Faith, freedom, guns: America’s mythologies
Forcing America to confront its myths is dangerous, says A.J. Somerset.
Freedom shoots 82 people in a movie theatre. Freedom kills 20 children in their classrooms. Freedom shoots more than 100 in a nightclub; 49 die.
Yet America’s faith does not waver, not even when Freedom machine-guns 600-odd concertgoers. If the shooting of 26 more Americans in their church changes no one’s mind, we have no right to be surprised. Freedom is America’s capricious god, and he revels in the cruelty of his mockeries.
Nothing is so immovable as faith.
We fit the facts to our faith, and belief survives mass shootings unscathed. The facts of Sutherland Springs fit neatly to the NRA’s narrative. Stephen Willeford, an NRAcertified instructor, grabbed his rifle and wounded the shooter, who had somehow passed background checks that should have kept him from buying guns. Gun Owners of America — the group you join when you decide the NRA are weak-kneed liberals — waxed poetic: “as gun control failed, an armed citizen prevailed.”
Never mind that by the time Willeford prevailed, 26 people were already dead or dying and the gunman was leaving the scene. Donald Trump insists Willeford saved “hundreds” of lives. A point of fact: Even Timothy McVeigh, the deadliest domestic terrorist in American history, did not kill hundreds. But numbers have become meaningless. Faith alone counts.
Despair seems appropriate. But if individual attitudes don’t much change, commitment does, and commitment is the power behind gun politics. The Sandy Hook massacre prompted no federal gun control legislation, but it did rejuvenate an essentially moribund gun control movement. It gave birth to Everytown and Moms Demand Action, the nation’s most vocal gun control groups. Gun control became a women’s issue; guns ceased to be a third rail in American politics. The NRA once enjoyed the unique power of an army of committed, single-issue voters. That power is unique no longer.
The Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress offer gun control advocates little hope at the federal level. Trump himself so faithfully cleaves to the NRA line that one hopes Wayne LaPierre is wearing gloves. But the NRA’s opponents claim victories at the state level, even if those victories are often only to block NRA-backed laws. Times change, even as attitudes harden.
The fight is ultimately not over guns, but culture.
The gun is above all a symbol of the embattled white masculinity embodied in Trump’s noxious administration. It stands for a desire to turn back the clock to the days when men were men and women were women and those people knew their place. It is the standard around which the troops rally in the doomed last stand of How Things Were.
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, cautioned ancient generals not to attack an enemy whose back was to a river: No one is more dangerous than when all is lost. And the aim of pro-gun rhetoric is to put the gun owner’s back to the river. Any small control — say, a ban on the ridiculous bump stock — is an attack on the holy Constitution, and it shall not pass.
If they take the bump stocks, Freedom goes next. The NRA is Freedom’s Safest Place.
Lest we forget, this is the rhetoric that inspired Timothy McVeigh. And it grows increasingly extreme. The NRA now urges its followers to arm themselves against “the violent left.” Trolls and wing nuts rushed to pin the Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs shootings on the left wing. The shooter was Antifa; the shooter was a Bernie Bro; the shooting was a false flag.
If America’s confrontation with North Korea is frightening, so too is America’s confrontation with itself.
The gun is the central symbol of a national mythology co-opted by loons who insist the founders envisioned a right to do political violence in Freedom’s name.
Neither the daily death toll nor a string of mass shootings can tarnish that symbol. To force the nation to confront its myths may take a cataclysm, a cataclysm that the American fringe seems eager to provide.