I am sitting at home watching the Olympic biathlon with my daughter. We are both still trying to figure out why cross county skiing and sniper shooting go together. It’s not as if most people can practice this “sport.” I always thought that the Olympics was about extraordinary people engaging in unbelievable feats of agility, strength and endurance that most of us had engaged in during school, but they were the best and kept it up for world competition.
The Biathlon is a remnant of white male gun supremacy, and we should never forget it. It also happened during a week in which we are all still open to the wound of seeing kids be murdered at one of the very institutions designed to keep them the most safe: school. As I am sitting here with my daughter, and we flip away from this obvious time-wasting buffoonery watching men in skis hiking hills and shooting at targets, I see some feminine commercial and rapidly turn away. Then I think to myself that my boys have to be better than me and be more sensitive to women’s products in the future, and I start to drift about how they can’t watch and comment about a woman’s breast exposed during the Superbowl halftime show on TV, or search for girls their own age on the internet out of fear of being placed on charges of child pornography, but they can search for guns all day long…..because as soon as we turned off the Olympics, I saw 2-3 shows with gun violence.
I started to drift again: ‘No son, breasts are bad, but bullets are good….’
I watched the courageous acts of children combat the cowardice of the president. When the guy tweeted that the children held some responsibility in protecting themselves at school, the children went the hell off on him, and started speaking with cogent analysis, venom laded prose, and staged a series of lie and die ins. And then as much as I loved these children for speaking their truths, exercising their rights, I hated my adult peers for making their actions worth a tinker’s damn. Nothing is going to come from the most recent tragedy, because nothing is better to a white man than a gun. Nothing.
You ever touch a gun? You ever load one, shoot one? There is nothing that has that feeling in the world. That cool steel, the smoothness of it, the smell of the powder, that forbidden recoil that kicks back at you, trying to see what you hit and the damage done to it in the process. If you could smoke a gun it would be inhaling a full body orgasm laden with crack, laced with crystal meth, sprinkled with chocolate chips, powdered with cocaine, doused with rum, and smelling like pizza and burritos and hamburgers and bacon and barbecue ribs all at the same time.
It is symbolic and physical and phallic and power based and permanent all at the same time. A gun, more than anything else in the world, is leadership. And not everyone has it, and not everyone deserves it. Sméagol wasn’t a fool, he just didn’t have a gun in 3rd earth….
In 1640’s Virginia, the first gun control law was enacted in the Americas. Blacks were barred from owning guns—including the freemen.
In 1857, during the Dred Scott Case (Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott’s argument that living in a free state for several years as a slave should have been nullified to allow him to be free, as by definition, a free state should not allow for slavery), Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney stated that blacks could not be citizens, because if they were citizens, they could own guns….
After the Civil War, southern states, southern whites and their hate groups went to extraordinary lengths to disarm free blacks, whether it was the use of Black Codes to legalize seizure, or hate groups forcibly removing guns from blacks.
At the end of the 19th century, many states had imposed high taxes on guns, or removed cheap guns for purchase, in order to keep blacks and poor whites from purchasing firearms.
The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.
Since blacks have always been disarmed, the real issue is not keeping the guns away from America but keeping the guns away from white Americans. Why have blacks always been disarmed? We’ll get to that later…
While there is no real statistic to know who own guns, estimates are that about 40% of whites own guns; the 32% of America which is made up of white males make up 61% of gun owners. About 20% of Hispanics and a lesser number of blacks own them today. But there are an estimated 325 million guns in America, despite the estimation that only 1 in 3 households have any. One gun for every American, but only one in three has one—almost the same ratio for whites who owned slaves…..
Blacks with guns suffer greater penalty in use; that is a 50 word essay on its own.
–Stand your ground in Florida where Marissa Alexander, a black woman shot the gun in the air to scare off an ex-husband while she had a restraining order against him, received a 20 year jail sentence that was later suspended after serving three years– while Floridian George Zimmerman stalked Trayvon Martin, a teenager unknown to him, but yet looked suspicious as he made his way home was approached and later died at the hands of Zimmerman. As the teenager likely fought this stranger for his life, Zimmerman shot and killed him. Not only did he not receive jail time, but an (five white, one Puerto Rican), all female jury acquitted him of all charges, and the majority of white people (over 3 to 2) believed that justice was served.
