I have been very busy this last couple of weeks at my new
job as an American hero. Last night, in
the midst of a desperate firefight involving violent jihadists attempting to take over an abandoned Soviet missile site
that was, CIA informed the SEAL
commander, still weaponized, I carried a wounded medic on my shoulders, fording
an icy stream while my colleagues provided cover with AR-15s and an
RPG-launcher. It was nighttime and my
night-vision goggles turned the scene an eerie pixilated monochromatic green.
Earlier, I had been heli-dropped into a Middle Eastern desert city—I was just a
soldier: they didn’t tell me what city,
or even what country it was, just that we were going in after some bad guys. With my radio picking up the chatter of my
fellow grunts, I went house-to-house trying not to engage innocent civilians,
though it seemed there weren’t any—even the young women hid machine pistols
under their flowing robes.
When the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting
occurred a few weeks ago, there was a brief silence from the shill-organization
for the major weapons industry. Most
Americans have heard, though far fewer believe it, that the National Rifle
Association is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the major American arms
manufacturers. That interruption in
shrill declarations of a constitutional apocalypse soon to come from jackbooted
federal gun-confiscators was a dead give-away to the power behind the
organization. No genuine American
sodality could have remained quiet in the face of such horror; corporations,
however, are not human and so they operate under the rules of efficiency found
in algorithms and statistics about the depth and longevity of citizen response
to actionable tragedy, and unrecorded phone conversations with the congressmen
and senators they have bought and paid for.
For nearly twenty years, I directed and served as a
principal faculty member for an international institute on American culture and
life. It was a vocation I happened upon,
and it took a little time for me to realize just what was entailed. Every summer, 30 or so teachers,
teacher-trainers, university faculty members and education-ministry specialists
would arrive for six weeks of intensive training on the current state of the
study of the United States. Early on, I
and my colleagues thought it was our mission to provide high-order scholarly
briefs on new trends in scholarship here in America. What we learned was that this was not even
remotely the job that needed to be done. As my friend and fellow faculty member
Christian Messenger (great name for an Americanist!) declared, it was
“our privilege to explain America to the world.” But even that wasn’t
right. We learned that the subject, the
verb and the predicate of that statement were all laughably imprecise. We didn’t know America, at least not the
America that came to be the subject of the Institute. And so “explaining” was not a responsible
activity. Moreover, the world that sat around us in the blandly efficient classroom
wasn’t a monolith, and it certainly wasn’t going to sit still and drink in our
wisdom.
Our constituency arrived, over the life of the Institute,
from almost every country on the globe.
We despaired of ever getting a Cuban, till one day Frank arrived; not only that, but his cousin ran an
excellent Cuban restaurant in Chicago, and Frank had already mapped out an
itinerary for himself with the help of the surreptitious extended network of
Cuban-Americans in the area. Was it Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan
from which tiny Yana arrived, with only a pair of high-heeled slippers (despite
our instructions to all to pack “sturdy walking and hiking shoes”) with which
she hiked the Petroglyph Trail at Mesa Verde National Monument and managed to
get herself left behind accidentally-on-purpose in a truck stop outside Gallup,
New Mexico, where she was surrounded by handsome, cowboy-booted truck drivers
with whom she demurely flirted while showing them pictures of her home country?
There were America-loving Provencal teachers and America-hating
Egyptian school principals, and we quickly found ourselves baffled by the
Americas of both. They didn’t resemble
in any way the worlds within which we lived—and we were a pretty motley crew of
Americans: a guitar-playing country boy
with a Ph.D. from Austin, Texas, and a Peace Corps alumnus from New England via
Ethiopia, and a political scientist who’d grown up in the high-rise projects in
Chicago and was, with his wife and his mother and a few sisters, still
fostering an average of ten kids at a time.
There was a lesbian economist and a neoconservative historian and a
libertarian specialist on architecture and the city. Why the Department of
State kept funding us, year after year, seemed a strange miracle to us. We thrived under the first George H.W. Bush
administration, and we thrived in the Clinton years and we thrived under George
W. Bush and we thrived in the first Obama administration. The Great Recession finally killed us off—we couldn’t
build a program in Chicago that could compete with isolated state-college
campuses in places we didn’t even consider for our road trips. We had a good run of it. We put the documents in front of our participants-- Dred Scott and The Declaration of Independence and The Plow that Broke The Plains and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Great Gatsby and The Statistical Atlas of the United States. We took them to black gospel churches and 4th of July picnics and corporate law offices. They listened to Navajo hat'aali and James Brown and Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, whose Guitars, Cadillacs and Hillbilly Music was a favorite of the woman from Senegal who won our "how many languages do you speak" that year-- 1987, with a still-unmatched record of 27-- not counting a few dialects here and there. She was the first person to click Xhosa to me-- a language my daughter now speaks with some imprecision.
