During the next few years, the Black Panther Party became a national organization with its own newspaper. As local chapters emerged to organize and serve Black communities across the country, federal and state authorities coordinated efforts to target, disrupt, and destroy the organization, and in some cases, engage in assassination, as in the coordinated killing of charismatic Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The National Rifle Association also became increasingly political during this period. One of the clearest responses to the fears instilled in white people by what came to be termed “urban violence” was the 1972 creation of the National Neighborhood Watch Program, overseen by the National Sheriffs’ Association.23 As Caroline Light observes in Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, “The selective logic of armed citizenship exists interdependently with larger assumptions about criminality… . Select law-abiding civilians take on the responsibilities of law enforcement, protecting themselves while policing others…The call for ordinary citizens to serve as quasi-police protectors for their communities assumes that citizens patrolling their neighborhoods are able to differentiate between dangerous criminals and the law-abiding citizens they are tasked to protect, yet the grim reality is that they often make this distinction through the prism of widespread social biases.”24
This was the case with George Zimmerman, acting on behalf of his Neighborhood Watch program in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was on his way to his father’s home in that very neighborhood. Florida, like many states, had introduced a “stand your ground” law, so the police who came to the scene simply let Zimmerman go after questioning him. Thanks to public outcry, Zimmerman was charged, but he was found not guilty by a jury of six women, all white except for one of mixed Latina heritage.
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white nationalists, many of whom identified as neo-Nazis, along with advocates for “free-market” privatization, geared up to block all social welfare initiatives promised by the Democratic candidate, as well as any policy the Democrats proposed for the following eight years. In 2007, Wall Street housing stocks and mortgage loan institutions had collapsed and unemployment was soaring, mainly among lower-income working-class families. Many of them often people of color could no longer keep up with mortgage payments while unemployed, and lost their homes. Rather than softening the blow with mortgage assistance (bailing out the homeowners), President Obama bailed out the banks and Wall Street. This initial action added fuel to the igniting Tea Party movement. In 2004, the privatization kings David and Charles Koch transformed their lobbying organization into two nonprofits, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which became the funding engines and strategy makers for the massive gatherings and demonstrations of righteously angry people drawn into the politics of white nationalism and immigrant (Mexican) hatred. Most important, they also financed electoral campaigns that resulted in the Republican takeover of Congress in 2010.
The election of an African American as president of the United States and commander in chief of its Armed Forces seemed the apocalyptic prophecy of the influential late William Pierce, whose organization National Alliance was one of the most ideologically extreme. Pierce was born in Atlanta; he held a doctorate in physics and was a tenured professor at Oregon State University in 1965, when he became an angry opponent of the Civil Rights movement and the emerging counterculture. He supported George Wallace’s presidential campaign and found affinity with neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who was assassinated in 1967. Pierce then founded his own organization, which became the National Alliance, built with young white men who had supported Wallace. He started a white supremacist publishing house, National Vanguard Books, and put out audio records with hate messages.
Pierce self-published his infamous novel The Turner Diaries in 1978, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald; it was later reprinted and kept in print by Barricade Books.25 The book became and remains required reading for white nationalists; Timothy McVeigh had a copy of it in the car he was driving when apprehended by the police soon after the Oklahoma City bombing. The first lines of the novel read, “September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking—and nothing but talking—we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.” The story begins when the federal government enforces the “Cohen Act” and raids homes to confiscate all civilian firearms. Turner and his group go underground to overthrow the government, which is controlled by African Americans, with crafty Jews getting them elected and giving them marching orders. This government not only confiscates guns, but also imposes repressive measures under the banner of anti-racism, such as annulling all laws against rape, as these laws are considered racist; making it a hate crime for white people to defend themselves from attacks by people of color; and forcing all citizens to carry passports to move around. Turner witnesses an anti-racist rally in which white people are pulled in and beaten, sometimes killed. The Organization prevails in war, taking regions of the country to operate from, igniting civil war that includes the use of nuclear weapons, by which the Organization destroys New York and Israel. The Soviet Union is destroyed by nuclear war, and then country after country falls apart as anti-Jewish riots destroy their governments. In the novel, people are reading Turner’s 1991 diaries in the year 2099: The Organization has conquered the whole world; in Africa, all Black people have been killed; and the continent of Asia has been rendered uninhabitable by radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs. In the United States all people of color were hunted down and killed, and a white nation and white world exists at the end of the twenty-first century.26
And it started with the government taking away their guns. So, when young Dylann Roof attempted to start a “race war,” he was tapping into the common fear shared by white nationalists, the loss of white supremacy. What was everyday reality during the century of frontier wars from the founding of the United States to the 7th Cavalry massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, was re-enacted and performed as theater by Roof, but with live ammunition. Liberal and conservative intellectuals and politicians insist that individuals like Roof and the groups they belong to are marginal, but white supremacists are acting and speaking openly in support of the very roots of United States nationalism, embedded in the institutional structure of the country from the Constitution itself, which includes the Second Amendment, to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy to save the institution of slavery and the continued colonization of Native lands. Their words, rhetoric, and desired future differ little from those of the free market fundamentalists and constitutional originalists who actually control the federal institutions and many of the state governments. White nationalists are the irregular forces—the volunteer militias—of the actually existing political-economic order. They are provided for in the Second Amendment.
