These then were the settlers upon which the national origin narrative is based, the ultimately dispensable cannon fodder for the taking of the land and the continent, the white foot soldiers of empire, the “yeoman farmers” romanticized by Thomas Jefferson. They were not of the ruling class, but a few slipped through and later were drawn into it as elected officials and military officers, thereby maintaining the facade of a classless society and a democratic empire. The founders were English patricians, slavers, large agribusiness operators, or otherwise successful businessmen thriving on the slave trade, exports produced by enslaved Africans, and property sales. After Independence, when descendants of the common settlers—overwhelmingly Presbyterian or otherwise Calvinist Protestant—were accepted into the ruling class, they usually became Episcopalians, members of the elite church linked to the state Church of England.11
The Second Amendment is one of ten amendments comprising the original “bill of rights” for individual citizens that were added to the completed U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment, “freedom of speech,” is most revered, and is considered an attribute of U.S. exceptionalism. The Second Amendment was drafted by James Madison and added to the U.S. Constitution in 1781. Little attention was paid to the Second Amendment until it became controversial during the second half of the twentieth century, and it continues coinciding with political, social, and economic shifts that opened nearly everything to question in the 1960s, particularly segregation and anti-Black racism. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, some white men, increasingly buttressed by the National Rifle Association, began pointing to the Second Amendment as an absolute right for the individual to bear arms and as justification for limiting firearms regulation, raising gun ownership as a constitutional issue, a covenant matter. On the National Rifle Association’s website, every possible argument for gun control is contested based on the exact wording of the Second Amendment, in part by quoting the founders:
George Mason asked, “[W]ho are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.”
Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall be debarred the use of arms.”
Patrick Henry said, “The great object is, that every man be armed.”
Richard Henry Lee wrote that, “to preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms.”
Thomas Paine noted, “[A]rms … discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.”
Samuel Adams warned, “The said Constitution [must] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”12
Up to the 1970s, there had been little juridical attention paid to the Second Amendment, and it was not held to be sacrosanct by anyone, its mandate being taken for granted. In 1876, while the U.S. Army of the West was slaughtering Plains peoples and the buffalo with thousands of Winchesters, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that “the right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” There was no recorded negative reaction to that decision. A second Supreme Court decision in 1939, United States v. Miller, ruled that the federal government and the states could limit any weapon types not having a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” Various regulations ensued in subsequent decades. But, following some forty years of political lobbying and challenging regulations, in 2008 the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, that held the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess and carry firearms, the late Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority. For the first time, the highest court, the ultimate interpreter of the meaning of the United States Constitution, decided that the Second Amendment means “the individual” when it says “people.” However, the decision left open the issue of government regulations: “[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”13
A Gallup poll released soon after the Heller decision found that 73 percent of those polled—a far larger percentage than gun owners or N.R.A. members—believed that the Second Amendment guarantees individual gun rights, while 20 percent believed it only guarantees the rights of state militia members. Only 7 percent had no opinion.14 But, overwhelmingly, U.S. citizens, not only white men or the N.R.A., accept the notion of sanctity associated with the Second Amendment, as with the Constitution as a whole. The lobbying efforts of the N.R.A. and advertising by U.S. gun manufacturers are the designated culprits in most arguments for gun regulations and bans of some weapons, but the N.R.A. and gun manufacturers’ success is due to a larger ideological hegemony that they did not create, but rather have exploited.
The majority argument in the Heller case is an example of the “originalism” that began as a marginal concept, slowly growing into a movement during the 1980s when conservative judges were appointed under the twelve-year stretch of the Ronald Reagan−George H.W. Bush administrations. The beginning of the movement is attributed to a speech in 1971 by the late Robert Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems.”15 Judge Bork was a professor of law at Yale and had served in government as Solicitor General and a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, but the Senate, with a Democratic majority, rejected the nomination. Civil Rights and women’s groups lobbied against Bork’s appointment, based on his record of having opposed federal intervention in enforcing voting rights in states and his call for annulling previous Supreme Court decisions on Civil Rights. However, Bork did not interpret the Second Amendment as applying to individuals and was critical of the National Rifle Association for promoting it as such.16 Bork was far surpassed during the following two decades by even more extreme judges, particularly Scalia, relying on originalism and gutting the Voting Rights Act, abortion rights, and affirmative action. But by the end of the Reagan presidency the Conservative movement, buttressed by a large evangelical constituency, had reached critical mass; Supreme Court decisions and legislation followed.