One of my jobs as Director was to serve as the teaching
faculty member during the two-plus week tours of the U.S.A. that culminated
each program. Though there was a running
joke that a lecture by me on the subject of the changing vertical ecosystems of
the Rocky Mountain Plateau after a big Southwestern tamale lunch at a diner on
the Res was the best way to guarantee a long nap, I grew to love the work of
close observation as we passed through small towns and big cities, ranchlands
and industrial parks, weaving together the fabric that was this country to
which I had devoted my intellectual and creative life. After it was over, the alumni of those
Institutes that had developed close-knit and continuing virtual Institutes via
Facebook and websites extracted from me a promise to continue my tourbus
lectures.
That was what began this series of essays. I warned those alumni that I wasn’t going to
go political on them. That I would
remain what I had always sought to be—a quizzical observer, pointing out the
hidden significance of the details of everyday American life.
When the National Rifle Association’s shill, a man named
Wayne LaPierre, gave his stump-speech after the Newtown murders of small schoolchildren by an automatic-weapon-toting young man, I struggled to
keep my promise.
I am going to skirt as close as I can to the edge; I’m going to use a deeply personal voice to
keep from seeming to throw some academic weight to what follows.
I was raised in the woods and farmlands of Connecticut. My father came from Mormon rancher stock,
from the foothill communities outside of Salt Lake City. My mother’s family came from Mille Lac,
Minnesota. Every one of them owned guns,
hunted deer and turkey with them, shot snakes and coyotes when necessary. My grandfather’s World War I service revolver
was in a canvas bag in the attic of my house.
My father’s service weapon turned out to be up there too—we found it when
going through his boxes after he died. I
had a bb gun, then a pellet gun, then a .22 rifle. My Boy Scout troop master taught me to target
shoot, and I once won a turkey in a turkey shoot in North Guilford,
Connecticut. I was probably 13. The Bushes,
Wayne and Wayne Jr., hunt deer on our farm, and we get a portion of the venison
in return. We are glad to see the
overpopulation of deer, who infect the dogs and the people with Lyme Disease
and wander into the road to cause bad crashes and who die of starvation or
parasites: we are glad to see it
diminished, though not enough, by the New York State hunting season.
Some years ago, a dear friend who is a bit of a gun nut took
me to a range to shoot, after an interval of two or more decades of increasing
rustiness at the task. We were shooting
at targets with pistols, and it was fun—a sport requiring precision and
strength and intense concentration and an affinity between self and machine
that’s not dissimilar to road cycling, though less demanding and less
thrilling, by my lights.
But what struck me that day, and the days after that at the
range, was that there seemed an inordinate number of fellow range-users who had
what can most charitably be called paranoid ideation. They were convinced the economic apocalypse
was upon us and only a hoard of heavy weaponry would protect them. They believed that jackbooted federal
officials were conspiring to take not just their weaponry but their houses,
their trucks, their children. They believed that crazy-haired black teen thugs
were at any moment going to drive out of the city to rape their daughters.
All of them had very specific accounts of people very close
to them who had been attacked in some way and saved from death or worse only by
brandishing or actually shooting their weapons at shadowy marauders. None of them could tell me just who it was
this had happened to. If they claimed it
had happened to them, they couldn’t tell me when, or where, and when I asked,
in what I thought was a tone that mixed curiosity and naivete, they became
increasingly agitated and threatening.
There are many documented cases where this scenario either
took place, or was alleged to have taken place.
One site, gunssavelives.net has recorded over a thousand reports
involving homeowners, residents, shopkeepers, carjack victims and vigilant
citizens whose weapons killed, wounded, caused to surrender, or scared away bad guys.
But the count reaches back more than a year and a half. In
19 months, across the entire U.S. guns have purportedly beaten back the bad guys just over a thousand times. Around fifty a month.
There are two glaring problems with this statistic. There are close to 115 million households in the U.S. Just in sheer numbers, guns have
saved .00096% of households over an 18 month period. As important, the number
of households saved is just about 20% fewer than the number of households in
which a member was accidentally killed by a gun in the house.
There’s more to this.
If you read the stories in gunssavelives.net, you notice pretty quickly
that the notion of salvation by guns is pretty flexible. One homeowner shot a man whom he reported was
attempting to break into his house; he
killed him after, he reported, the man refused to leave despite repeated
warnings. But an onlooker who had
noticed the man earlier looking into parked cars and come out with a baseball
bat to scare him away decided it wasn’t an issue-- the man was talking to his
hand and yelling incoherently. The
onlooker then watched as the man approached and began banging on doors; the last one he banged on was the one with
the armed family protector on the other side.
In report after report, home
protectors provided the reports, often with no corroborating evidence. Many of the cases read disconcertingly like
that of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was talking to his
girlfriend on the cell phone inside the gated community where he was living,
and was shot in what a community-protector called self-defense.
This is the issue of disproportionality: most of the cases I’ve read in a random
sampling of those on gunssavelives.net involved unarmed “home invaders”—read,
burglars, breakin-thieves, or smash-and-grabbers—shot and often killed by
multiple gunshots.
