Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  • • •

  If reason played any role in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago. Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or a school classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask you what you’re smoking. Yet this has been the NRA’s answer to the massacres at Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, Connecticut, and elsewhere, and after the high school killing spree at Parkland, Florida, President Trump suggested arming teachers. One bumper sticker on sale here shows the hammer and sickle again with GUN FREE ZONES KILL PEOPLE.

  Nor, when it comes to national legislation, do abundantly clear statistics have any effect. In Massachusetts, which has some of America’s most restrictive state firearms laws, three people per 100,000 are killed by guns annually, while in Alaska, which has some of the weakest, the rate is more than seven times as high. OK, maybe Alaskans need extra guns to fend off bears, but that’s certainly not so in Louisiana, another weak law state, where the rate is more than six times as high as in Massachusetts. All developed nations regulate firearms more stringently than we do; Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns than are the citizens of twenty-two other high-income countries.

  A Congress terrified of the NRA ignores such data and has not only shielded gun manufacturers and dealers from any liability for firearms deaths but prevented the Centers for Disease Control from doing any studies of gun violence. The top ten recipients of direct or indirect NRA campaign funds in the U.S. Senate have received a total of more than $42 million from the organization over the past thirty years. Funneling a river of money to hundreds of other members of Congress as well, the NRA has certainly succeeded in getting what it pays for.

  After each horrendous mass shooting, like the one at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, not only does the NRA once again talk about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns, but gun purchases soar. By the way, only a tiny fraction of the more than thirty thousand Americans killed by guns each year die in these mass shootings. Roughly two-thirds of the deaths are suicides; the rest are more mundane homicides, and about five hundred are accidents. Some eighty thousand more people are injured by firearms each year. All these tolls would be far less if we did not have more guns than people in the United States and guns were not so freely available to almost anyone.

  The most powerful single lobbying organization in Washington, the NRA for decades has pursued a two-faced strategy. It presents itself to the public as willing to consider “reasonable” restrictions on firearms and touts its courses in gun safety, but at the same time it tells its members that almost any kind of gun control whatever would be the first step to taking everybody’s guns away. This technique worked under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and it works today. With five million members to mobilize and an annual budget of more than $300 million, the NRA makes sure that Congress never passes any meaningful gun control. Some states may tighten regulations in the years ahead—Florida did, very slightly, after outspoken campaigning by the high school students who survived the shooting in Parkland—but don’t expect sweeping changes at the national level any time soon. Because the NRA so reliably turns out right-wing voters on election day, the Koch brothers have been major financial backers. Supporting the NRA has a curious side benefit for the Kochs and their ilk as well: it encourages the illusion that the key source of political power in America is gun ownership, rather than, say, great wealth.

  Guns were a major part of our early history, but as the frontier disappeared the deep American mystique about them only grew. In the 1800s, Winchester rifles were advertised in utilitarian terms, but by the early 1900s the tone had changed. Guns develop “the study manliness that every real boy wants to have,” read one ad. “Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers,” wrote the magazine Sports Afield in 1912, “is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge and executioner swung on his hip.” In 2017, someone who would dearly love to wield such powers against his enemies became the first sitting president to address the NRA in more than three decades. “The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end,” Donald Trump told the group’s annual convention. “You have a true friend and champion in the White House.”

  Over more than a century, the NRA has argued with its opponents over the meaning of that amendment: “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.” Gun enthusiasts and lawyers marshaled by the NRA claim that this protects almost anyone who wants to carry a rifle down the street or a pistol to church and that gun control therefore violates the Constitution. Liberals, on the other hand, maintain fervently that the rights granted by the Second Amendment refer only to a “well regulated Militia,” such as those that fought the redcoats at Lexington and Concord or the National Guard today. Yet something feels sterile about this dispute over what the Founding Fathers had in mind. It is tragic that we should still have to battle over what that assembly of men in their frock coats and powdered wigs intended when, all around us, the carnage from gun violence continues. In the past fifty years alone, more people have been killed by firearms in the United States than have died in uniform in all the wars in American history.

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment offers a blast of fresh air on this subject so endlessly argued over. She is no fan of guns, or of our absurdly permissive laws surrounding them. But she does not get to this point by merely taking the liberal side of the familiar debate. “Neither party,” she writes of that long squabble, “seems to have any idea of what the Second Amendment was originally about.” Of course the amendment was written with militias in mind, she says, but, during and after the colonial era, just what were those militias? They were not merely upstanding citizens protecting themselves against foreign tyrants like King George III. They also searched for runaway slaves—and seized land from Native Americans, often by slaughter.

  Loaded quotes the former Wyoming senator Alan Simpson: “Without guns, there would be no West.” But in this sense, the West began at the Atlantic seaboard, where settler militias were organized from the seventeenth century onward. Before long, members could collect bounties for the heads or scalps of Native Americans—an early case, incidentally, of the privatization of warfare. When the thirteen colonies declared their independence, one grievance was the king’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 by which the British, fretting over the expense of sending troops across the Atlantic to fight endless Indian wars, placed land beyond the Appalachian-Allegheny mountain range off-limits to white settlement.