The genealogy of the ascension of constitutional “originalism” begins with the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools,17 with opposing arguments in favor of “states’ rights” and anticommunism. White Citizens Councils formed in the Southern states, along with other such groups, labeling all policies and acts of desegregation as communist-inspired. The John Birch Society, birthed in 1958 in Massachusetts by the scion of the Welch candy fortune, produced an ideology, a plan of action, and even a military arm in the “Minutemen.” Fred Koch, of the Koch Brothers industries that remain major “small government” and “free market” funders, was a founding member of the John Birch Society.
This highly public reassertion of white supremacy and the Birch Society’s methods of founding activist local chapters to take over school boards and other local offices across the country became a hallmark of the new right movement, embraced by the transformed National Rifle Association in the 1970s, coinciding with the rising visibility and politicization of the right-wing evangelical movement. The first time the movement revealed its collective power was in support of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964.18 Goldwater didn’t make it, but the movement grew, so that in California, the avatar of the new right, Ronald Reagan, was elected governor for two terms, serving from 1966 to 72, then became president of the United States in 1980.
During the period 1954–64, following the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and a stalemated proxy war between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China in Korea, national liberation move
ments arose in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, most succeeding in evicting French, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonizers from their countries. While these movements inspired activist African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Indigenous Peoples, Chicanos, and Asian Americans, as well as white anti-imperialist and anti-war activists and students, they had the opposite effect on those who feared the loss of white supremacy in the United States and the loss of U.S. supremacy in the world, and among the elite, who feared loss of confidence in capitalism.
The National Rifle Association was one of the formations transformed during this period of right-wing growth. Up to 1975, the N.R.A. had not opposed gun regulations and had not made a fetish of the Second Amendment. It had been founded following the Civil War by a group of former Union Army officers in the North to sponsor marksmanship training and competitions. Since the late nineteenth century, target shooting has been a part of the Olympics. In 1934, during the Depression, the N.R.A. testified in favor of the first federal gun legislation that sought to keep machine guns away from outlaws, such as the famous Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, and Chicago gangsters. During testimony, a Congressman asked the N.R.A. witness if the proposed law would violate the Constitution, the witness said he knew of none. When the N.R.A. opened a new headquarters in the late 1950s, its marquee advertised firearms safety education, marksmanship training, and recreational shooting (hunting).
By the time of its 1977 convention, the Second Amendment Foundation and its lobbying arm, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, founded in Washington State in 1974 seized leadership of the N.R.A. It was then that the N.R.A. centered the Second Amendment as its main concern.19 Harlon Carter was the primary actor in this “coup” that transformed the N.R.A. Carter, following the career path of his father, had been a U.S. Border Patrol chief with a checkered past. As a youth he killed a fellow teenager, who was Mexican, and was sentenced to three years in prison, which was overturned soon after. As a U.S. Border Patrol chief, Carter was head of the mid-1950s “Operation Wetback” program, a violent, corrupt, and massive roundup and deportation of people who were allegedly undocumented Mexicans. Journalist and author Mark Ames writes:
The seemingly strange amalgam that Harlon represents—pro-gun, pro−border guard, violent fear of dark southern immigrants, combined with a fear and hatred of the federal government—is still around today, the basic material of Ron and Rand Paul, both of whom have some crazy extreme ideas about massively militarizing the southern border and making citizenship harder to achieve, while at the same time railing against the federal government, and pushing for a culture in which every home is packed full of firearms.20
N.R.A. membership numbers soared during the early years of the Reagan White House. As California governor, Reagan had indulged the John Birch Society, which helped him win the California governorship in 1966; then in 1980, as a presidential candidate, he promised to implement Harlon Carter’s N.R.A. pro-gun agenda as soon as he took office. As for Carter, by the mid-1980s, gun cultists even more fanatic than he was threw him out of leadership. That trend continues today. As Ames puts it, “The formula is simple: The more batshit malevolent the gun cult gets, the more power they exert. Just ignore the periodic squeals from the rest of the country, and keep pushing the batshit envelope. There is power in acting like the crazy one who needs to be talked down, so long as you convincingly mean it.”21
The large N.R.A. headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, has the Second Amendment written on the lobby wall, but only the second part: “The right of the people to keep and Bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
In April 2017, in Atlanta, President Donald Trump addressed the enthralled N.R.A. membership gathered at its annual convention: “Only one candidate in the general election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of the United States, standing before you… . You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”22 Trump had spoken at the N.R.A. convention in Nashville in April 2016, before winning the Republican primaries. Ironically, gun sales had been plummeting ever since President Obama left office. George Zornick writes on the N.R.A in a feature story for The Nation:
The Obama administration provided an eight-year sugar high for the industry, with imagined fears of a nationwide gun-confiscation program fueling sales. Particularly after the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, industry profits boomed: There were 19 straight months of increased year over year sales, according to FBI background-check data. (There is no public tracking of gun sales nationwide.) But as soon as Trump was elected, stock prices for the major gun companies plummeted, and they haven’t fully recovered. In April, a full third of the outstanding shares in Sturm Ruger, for example, are short bets.
