Guns are at the centre of America’s growing civil conflict
The gun question is at the centre of a dangerously widening civil conflict in the United States. The issue is destined to play an important role in the presidential election this year.
Millions of Americans have drawn a line in the sand in an all-out defence of the right to own and carry guns, based on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Far more is at stake than guns.
The gun rights movement is predominantly made up of whites who are small city and small town dwellers, who have risen in revolt against the emergence of a multiracial society they claim they no longer recognize.
One arm of the movement has coalesced around Donald Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, whose campaign is noteworthy for its assaults against Mexicans, Muslims and women.
Even before President Barack Obama announced last week that he would take presidential executive action to ensure that background checks are carried out on gun purchasers, Trump declared at a rally in Biloxi, Miss.: “So he’s going to sign another executive order having to do with the Second Amendment, having to do with guns. I will veto. I will unsign that so fast.”
In addition to its political wing, which includes all of the Republican presidential candidates, there is the more extreme direct action wing of the pro-gun movement. This wing comprises members of self-appointed militias who are anti-immigrant and are often white supremacists.
A few days ago, armed militia members occupied a building in a federal wilderness refuge in Oregon. Ostensibly modelled on the militias who fought the British during the American Revolution, present-day militias question the very legitimacy of the U.S. federal government. The leader of the siege in Oregon is Ammon Bundy, a registered Republican who lives in Phoenix.
The incendiary and paranoid language used by Trump and other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination helps drive recruitment by the armed wing of the pro-gun movement, even though the presidential candidates are careful to keep their distance from illegal actions such as the occupation in Oregon.
In recent years, as rural, small town and small city white Americans have increasingly come to fear their loss of power, the right to own guns has become the assertion of what is regarded as a fundamental entitlement. The extreme wing of the pro-gun movement proclaims that, if necessary, armed citizens have the right to combat the forces of the state.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has stated that the Second Amendment “is the ultimate check against government tyranny.”
The gun question is seminal in driving the United States into two cultures that are implacably hostile toward one another on a wide variety of social issues. For the United States to end the massive violence that is inflicted by guns, the state would have to disarm gun owners to a very appreciable extent. And the pro-gun forces have made it abundantly clear that they will resist, violently if pushed, to keep their weapons.
Obama’s current very moderate initiative centres on closing loopholes on background checks at gun shows and on sales of guns by so-called gun hobbyists who do not conduct background checks on purchasers. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre rails against Obama’s “rogue agenda to destroy our unique American freedoms.”
Every time the president speaks or acts on the gun issue, the sales of guns and ammunition spike in the United States. Shortly after the massacre of students and teachers at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Conn., in December 2012, I visited a gun shop in Southern California. The proprietor told me that he was six months behind in meeting orders for ammunition and for the most popular handguns and high-powered rifles just at the mere hint of greater gun control.
Republicans in alliance with the NRA have moved the gun debate far beyond what kind of weapons it is reasonable for individuals to own to the realm of basic rights. The right to “bear arms,” the language of the Second Amendment, has become a rallying cry.
When tens of millions of citizens own firearms and are coming to understand their ownership not as a means to sport or for their own safety, but as a fundamental right, the state is in trouble. The house is divided. How far that division will drive the United States into a civil conflict that is unique in the advanced countries remains to be seen.