Guns have been the great equalizer for keeping the have nots at bay. The New Republic reported that Forensic scientists excavating sites in Peru have found an Inca man shot through the back of his skull by a conquistador, possibly executed after a 1536 uprising, his body dumped in a mass grave alongside those of women and children. Many of their remains show signs of mutilation and abuse.
There is no doubt of the power of the gun on colonization. While the Chinese invented the fire lances, the adaption of Afro-Asian iron and Indo-Chinese gunpowder by Europeans is the most important factor in world domination. There would be no mass colonization if not for the gun. There would be no suppression of insurrection if not for the threat of the gun. There would be no Renaissance, no Industrial Revolution, no American Revolution, if there was no European gun.
400 Years after it started colonization, and at its peak after WWI, the British Empire still had influence over 23% of the world’s population and 24% of the world’s land under its territorial rule.
There are over 600 separate, distinct cultures that have been taken over by European rule in the last 400 years, and the only way this becomes possible is through the use of the gun.
The Gun in the Making of the American West
Let’s minimize the reality that in a nation that is as large as China, or Canada, there were as many as 100 million people living here in the US before European settlement. There are estimates that 75% of the folk died out before European contact. I am unsure if I believe that mass death statistic, but for my heart, I will accept it. Why? Because if the numbers are not accurate, and those people were here at the onset of European settlement, it makes it all the more frightening how they might have been wiped out.
I am going to go with 25 million Native Nation people living in the United States in 1492. How many Native Nation people are here in 2018? According to the 2010 US Census, 5.2 million are at least part native nation (half, is what the number is supposed to represent, not that grandmomma’s grandmomma stuff that most of us with Native ancestry spout off when we parcel out eighths and 64ths and 128ths ). 2.9 million are considered full Native Nation.
Why were they killed? Easy: for the western expansion effort. Natives were either opposed to it or fought it, so they got exterminated in war and warfare tactics. War is easy; shoot them down, burn them out. Warfare tactics include things like smallpox sent to natives in blankets or killing their food supplies. Even their food supplies were killed to make way for expansion. In a 30 year span, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, 30 million buffalo/bison were slaughtered. Ironically, this disturbance of the ecosystem not only killed the buffalo, stopped native nations from thriving, but it also contributed to the deforesting of the plains states. And for what? These are for the most part, still the least populated parts of America, and it could be argued that the Native nations could still be living here without much outside interference. Killed off the people, killed off the animals, destroyed the ecosystem, all with the gun, for little return in the end.
I estimated once (during one of my independently strange research kicks) that about 2,000 westerns have been made over the last 100 years, and that at least 4,000 shows on episodic TV were made with Westerns in the last 65 years. There are five generations of people here and abroad who have known nothing but the power of the gun to move America westward and to complete the nation. The gun represented the taming of the savage, the reclaiming of the land from the foreigner, and the elimination of the bad guy at the same time. The way that we as Americans see manhood is shaped by the use of a gun. Yet, the imagery of who has the gun is also suspect. If as many as a 1/3 of the American cowboys during the 19th century are black, where are they in cinema? Remove Oscar Michaux movies; I had a hard time finding more than a couple dozen black people in any of these movies or TV shows. What does that do to the psyche of a nation in which a third of the people are literally wiped clean from the historical records, because we don’t want to see them with guns? As for the Mexicans and Native nations, on screen they are usually depicted as the bad guys fighting the white man for his land and his women. We have been force fed a narrative that only serves to give the illusion that white men must keep their guns to stay strong. And name a western woman heroine that didn’t tote a gun ‘as good as any man’…..I’m waiting.
Before you think it solely racist, don’t forget about the half million people killed during the Civil War….brothers shooting brothers on purpose, with 2/3 of them doing so for the right to own something that they do not have, little to no land, and no slaves. Anybody going to shoot for the rights of a Raiders season ticket in Las Vegas, even before the stadium is built?
Of course they were savages, we are much better today, right? Indeed, what can be said of these earlier settlers that cannot be argued today?
- Politics editor of the Daily Beast, Sam Stein, said that 180 Congressional districts in 2017 (out of 435 folks) have experienced a mass shooting.
- 11 mass school shootings since Columbine, with an average of 10 students dying in each shooting. The overwhelming majority being white and affluent and suburban.
- A high ranking Congressman was shot in the head in front of his Republican Congressional peers on a baseball field. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot; President Reagan was shot; 4 sitting presidents have been shot and killed.
If they don’t even take measures to save their own; save themselves, save the institution, why would you think they would work to save you?
Nothing is going to change, because guns mean everything.
holowe 