Guns
have become an intimate part of American culture, one that is fed
by gun-makers and the gun lobby, the right-wing media and
Hollywood, and of course the Republican Party. Our children are
paying the price.
Mass
shootings are good for gun sales. In the days following the
horrific massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde,
Texas, firearm manufacturers’ stock
prices predictably rose.
Gun owners, who have been conditioned to purchase weapons out of
fear of not being able to buy more guns, tend to run out and buy
more weapons in anticipation of coming restrictions. That in turn
boosts gun profits and stock prices. It is a macabre cycle that
appears to be fueled by Republican-led fear-based culture
wars.
Gun buyers behave in ways that suggest they
logically anticipate that lawmakers will respond to a mass
shooting by making it harder to buy a gun. After all, when
consumer products are found to be a danger to humans, they are
often regulated.
The federal government routinely
recalls dangerous products—such as a line of children’s
bunk beds
whose defective ladder resulted in the death of a 2-year-old
child from Ohio. In that case, nearly 40,000 units sold to the
public were recalled. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has
a lengthy
list
of toys that the federal government has recalled that have posed
choking hazards for kids.
It makes sense to regulate
harmful products, especially where children’s health and
safety are concerned. The government doesn’t sidestep the
issue by saying that it was the fault of the child or the parents
that a product caused harm. Instead, it acts on the assumption
that only safe products should be available for purchase, and it
punishes the manufacturer.
But, time and again, gun
owners’ very rational fears remain unfounded as thousands
of children are victims of gun violence each year, and yet
firearms manufacturers are absolved of blame and weapons of war
remain easily available for purchase. The Uvalde shooter
reportedly bought
two AR-15-style rifles
legally from a federally licensed gun store just days before the
massacre and used one of them to end 21 lives.
A group
of pediatricians published
a plea in Scientific American
in response to the Uvalde shooting and to the fact that gun
violence is now the leading
cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19. The doctors
wrote,
“We must do better for our children,” and pointed to
“the politicization of guns taking priority over public
health.”
How else to explain the endless
proliferation of deadly killing machines, when we won’t
even tolerate a faulty ladder on a bunk bed?
It’s
true that gun
sales are big business,
with millions of firearm sales each year. Some gun manufacturers
with lucrative federal contracts are even using
their profits to lobby the government
against gun control. But the hold that guns have on the nation
goes deeper than plain economics.
It’s also true
that the National Rifle Association holds great sway in
Washington via its political affiliates making large
campaign donations
to GOP politicians like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to ensure
inaction on gun control. But the NRA alone is not driving the
tightened grasp on guns.
At the heart of the matter is
how guns have become central to the right-wing culture wars in
the U.S. today. They have become synonymous with “freedom,”
or rather, with a perverse interpretation of the word. They are
also associated with “defense,” a word that appears
in the name of the manufacturer, Daniel
Defense,
whose rifle was used to kill the Uvalde elementary school
victims.
The “freedom to defend” oneself
has become a powerfully compelling cultural idea for a shrinking
white population whose paranoia is being stoked incessantly by
Fox
News,
the Republican Party, and gun manufacturers like Daniel
Defense.
The gun-maker engages in aggressive
marketing.
In one commercial, founder Marty Daniel narrated, “There
are two types of people in the world, good people and evil
people.” He continued, “And just in case evil people
get in charge, good people need to have the ability to fight
back.”
While the language of “good versus
evil” sounds simple and even benign, in fact, it is often
coded language for good white heterosexual guys versus evil Black
and Brown people. Or LGBTQ folks. Or undocumented immigrants. Or
“woke” white folks.
What is often left
unanswered is the question of guns offering the freedom to defend
oneself from what, or from whom? It’s certainly not wild
animals, in spite of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s
recently ludicrous assertion that Americans need AR-15 rifles
because of “feral
pigs.”
There
is a fear that “there are all these criminals out there;
they’re going to break into your house in the middle of the
night,” Michael
Siegel,
a visiting professor in the department of public health and
community medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine,
told me in a recent interview. “It’s a racialized
fear,” he added.
So convinced are right-wing
(mostly
white, male)
gun owners that they need to defend themselves against imagined
evil “others” that in the hours after the Uvalde
shooting, some went as far as speculating that since Border
Patrol had killed the shooter, he must have been an “illegal
alien.”
Others were convinced the shooter was a transgender
woman.
The
facts about gun ownership and self-defense show just how
ludicrous the idea of “freedom to defend” is. The
polling company Gallup
found that in 2000, 65 percent of Americans cited “protection
against crime” as a reason for owning firearms. In 2021,
that number jumped to 88 percent. At the same time, violent crime
and property crime rates nationwide have dramatically
fallen
since the 1990s. Meanwhile, studies
show that guns are extremely rarely used in self-defense and that
it is far more common that they are used to commit assaults,
homicides, or suicides or are accidentally discharged.
“This
is a charade,” said Siegel of the self-defense trope. “This
is not an issue of freedom. The Republicans who are refusing to
support these laws, they’re not standing up for freedom.”
If parents and children are justifiably afraid of school because
of gun violence, “that’s not much of a free society,”
he asserted.
Hollywood also bears some blame, using
gun violence as a way to raise tension in the plotlines of movies
and television shows in what amounts to a massive public
relations campaign for gun manufacturers. Researchers Brad
Bushman and Dan Romer writing in Quartz
found that “acts of gun violence in PG-13 movies nearly
tripled over the 30 years between 1985 (the year after the rating
was introduced) and 2015.”
Furthermore, they
write, “the gun industry pays production companies to place
its products in their movies,” and “prominent
placement in high-profile films can result in a significant bump
in sales for gun models.” While Hollywood may not be
feeding the same fantasy (“freedom to defend”) as the
right wing does, it certainly makes guns appear “cool,”
in the same way that the industry did for cigarette smoking.
A
majority
of Americans
support various gun restrictions; but the Republican Party, which
has spent years laying the groundwork for minority rule in
anticipation of the coming demographic shift away from white
conservative voters, need not listen to the will of the people.
Instead, they have gerrymandered
districts,
enough seats in the undemocratic
Senate,
and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to ensure they
remain immune
from popular will.
Ultimately,
the white male Republican belief that guns are a way to defend
oneself from imaginary evil people is a hate-filled fantasy—a
direct outcome of cultural conditioning by right-wing media, gun
lobbyists, Hollywood, and the GOP. The price we as a nation are
paying for this fear-based fantasy is the lives of our children
and their sense of safety at school.
This
commentary
was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