“In the firearms segment, we’ve experienced the expected slowdown in demand for modern sporting-rifle products and handguns post the presidential election,” said Steve Jackson, chief financial officer of the Remington Outdoor Company, which now owns some of the biggest gun manufacturers in the country. Speaking to investors in an early April conference call, Jackson noted that inventory levels were problematically high, because “retailers and wholesalers expected a different political climate and hunting season that did not materialize.” Most of the publicly traded firearm companies reported similar situations in their first-quarter reports for this year.23
The more that gun-control advocates raise the issue of government regulation, particularly federal government regulation, the more ammunition is provided to those who hold the Second Amendment sacred to stand their ground. And because gun-control advocates erroneously misinterpret the Second Amendment provisions as being related only to the individual right to hunt and to militias as national guards, they delude themselves, failing to comprehend the history embedded in contemporary U.S. culture and social relations. The Constitution is the sacred text of the civic religion that is U.S. nationalism, and that nationalism is inexorably tied to white supremacy.
SEVEN
MASS SHOOTINGS
“Such is the commemorative sleight of hand that renders a raid resulting in four deaths more objectionable than a day’s battle costing thousands of lives,” writes historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert, regarding Confederate guerrillas’ actions in the Civil War compared to the massive slaughter of the two national armies.1 This observation could be rephrased to make the point about the horror expressed about mass shootings in light of U.S. wars for the past half-century.
Similar outrage could be expressed over gang shootings from the 1980s and 1990s in Los Angeles to South Chicago in the new millennium compared to U.S.-sponsored death squads, coups, counterinsurgencies, and wars taking place at the same time. In 1991, after the Los Angeles uprising protesting the acquittal of LAPD officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, when asked about “drive-by shootings” by Crips and Bloods, a gang leader responded, “What about those fly-by shootings in Iraq?” It was a fair question a few months after Operation Desert Storm’s devastating 24/7 bombing of Baghdad, with 88,500 tons of bombs dropped in thirty-seven days during which time countless people were slaughtered.
Mass shootings have no direct relationship with the Second Amendment, but have everything to do with the demands for stricter gun regulations and the banning of AR-15, as well as the N.R.A.’s argument for gun rights based on the Second Amendment. These catastrophic events occur more frequently in the United States than in other countries, but only account for a tiny percentage of U.S. gun-related deaths.
There is no way to prove a correlation between war crimes—the U.S. bombing of civilian populations and their infrastructure—and domestic mass shootings, but the relationship does not appear to be random. The definition of “mass shootings” varies, but is generally defined by four or more deaths in one location by a lone gunman, or in a few cases, such as Columbine and San Bernardino, two. There were 128 such events with 932 victims in the United States between 1966 and late 2017, with an average of s
even deaths in each. Only three of the 131 shooters were women.2 However, if domestic shootings are included, meaning a man shooting his partner, often including their children and other relatives, the occurrence rises dramatically. A New York Times report titled “How Often Do Mass Shootings Occur? On Average, Every Day, Records Show” uses the measure of four or more wounded, and includes domestic shootings. More than two-thirds took place in private residences and included “a current or former intimate partner or family member of the attacker. Half of all victims were women.3 Investigative journalist Jane Mayer further links domestic violence and many non-domestic mass shootings. Shortly after the June 2017 shooting that wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others, it was known that the shooter James Hodgkinson had a history of domestic violence. The shooter in the 2015 Planned Parenthood Clinic had an arrest record of rape and sexual violence. Mayer writes, “In the meantime, many domestic-violence suspects, like Hodgkinson, are arrested only to have the charges dropped later, which leaves them armed and dangerous. The National Rifle Association and its allies have successfully argued that a mere arrest on domestic-violence charges … is not sufficient reason to deprive a citizen of his right to bear arms.”4 Some mass shootings have taken aim at women simply because they are women. Also, women are wounded or killed by their partners by stabbing, slashing, punching, strangling, stomping, kicking, running over, beating with various objects, and other means more frequently than with guns, but the gun nearly always guarantees death.
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