to work” reforms of the Clinton presidency. Google search engine on the topic “does welfare perpetuate poverty” lists dozens of referenced sites: www.google.com/search?q=does+welfare+perpetuate+poverty&oq=doeswelfareperpetuatepoverty&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0.13481j0j8&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8.

³³ The entire 5000-year history of the Middle East from Ancient Sumer to the present has been one endless parade of armies. Patriarchy, autocracy and militarism appear to be endemic to this region of the planet and it has long been their export. See a quick visual history, Nina Paley, This Land Is Mine (www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pKMV6e5kEo).

³⁴ Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) argues that the sixth mass extinction began 40,000 years ago with the arrival of modern Cro-Magnon humans in Europe hastening the demise of the Neanderthals. Additionally, where modern humans have trodden since then, they have left a wake of species extinction. Human beings, because of our long gestation period, and the much longer duration to sexual maturity, are highly vulnerable to species extinction.