Bearing Arms is a specialty site. We focus on the Second Amendment and related topics. Sometimes, that means we step a bit outside of our normal lane, such as talking about general safety or crime in general. It’s sort of related to what we do, but it’s not quite the same thing. Sometimes, I’ll admit that I’ll stretch to make something look like it’s inside our wheelhouse just so I can write about it.
And this isn’t uncommon at other specialty sites that focus on certain things. If they can find a way to include a discussion they want to have, they’ll do it.
I can’t begrudge it.
However, that doesn’t mean people who write for literary sites actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to guns.
Yeah, that’s right. Some reaches are so extreme they’re almost jarring, but in this case, the writer took two different books relating to gun culture and tries to leverage that into a discussion about guns.
Two new books—historian Andrew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, and sociologist David Yamane’s Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture—attempt to explain what brought us to this point, and to break the stalemate of the gun debate, by transforming our understanding of the relationship between gun violence and gun culture. The comparison of these explanations reveals much about the limits of US liberalism’s ability to contend with our increasingly armed society.
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In a certain sense, McKevitt’s reading of the Second Amendment, like Yamane’s, is an attempt to “bend the arc” of gun culture. The armed citizen soldiers of the young Republic were “defending” a country that was in the process of being violently wrested from Indigenous peoples, to say nothing of its economic dependence on the violent control of a restive population of enslaved people. But both McKevitt and Yamane reject any originalism that would imagine the United States’ relationship to guns to be wholly determined by the conditions of its founding.
McKevitt, however, refuses the liberal affirmation of gun owners’ right to privately enjoy their own consumer desires, a right that Yamane holds sacrosanct. Gun Country is the origin story of a violent and very modern consumer fantasy, a fantasy that has come to shape Americans’ fundamental relationships with guns and with each other.
We may never learn the details of what broke inside of Thomas Matthew Crooks’ mind in the days leading up to the moment he killed and died on a Pennsylvania rooftop. But his T-shirt tells us that, in the depths of his private despair, he embraced a mass-produced belief shared by millions of Americans, a faith that his manhood and agency could be reclaimed behind the stock of a gun.
This conception of individual empowerment, so central to our contemporary gun culture, is neither an anachronistic remnant of a violent past nor an immutable foundation of American democracy. Those that refuse to accept the normality of US gun violence must join McKevitt in the difficult work of reckoning with how this fantasy has been constructed, and how it might be undone.
Go and read the whole tortured attempt to look unbiased while clearly embracing Gun Country’s premise from the get-go to get more details. It’s a long piece but I don’t want to quote all of it for obvious reasons.
What the author of this screed fails to do, though, is acknowledge that while McKevitt and Yamane may reject any originalism in the Second Amendment, that doesn’t mean they’re right to do so.
The right to keep and bear arms was preserved in the Second Amendment for a reason. This idea that “the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” really just means we should infringe it in any way we so desire makes absolutely no sense at all. This idea that originalism has no place here, of all places, is absurd.
Every right enshrined in the Bill of Rights was predicated by some act of tyranny committed by the British on the American colonists. That includes the Second Amendment, so yes, the nature of our nation’s founding very much plays a role.
But the author here would like us to think it’s really just a “consumer fantasy about empowerment” when the harsh reality is that guns do empower people. They empower millions of Americans to protect themselves from dangerous people who aren’t going to be dissuaded because of some gun control laws.
The author here walked into this piece with a preconceived opinion. He knew he’d be more inclined to side with McKevitt than Yamane from the jump. However, because he writes for a book site, he needed this to express his own opinions about guns. That’s all that happened here, and in the process, he dismisses the reality around firearms and makes it impossible for anyone actually familiar with the topic to take him seriously.
The problem isn’t that he; “makes it impossible for anyone actually familiar with the topic to take him seriously”, The problem is that those NOT FAMILIAR with the subject DO take him seriously.
AND, it is a major problem.