Contributors

Monday, July 11, 2016

"Guns Are This Era's Slavery"

I was recently asked to answer a question with prize money on Quora. There have been many interesting answers but the best one so far is from famed programmer, Ernest W. Adams. I am reprinting it here in its entirety.

The root cause (as opposed to the proximate cause) of the large quantity of gun violence¹ in the United States can be traced precisely to April 19, 1775.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
At the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the rebellious Massachusetts militia, composed of farmers and other local people, fired on British regulars who had come from Boston to search for weapons. The detachment was forced to retreat.
The opening battle of the American Revolution has been romanticized in story and song for nearly two and a half centuries. The story contains two elements that have directly influenced the culture of the United States from that day to this: first, the authority of the state (the British troops) being used to search for and confiscate guns; second, citizen ownership of firearms being used to oppose this action. Thus began the Great American Gun Myth—using myth in the sense of a body of cultural belief.
As the new nation spread westward, firearms were needed on the frontier to hunt, to protect people from wild animals, and to fight native Americans. They were also used in lawless regions by lawless people, which meant that peaceful people were obliged to keep them too. The idea began to grow up that the guns created the nation itself.
It did not take long for the Gun Myth to find expression in stories of adventure and daring. The Indian Wars were a particularly fertile source of excitement, and Buffalo Bill was adding to the legends in his Wild West show before the Indian Wars completely over, rather as we now make war movies before the war is even over. The mythologizing begins early. His shows often of featured sharpshooting skills of Annie Oakley and others.
The first Western novel, The Virginian, was written in 1901, and the first Western movie was made in 1903. There followed a flood of others. Gunsmoke began as a radio series in 1952 and ran continuously until 1975. Movies like Falling Down and God Bless Americapresent us with heroes who took up arms when “pushed too far.” Even if the film’s intention is satirical or fantasy-fulfillment, it nevertheless presents shooting people as appropriate, fun, and consequence-free. It’s impossible not to internalize some of this. People with poor judgment or intelligence want to actually make those fantasies come true.
We have now arrived at a point at which it is part of our national ethos that guns are a legitimate resort with which to solve a problem. They’re not even a last resort. Armed people don’t seek alternative resolutions to conflict; they just pull out their guns. The United States is no longer oppressed by Britain, nor is it the Wild West, but we continue to act as if it were.
The short answer to the question is this: Americans shoot people in disproportionate numbers compared to other populations because they have been taught ever since April 19, 1775 that it is an acceptable thing to do.
Many other nations—Canada, Finland—have a fairly high number of firearms in the population, but they aren’t used for homicide. Other former British colonies—Australia, India—achieved independence without warfare. They don’t have the Great American Gun Myth.
Nations that do treat gun ownership as an aspect of manhood and personal identity and a legitimate solution to problems (Pakistan, Afghanistan) have even greater rates of firearms abuse than the USA does.
The Myth has made it impossible to create a sensible firearms policy that restricts guns to the hands of those who are responsible users. The nation is awash in weapons and too many of those weapons are owned by people who should under no circumstances own them. But make the slightest effort to restrict them and the Gun Myth gets invoked: we need guns to make us free; we need them to fight tyranny; they are part of who we are as Americans and it is unpatriotic even to question this.
So many people now have a vested interest in guns that even without the cultural argument it is very difficult to reduce their numbers. The firearms manufacturing industry is worth $13.5 billion annually, and retail gun stores another $3.1 billion. There are four times as many federally licensed gun dealers as there are grocery stores in the United States, which gives you an idea of the absurdity of the situation.
Guns are this era’s slavery. They are America’s “peculiar institution.” The justifications for them are poor, yet a vociferous minority continues to announce that firearms are an inseparable part of their “way of life,” and threaten violence to anyone who would take them away.
I hope that it will not be necessary to fight a civil war over them, but ultimately I think the growing damage that firearms do in the wrong hands will lead to enough political support for controlling them properly that the gun control voters will outnumber the gun enthusiast voters. It will be solved, in answer to your final question, by political action.
Until that day, expect the deaths to continue.

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