The Wrong War

This quote from Quora on the Right's love affair with guns comes close to the nub of the truth, but misses it:

You'll fight your government just like we fought the Redcoats.

These people don't want guns to re-fight the Revolutionary War. They want guns to re-fight the Civil War.

Only the most obnoxiously racist white supremacists dare utter this aloud, but many of these gun-toting whites think they need guns to fight a race war, which is sure to come because the government keeps prosecuting men who have the stones to shoot black teenagers walking down the street in hoodies, or 13-year-old black kids who they think stole their stuff, or drunken black girls pounding on their front door.

It started in the 1940s with the Dixiecrats, then continued with Brown vs. Board of education in the 1950s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 further alienated Southern whites from the Democratic Party. The Southern Strategy of playing to white racist fears gave Nixon the White House in 1968. Up till the 1970s the NRA was for gun control: 

In November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle that Owsald bought from a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine. In congressional hearings that soon followed, NRA Executive Vice-President Frankin Orth supported a ban in mail-order sales, saying, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

But no new federal gun control laws came until 1968. The assassinations of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were the tipping point, coming after several summers of race-related riots in American cities. The nation’s white political elite feared that violence was too prevalent and there were too many people—especially urban Black nationalists—with access to guns. In May 1967, two dozen Black Panther Party members walked into the California Statehouse carrying rifles to protest a gun-control bill, prompting then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to comment, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

But by then it was clear that whites weren't going to be able to get away with official institutions that oppressed blacks anymore: equality was inevitable (though apparently subject to Zeno's paradox). White men would have to take the power into their own hands. And for these people, guns are power. In 1977 the Second Amendment perverts took over the NRA and forced out the reasonable men who knew that more guns just mean more death.

Today it's not so much just the blacks, but women and immigrants too, especially Latinos. You hear it over and over: this country is being "invaded," we have to save America for real Americans; you know the drill.

The people today who fly the Confederate flag glorify the traitors who tried to destroy the Union in order to keep the corrupt and evil institution of slavery alive. Dressing it up as defending "states' rights" is just a lie.

The thing is, no one in the Confederacy was free. Just as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the Confederacy required even white citizens to carry domestic passports:

Judith McGuire, a resident of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, reported in her diary on a trip along the valley turnpike during which a Confederate picket stopped her stagecoach. When the soldier asked the passengers to present their travel passes, McGuire quietly complied, but one of her fellow travelers exploded in rage: “Passes! Passes for white folks! I have never heard of such a thing. I ain’t got no pass … we ain’t niggers to get passes.” (Emphasis in original.)

Conservative white men feel they are losing political and economic power to women, blacks and Latinos. A gun restores that lost feeling of power.

But the real problem is not that blacks and women and Latinos are taking over. It's that conservative white men, especially in the South, are undereducated and having difficulty adapting to changing times. The economic inequality resulting from globalization that sent well-paying blue-collar jobs -- jobs that white men relied on -- is putting white men on the same level as the people they once looked down upon. The conversion to a high-tech economy, the automation of farming and industry, and the loss of mining jobs due to depleted resources such as coal and iron ore have further eroded the economic security of white men.

So, even though in reality white men still have much more power than blacks or women or Latinos, they see it slipping away because they're standing in place while these other groups are slowly advancing. And the most prominent symbol of the decline of the white man? A black man was elected president! Twice!!! White men are doomed!

Blacks, women and Latinos are not the enemy. The enemy is economic inequality stemming from corporations and the wealthy having too much political power, and using that political power to tilt economic, industrial and tax policy in their favor. Just because these corporate honchos are old, male and white doesn't mean they view average white guys as equals: they view them as suckers to be led around by the nose, easily convinced to support policies that undermine their own best interests by pressing the hot buttons of race (in the guise of immigration), guns and abortion.

These corporate guys are, after all, the same ones who sent all those decent manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China in the first place. And you can't blame it all on globalization: somehow Germany has managed to remain an industrial and export powerhouse, even though they have to deal with competition from China, unions, six weeks of mandatory vacation, and had to absorb the collapsed and corrupt communist economy of East Germany.

And they even have a woman running the country! Dooom!