Sacred right
Engraving depicting the colonial assault on the Narragansetts’ fort in the Great Swamp Fight in December 1675.
Voices

Sacred right

Why are guns so popular? History might provide some insights. This country’s founding was born out of the barrel of a gun long before the seeds of Revolution were planted.

BRATTLEBORO — The scourge of gun violence in our schools and society has spawned a renewed debate about the causes.

We can blame the National Rifle Association for sure; it is a significant co-collaborator. But of the 70 million gun owners, only 5 million are NRA members, and the rest are unaffiliated or members of other, perhaps less-extreme gun-rights organizations. Numerous other political advocacy organizations are better funded than the NRA.

We can also blame our neutered politicians. The vicious irony here is that the fear of and acquiescence to the NRA by politicians of all parties serves only to amplify its undeserved power.

So are these the causes?

While the United States constitutes 4.4 percent of the world's population, we possess 40 to 50 percent of the world's civilian-owned guns.

Thirty-three states have stand-your-ground laws based on the Castle Doctrine, which enables citizens to use deadly force against non-lethal threats. Historian Caroline Light calls this a unique form of “do-it-yourself” security, amounting to institutionalized vigilantism.

The U.S. is the only advanced society that has codified a constitutional right to own firearms. According to the excellent research of historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, numerous colonies required households to have working firearms. The Second Amendment, as now interpreted, is an individual's and not just a state militia's right. Justice Scalia's 2008 majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller enabled guns to continue to proliferate.

But these facts do not have enough explanatory power.

Perhaps we are conflating symptoms with causes. Why are guns so popular? Why do more than 40 percent of households have guns? Why, nationwide, are there more federally licensed firearms dealers (56,000) than McDonald's (15,000)?

History might provide some insights.

* * *

This country's founding was born out of the barrel of a gun long before the seeds of Revolution were planted. The imperial pattern of destruction began with the establishment of the first European colonies.

In 1607, Europeans settlers “discovered” a land occupied by millions of originals - Natives who as “heathens” needed to be civilized or eliminated. Citizen volunteers along with colonial militia would regulate these undesirables.

The first colonial-funded militia was organized in the Plymouth Colony in 1676. Historian Richard Slotkin characterizes U.S. aggression towards Natives as ”savage war” for the deployment of such extreme violence against children, women, and men who were viewed as unredeemable sub-humans.

In 1500, there were some 10 million Natives in North America, and by 1900 only about 250,000 remained. Legal duplicity, disease (including the first recorded example of biological warfare in 1763), and gunpowder were the principal means of annihilation.

In 1619, the first people of bondage arrived, and by the 1660s, with the rapid emergence of the national political economy of slavery, came the obligation of preservation and social control of this capital investment.

By the eve of the Civil War, the total value of slaves in the U.S. was about $4 billion, in contrast to the total value of silver and gold in circulation, which was $228 million. Contrary to conventional analysis, the slave economy was as essential to the North as it was to the South.

The gun was the instrument of that property preservation and racist control. A society attempting to cage and exploit the labor of millions must rely on more than law and acquiescence to achieve mastery over its citizens.

* * *

Yes, the roots of this country's veneration for guns run deep and wide. In addition to the imperatives of slavery and control over Native peoples, gun-ownership rights were codified into the constitutions of five of the colonies before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In the interim of the Spanish-American War and World War I, the government sponsored programs on gun safety, leadership, and shooting skills for public schools students. Today, schools can avail themselves of gun programs offered by government and private organizations. While gun skills and safety are the intentions of such programs, the ultimate result is that gun usage by young people is promoted, normalized, and esteemed.

Guns have been socialized into our identity along with those myths of rugged individualism and “American exceptionalism.”

Gun ownership has a powerful emotive and cultural content.

Guns are imbued with an ethos of freedom and independence that appears to rise to the level of a sacred right.

* * *

So is it impossible to overcome our historical traditions and reduce gun violence via citizen action and legislation?

Such a proposition, of course, is both ridiculous and ahistorical. Consider our changed values on slavery, on women's rights, on civil rights, on gender-identity rights, on environment rights, on disability rights, on child-labor and -worker rights.

As our current historical circumstances so brutally demonstrate, democracy is a process, not a static condition. A society cannot simply achieve democracy; in reality, it is a dynamic state of being.

This incredible invention is too fluid, too vulnerable to be left alone. Democracy must be continually nurtured and defended.

The current assaults by the radical Republicans and Trump will be overcome. Real democracy demands that citizens lead the leaders, and today the children will lead us. Witness the eloquent actions of our high-school students nationwide as they challenge the ongoing scourge of gun violence.

Subscribe to the newsletter for weekly updates