And it is the reason, I think, that Wayne Lapierre, mouthpiece of the gun industry, broke the
silence of the N.R.A. with a statement crafted entirely around the concept of “bad
guys” and “good guys.” The only thing that stops a bad guy with a
gun is a good guy with a gun, Lapierre declared. The disproportionality of gun use—unarmed,
nonviolent criminals or even noncriminals mistaken for criminals and shot—cannot
be allowed to stand. The moral argument
evens the score: one bad guy/one good
guy.
In fact, many of the stories on gunssavelives.net concern
lone individuals heroically holding off more than one bad guy. This is also very
useful as arguments go. It sets the
shooter as the victim of disproportionality.
It defines the gun as the great
equalizer, as it’s often called by gun advocates. And it links often-sordid, trivial
confrontations of today within the context of America’s long mythos of the
Western. Each one of these home protectors carries the mantle of John
Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.
Wayne Lapierre’s diatribe about the Newtown shootings
focused on violent video games and movies that, he said, emboldened and incited
bad guys to action. I’m ready to grant that premise, on one
condition—that Wayne Lapierre concede the corollary—that the shootings of
unarmed people in the names of home-defense, that the accidental deaths and
injuries of gun-household children, that
the numerous self-inflicted injuries by incompetent or inexperienced gun users,
and the violent deaths of partners, spouses, friends and houseguests by
gunowners: all be placed at the feet of the American mythos of the Western.
Let’s return to that other, brushed-aside circumstance: killings of family members by family
members. I don’t have good statistics on
this at the moment. What I do have dates
back to 1995, when just around 1,500 households saw one adult member kill
another. As far as I can tell, about ¼ of
these deaths were by firearm. I don’t
have statistics on the number of children killed by adults in their household. I don’t have statistics on the number of
forcible rapes by gun-owning family members occurred, either. Or the number of children killed by other
children in the house by a gun left there conveniently close in case of home invaders-- loaded and ready, in the bedside table drawer, or under the mattress or pillow, or on top of the dresser.
.
What has emerged
from my recent obsession with gun-violence data in the United States, is
this. There seem to be three broad
categories of gun owner in America. By
far the largest consists of people like me, and like my neighbors: gun owners whose guns are used for the
purposes of hunting or, in some cases, recreational shooting—from target
practice to skeet to the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Shoot. At the opposite extreme is a smaller but much
noisier group of people who see the world as a place out to get them or theirs, and who
view guns—big guns—as their only
recourse. This group believes itself to
comprise the good guys. What’s disturbing is that increasingly they are pushing those
who don't embrace their vision into that other role: bad guys. In their eyes, I'm a bad guy. I threaten them. I need to be protected against. Maybe, soon, I and mine need to be taken out.
But I'm not worried. After all, there is my own recent change of identity, from bad guy to good guy. I’ve achieved this magical conversion by
shooting down dangerous foreigners, murderous children (Arabs, so it’s ok),
bomb-wielding women (Muslim), and, most recently (in Call of Duty: Black Ops) buffoonishly incompetent African Negro rebels
and marauders whose faces seem drawn from Amos
and Andy as much as from Muammar Gaddafi
or Idi Amin Dada. Playing those games, I appear to be embracing their strange, paranoid vision, in which Americans are always good guys and everyone else... well...
I do not see in these digital bad guy faces any resemblance to my friends
the world over—to Assam, to Yana, or Hiram, or Mohammed or Mamadou—men and women who
teach small children and sullen teenagers and overly-materialistic university
students and overly-obtuse graduate students, men and women who look at America
as a place of failing promise, and who worry about us.
Consider that, Wayne Lapierre. All over the world, good-hearted people who
love this nation and its heritage and promise are worrying about us. They aren’t worried that we’re not fighting
enough wars, or that our drones aren’t killing enough bad guys or that we aren’t going to enter a small, insecure nation
and attempt to eradicate its questionable nuclear capability, or threaten and
bully another much like it until it starves its people to death and decides to
nuke Japan. They aren't worried that we're losing our masculinity as a nation. They don't think that, without our rocket propelled grenades in their nation's capital all will fail.
They're worried we've lost our way. They are worried that
we’re caricaturing our own Constitution and trivializing its humanity-uplifting
propositions while celebrating its long-outmoded trivial features. They’re
worried that American toleration of rage and intolerance and paranoia inside our border is undercutting the very doctrine of skeptical tolerance at the heart of the American Experiment.
They're worried that it's not just a small marginal minority that has abandoned evidence-based thinking or critical thinking in the name of
bizarre, Judeo-Christian-seeming jihadist
fundamentalisms, whether in Kiryas Joel, New York or Waco, Texas. They fear our increasingly paranoid behavior at home and abroad has already destroyed our ability to set an example in the
world for fairness, kindness, generosity, hope, opportunity, tolerance and
welcome. They worry we have lost our way and they wonder how any other nation
or civilization can take our place.
For we must consider
that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us.
So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have
undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be
made a story and a by-word through the world… We shall shame the faces of many
of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon
us till be be consumed out of the good land…
Therefore let us
choose life
That we and our seed
may live…
John Winthrop, aboard the Massachusetts Bay Colony ship Arbella, on the way to America, 1630