From coast to coast and border to border, the bodies keep piling up. Gun deaths by mass shooters and trigger-happy homeowners in the US grow almost by the day, multiplying ad infinitum — so many now in so many places that it’s hard to keep track. In any compilation of the civilized world’s self-induced carnage, we are far and away number one.
A year ago, in June 2022, Congress purported to address the situation by bringing forth one of Joe Biden’s treasured bipartisan agreements in the form of a narrow gun-safety law passed by Democrats with the support of a small handful of Republican senators. The minimalist law did little beyond enhancing some rules and background checks designed to keep guns away from certain classes of people (mentally disturbed minors, domestic abusers, and the certifiably dangerous) and making funds available for purely discretionary state spending on school-safety measures and mental-health services.
Since enactment, America’s shooting spree has continued unabated. The law’s most critical potential inclusion, an assault-weapons ban, was dismissed out of hand by GOP negotiators, notwithstanding that a semi-automatic rifle, the AR-15, is the weapon of choice for today’s mass shooters. One Republican senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, summed up his party’s shamefully negligent attitude on firearms as follows: “The things that have already been done have gone about as far as we’re going with gun control.”
The refusal of congressional Republicans to deal seriously with guns extends to the Republican-dominated Supreme Court, which has bent over backwards to enable “active shooters.” In 2008, the Roberts Court, reflecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, redefined the Second Amendment by ruling 5-4, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that individuals had the right to keep handguns in their homes for personal use or self-defense. A subsequent ruling in 2010 (McDonald v. City of Chicago) applied that decision to state governments, as well as federal jurisdictions, thereby encouraging the infamous state “stand your ground” laws.
Then, last year, in a 6-3 opinion written by conservative ideologue Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court affirmed, in New York State Rifle Association v. Bruen, that individuals also had the right to carry handguns outside the home for, again, self-defense - - thereby putting its seal of approval on state “open-carry” laws and invalidating state handgun regulations in one fell swoop.
The contemporary Supreme Court’s 21st-century loosening of gun controls, which has reversed decades of settled law regarding firearms, can be credited to Justice Scalia and his judicial theory of “originalism.” Until Scalia, the Second Amendment coexisted quite comfortably with sensible gun restrictions, such as the National Firearms Act of 1934, enacted to register and tax organized crime’s machine guns of the Al Capone era out of existence; this law was upheld by the Roosevelt Supreme Court in 1939. Scalia and his colleagues, however, in a deliberate misreading of the original intent of the Second Amendment, concluded it didn’t mean what its author James Madison obviously meant it to mean: guaranteed access for state militias to arms for the common defense.
Apart from the willful Scalian twisting of the Second Amendment’s meaning, there remains the question of why guns have such an outsized influence in American life. The fact is we’re a gun-obsessed country and have been for some time, even when the state and federal governments have been willing and legally able to curb our obsession in the name of public safety.
There’s more than one reason for the gun fetish — the contemporary identification of gun rights with movement-conservative ideology and modern Republicanism, for example. But the obsession goes much deeper and further back in time, and is as much psychological as political; it’s part of the American myth (the gun-toting cowboy as symbolic national hero), a mythology so wrapped up in the history of the supposed Wild West that it’s hard to separate fact from fiction.
The fact part begins, naturally enough, in Texas, our most gun-obsessed state, where open-carry is a religion. As historian Walter Prescott Webb established (“The Great Plains,” 1935), Samuel Colt’s revolver or “six-shooter,” our most celebrated side arm, entered the American consciousness by way of the early Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, went up the Chisholm Trail on the Texas cattle drives to Kansas railheads after the Civil War, and spread from there throughout the West.
Then, the writers of fiction and the makers of movies took over, and America’s gun obsession was born. The heavily armed West of legend was portrayed in cheap 19th-century “dime novels” from the very beginning, but the first great Western novel was Owen Wister’s “The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains” (1902); it was followed by Zane Grey’s popular “Riders of the Purple Sage” (1912) and numerous others.
By then, the genre had been formularized. Lewis Atherton (“The Cattle Kings,” 1961) described its essential ingredients: characters easily classified as “good” or “bad” (as in NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” vanquishing a “bad guy with a gun”); a noble hero, who ultimately wins out; a noble heroine; and abundant action, including plenty of shooting and killing.
After Wister and Grey came the movie Westerns with their weapons-carrying mounted heroes, starting with William S. Hart and Tom Mix in the silent-film era, and culminating with the justice enforcers Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood of later years. Celluloid gunplay moved on from movie theaters to television in the 1950s and ‘60s, courtesy of vehicles like “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide” and (yes) “The Virginian.”
The formula never changed: the gun settled all disputes and solved all problems. And the lesson, inculcated generation after generation, shaped the latter-day American attitude toward firearms. Unfortunately, it didn’t square with reality. Gunfighting was never as prevalent as we suppose. Historical accounts indicate most Westerners never fired a gun in anger, or witnessed a gun duel; many never went armed at all.
Above all, they believed in gun control. From Tombstone, Arizona, to Dodge City, Kansas, visitors’ firearms were routinely impounded by authorities within town limits. Historian Robert Dykstra (“The Cattle Towns,” 1970) determined that between 1870 and 1885, there were just 39 homicides by gunfire, or barely two per year, in the supposedly wide-open Kansas cow towns.
Maybe it’s time for America’s gun lovers to heed the advice of “Gunsmoke’s” Marshal Dillon and figuratively “get out of Dodge.”
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2023
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