We're now about
six weeks post-Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in which 20 six and
seven year-olds were murdered plus six school employees. Since then the ongoing debate about guns in
the U.S. has been revived and is thriving, as are gun sales, in the wake of
fears about government confiscation of guns in the name of “gun control” or
“gun safety.” Dueling identities for
guns and gun owners--and even U.S. culture--have been constructed in the
process, especially a seemingly defining national character as a “gun culture.”
Just today, on the
Peace and Justice Studies listserv in which I participate, someone posted a
link to a Politico article in which
former President Clinton discusses a pro-gun culture. This culture, from Clinton’s perspective wields
real power in U.S. politics and policymaking.
According to Clinton, speaking to Democratic party donors, “the issue of
guns has a special emotional resonance in many rural states” and refusing to acknowledge
that reality “is counterproductive” to any gun regulation effort. He warns gun safety regulations advocates
that even with polls showing broad public agreement with their efforts, “it’s
not the public support that matters—it’s how strongly people feel about the
issue.” I’ll post a link to Byron Tau’s Politico report below.
In her 1986 book, The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda
Lerner, writing about gender identity constructions, that “the matrix of any
idea is reality—people cannot conceive of something they have not themselves
experienced or at least that others have before them experienced…images,
metaphors, myths all have expression in forms which are ‘prefigured’ through
past experience. In periods of change,
people reinterpret these symbols in new ways, which then lead to new
combinations and new insights” (10).
While she’s speaking specifically of gender identity, I’ve been thinking
a lot about her words in the context of gun identity constructions in the U.S.
virtually every time a new episode of mass gun violence is reported on the
news.
- What images, metaphors, and myths about U.S. guns and gun owners have been dispersed out into the historical, social, cultural atmosphere from which our own if not the world’s perceptions of “America” arise?
- What are the realities in which such strong American pro-gun narratives and identity constructions were prefigured?
- How did the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights gain virtually sacred status, seemingly surpassing in priority these days the First Amendment right to free speech—including apparently, the right to question or protest the divine authority given to guns in America by the most aggressively vocal pro-gun advocates?
- How has the idea of “common sense” gun safety legislation and regulation become equated with treasonous betrayal of “the” American ideal and Constitution, worthy of threats of violent rebellion if not all-out “revolutionary war”?
The U.S. seems to
have become a culture constrained by fear: fear of some threatening other
invading our homes, schools, and even places of worship, not to mention
crossing our borders to inflict harm to us as a nation; fear of a tyrannical
government coming to confiscate all the guns of “law-abiding citizens.” Clearly some of our fear is warranted since
we can’t seem to escape a plague of violence and death perpetrated on a daily
basis. But we also seem to rely heavily
on rather hypothetical fear to justify our need, if not right, to build
personal arsenals of the most powerful firearms and rounds of the most
explosive ammunition. What is the
idea-reality matrix that has brought us to this place of constant fear?
How
do we move beyond this fear-filled place? How
do we begin to re-identify and reinterpret the symbols defining our priorities,
needs, and individual and national identities in truly life-preserving and
life-affirming ways? How do “we the
people” create “new combinations and new insights” for ourselves and for the
U.S. that allow us to meet and deal with conflict in less deadly and more
productive ways? I guess here would be
as good as any place to brainstorm and build new possibilities, yes?
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