  Many well-armed settlers, however, thirsted for that land and crossed the mountains to take it. Among them was the eager young George Washington, who went on to make a fortune speculating in land far to the west of the Virginia coast where he had been born. As settlement expanded across the Great Plains, U.S. Army troops took over the job of suppressing the doomed Native American resistance, but militias had long preceded them.

  The militias also kept slaves in line. Dunbar-Ortiz cites a North Carolina legal handbook of 1860 on such duties: “The patrol shall visit the negro houses in their respective districts as often as may be necessary, and may inflict a punishment, not exceeding fifteen lashes, on all slaves they may find off their owner’s plantations. . . . [and] shall be diligent in apprehending all runaway negroes.” If a captured slave behaved “insolently” the militia could administer up to thirty-nine lashes. Some militias, such as the Texas Rangers, did double duty, both seizing
land and hunting down escaped slaves. After the Civil War, when the South was still awash in guns and ammunition, militias morphed easily into the Ku Klux Klan—and into private rifle clubs; by 1876 South Carolina alone had more than 240.

  • • •

  Cleansed of its origins, some of this history has been absorbed into our culture, in the form of romantic stories of bandits like Jesse James, said to be American Robin Hoods. Those who believed such tales included Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, both of whom recorded an 1882 ballad,

  Oh, they laid poor Jesse in his grave, yes, Lord

  They laid Jesse James in his grave

  Oh, he took from the rich and he gave to the poor

  But they laid Jesse James in his grave.

  But who was Jesse James? He was a veteran of a particularly brutal militia, in which he had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The records of men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Dunbar-Ortiz points out, have been sanitized in a different way, and they are remembered not as conquerors of Native American (and, in Crockett’s case, Mexican) land but as frontiersmen roaming the wilderness in their fringed deerskin clothing—and as skilled hunters. This has powerful resonance with many gun owners today, who hunt, or once did, or at least would like to feel in themselves an echo of the hunter: fearless, proud, self-sufficient, treading in the footsteps of pioneers. One of those fringed leather jackets, incidentally, (although not deerskin, the salesman acknowledges) is on sale at the gun show, as is a huge variety of survival-in-the-wilderness gear: canteens, beef jerky, buffalo jerky, bear repellent, and hundreds of knives, many of them lovingly laid out on fur pelts: coyote, beaver, muskrat, possum, and, the softest, badger.

  The early militias are one strand of the ancestry of gun enthusiast groups like the NRA that Loaded identifies. Another is the legacy of America’s wars—not those with defined front lines, like the two world wars and Korea, but the conflicts in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In those wars the distinction between friend and enemy was (and is) often unclear. Massacres of civilians have been common, and many a military man has evoked the days of the Wild West. General Maxwell Taylor, Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambassador to South Vietnam, for instance, called for more troops so that the “Indians can be driven from the fort and the settlers can plant corn.”

  One of the greatest predictors of American gun ownership today is whether someone has been in the military: a veteran is more than twice as likely to own one or more guns than a non-veteran. Among the bumper stickers and signs at the gun show are JIHAD FREE ZONE and I’LL SEE YOUR JIHAD AND RAISE YOU A CRUSADE; the latter shows a bloody sword. Many a vet is strolling the aisles, happy to talk about fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Several of them—sufferers from PTSD?—are accompanied by service dogs. The first of the chain of mass shootings that have bedeviled the United States over the past half century or so was by the ex-Marine Charles Whitman from atop a tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, just at the time of indiscriminate mass killings by Americans in Vietnam.

  The passion for guns felt by tens of millions of our people also has, of course, deep social and economic roots. The fervor with which they believe liberals are trying to take all their guns away is so intense because so much else has been taken away. In much of the South, in the Rust Belt along the Great Lakes, in rural districts throughout the country, young people are leaving or sinking into addiction and jobs are disappearing—outsourced to distant, low-wage parts of the world or lost forever to automation. These hard-hit areas have not shared the profits of Silicon Valley and its offshoots or the prosperity of coastal cities from Seattle to New York. Even many of his supporters know in their hearts that Trump can never deliver on his promises to bring back coal mining and restore those once abundant manufacturing jobs. But the one promise he, and other politicians, can deliver on is to fight for every imaginable kind of right to carry arms.

  People passionate about guns often show a sense of being under siege, left behind, pushed down, at risk. One of the large paper targets on sale at the gun show shows a scowling man aiming a pistol at you. On bumper stickers, window signs, flags, is the Revolutionary era DON’T TREAD ON ME, with its image of a coiled rattlesnake. At one table, two men are selling bulletproof vests. For $500 you can get an eight-pound one whose plates—front, back, side—are made of lightweight compressed polyethylene. “They used to use it to line the bottom of combat helicopters.” For only $300, you can get one with steel plates, but it weighs twenty-three pounds. Also on sale is a concealable vest that goes under your clothing: medium, large, and x-large for $285; xx-large and xxx-large for $315.

  Who buys these? I ask.

  “Everybody—who sees the way the world is going.”

  • • •

  The most belligerent descendants of the American militias of centuries past are the forces that go under the same name today. We have seen a lot of these camouflage-clad men (and the occasional woman) in the past few years: they strode through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 with their rifles and walkie-talkies under Confederate flags; they travel in convoys with gun barrels visible through the windows of pickup trucks and SUVs to camp near the Mexican border and watch for immigrants slipping across; and, most often, they have tangled with U.S. Forest Service or other federal officials in theatrically orchestrated stand-offs over the use of federal land in the Far West. Four hundred armed militiamen were on the scene in 2014 at the height of a standoff in Nevada, a hundred appeared at another in Montana the next year, and three hundred at one in Oregon the year after that. Similar armed confrontations have taken place in New Mexico, Texas, and California, and a militia leader from Utah was arrested in 2016 after apparently trying to bomb a Bureau of Land Management outpost in Arizona. Between 2010 and 2014 alone there were more than fifty attacks on BLM or Forest Service employees, including two by snipers.

  Genuine grievances lie behind these Western land occupations, however alien the ideology of the occupiers may feel. The Endangered Species Act, for instance, has thrown both loggers and ranchers out of work, and even though there are good reasons for limiting grazing on federal land (such as preventing erosion or the pollution of drinking water), a new restriction can push a struggling small sheep farmer into bankruptcy. And so people focus their ire on federal control of vast tracts of land. But those who will really benefit from any privatization of this territory are not the militiamen with their “Ranchers’ Lives Matter” yard signs but those who have the capital to exploit the land’s riches: agribusiness, big mining companies, oil and gas drillers. It’s no surprise that many of those interests enthusiastically support the militia occupations.

  There are rivalries aplenty between various militia groups, but one undercurrent in almost all of them, whether spoken or denied, is white nationalism. The first attempt to plant a private militia on the Mexican border was made by David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan. Cliven Bundy, patriarch of the family behind several of the Western land standoffs, has said of African Americans, “I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton . . .?” Two of Bundy’s sons were among those who occupied federal buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon; one of their collaborators had recently aired a video that showed him wrapping pages of the Koran in bacon and setting them on fire. The Malheur occupiers rifled through a collection of Native American relics; the site of a nearby archeological dig containing more artifacts they turned into a latrine. It is not hard to see the continuity with the militias of two hundred years ago.

  American right-wingers in uniform have been around, of course, since the Nazi and blackshirt groups of the 1930s. Later militias have been more heavily armed, and a new wave of them was spurred by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Their ideology tends to echo that of others on the crackpot Right: the New World Order and its chief conspirators (Barack Obama—born in Kenya, of course—, “crooked” Hillary Clinton, George Soros, most people in Hollywood, and many others) are cons
piring to flood the United States with immigrants and refugees, favor the spotted owl over loggers and ranchers and black people over white, patrol the skies with black helicopters, install United Nations rule and Sharia law, and seize guns from their rightful owners. As long as I’m alive and breathing, sings the country and western artist (and Trump supporter) Justin Moore, You won’t take my guns. One bumper sticker on sale at the gun show says, AMERICA HAS BEEN OCCUPIED BY GLOBALIST FORCES. Militias go farther than other right-wing groups, of course, in that they promise to resist this imposition of the New World Order with arms. “When the ballot box doesn’t work,” says John Trochmann, founder of the Militia of Montana, “we’ll switch to the cartridge box.”

  Some of this, of course, is hot air. The number of active militia groups actually fell by 40 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors the movement closely. One “key factor” was that when the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy and their followers seized buildings at Malheur in early 2016, the federal government hung tough, shooting dead one militia leader when he tried to pull a gun on officers at a roadblock, arresting many more, and indicting them on serious charges.

  There has been, of course, one huge change since then: the election of Donald Trump. Several years before, during an earlier stand-off, Trump voiced qualified support for Cliven Bundy, father of the two brothers. (He was uneasy about the occupation and suggested Bundy cut a deal with Obama, but said, “I like him, I like his spirit, his spunk and the people that are so loyal . . . I respect him.”) Several friends of the Bundys or supporters of their Malheur occupation became prominent Trump backers, and one, the oilman Forrest Lucas, was on the president’s shortlist for secretary of the interior. A judge’s recent declaration of a mistrial was the latest in a series of setbacks the government has had in prosecuting the Bundys. Since the election, militia members have been increasingly visible around the country, providing “security” for right-wing demonstrators and speakers. One such speaker has been Cliven Bundy, newly released from jail. And, in contrast to their decline as Obama cracked down on the land occupations, under Trump the number of armed militia groups in the United States has soared ominously, from 165 in 2016 to 273 in 2017.