NINE
ELUDING AND RESISTING THE SECOND AMENDMENT’S HISTORICAL CONNECTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY
In the past, historians have shown little interest in researching the U.S. arms industry, even though gun making was one of the nation’s first successful manufacturing industries domestically and globally, and one of the few that escaped deindustrialization. That changed after the U.S. Congress passed the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” effective October 26, 2005, a measure that shields gun manufacturers and licensed dealers from liability for deaths resulting from their products if occurring in a criminal act. With frequent mass shootings in the years before and after, as well as suicides and accidental gun deaths, more scholars and journalists began research into gun violence as a health issue.
Dr. Gerald J. Wintemute, an emergency room physician who has studied gun violence for thirty-five years, experienced research funding drying up. As the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis Health System, he was virtually alone in the task. But things got worse in 1996, when t
he Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress passed the “Dickey Amendment,” which barred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using federal funds to promote gun regulations, stripping the CDC of the nearly $3 million it had been devoting to the study of injuries and fatalities relating to gun use. While some funds from other federal sources were made available under the Obama administration, the gun-rights debate was highly charged, so that research findings or interpretations could be met with threats of violence. These scholars must take precautions that few in academia find necessary.1 Even for scholars not researching anything related to guns, there is fear of the 2016 Texas law that extended open-carry rights to public university campuses in the state, leading the president of the faculty senate at the University of Houston to create a PowerPoint presentation to show in faculty forums. One slide suggests that faculty members “may want to be careful discussing sensitive topics; drop certain topics from your curriculum; not ‘go there’ if you sense anger; limit student access off hours; go to appointment-only office hours; only meet ‘that student’ in controlled circumstances.”2
In all the debates and research, little scrutiny is given to the gun manufacturers—the industry itself—with attention mostly directed toward the victims of gun violence, the purchasers and users of firearms, and the gun sellers, particularly those who exhibit at gun shows. The 2016 publication of historian Pamela Haag’s meticulously researched and documented book, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture3 was a welcome corrective. The book is a global and detailed survey of the history and present situation of the U.S. firearms industry, containing a more detailed case study of the 150-year history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The founder, Oliver Winchester, had been a shirt maker before he went into the gun business and became a very wealthy Connecticut corporate giant.
In the United States, there is an acute awareness of the powerful influence and grip of corporate advertising, but no other product sold legally on the market bears any similarity to a gun. Guns are made to kill, and except for hunting, that usually means killing other humans or oneself, either intentionally or accidentally. Most critics of easy access to firearms place blame on the N.R.A. for its effective lobbying and for having an outsize influence on its highly active members, suggesting a cult-like relationship. Haag includes the N.R.A. in her condemnation of the unregulated firearms industry, but mainly for the revenue it receives from gun industry advertisements in the organization’s publications and on its website. Haag goes to the source and bores in on the gun industry itself as the main culprit, not only ethically, for producing a deadly product, but also for its relentless advertising, which has normalized and domesticated that product, even making getting a gun a coming-of-age milestone for every boy.
Haag writes that her motivation for starting this project was to figure out “what allowed Oliver Winchester and his successors not to feel at least a small bit encumbered by the fact that they manufactured and sold millions of fearfully destructive guns… . The gun debate has been mired in rights talk for so long … that it is forgotten as a matter of conscience.”4 But what she claims to have discovered in the process is the fallacy of the assumed “gun culture” that historian Richard Hofstadter theorized and which still reigns; rather, she argues, “gun culture” was manufactured by the gun industry and is not some inherent characteristic of U.S. history and society: “An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there.”5
Haag claims that this narrative includes the false assumption that the Second Amendment has always been regarded as a sacred right for the individual to bear arms, and she denies that the idea of gun regulation is new and abnormal. She scoffs at what she calls “the American gun story:”
The American gun story is about civilians and individual citizens, and they are its heroes or its villains—the frontiersman, the Daniel Boone “long hunter” who trekked far into the wilderness alone, the citizen-patriot militiaman, the guiltily valorized outlaw, and the gunslinger … and this mystique is about individualism: guns protect citizens against overzealous government infringement of liberties; they protect freedom and self-determination. 6
In making this argument, she dismisses outright any significance of the Second Amendment or of “how the West was won” history: “The story that highlights the Second Amendment, frontiersmen, militias, and the desires and character of the American gun owner is not to be found in the pages of this book.”7
Haag’s work is invaluable for offering a deep study of a particular product and industry; her book resembles those of other contemporary thinkers, such as Mark Kurlansky in Salt and Cod, and Mark Pendergrast’s investigation of the Coca-Cola Corporation. Haag reveals how consumer capitalism works, but she seems not to have a problem with consumer capitalism and advertising per se, only with the fact that the gun has been so culturally normalized that it is sold alongside children’s toys, clothing, food, and mouthwash at the low-end chain store such as WalMart, the nation’s top seller of guns and ammunition.8 To support her arguments, not only is the historical context for the Second Amendment ignored, United States history is ignored—absent are the voluntary militias that destroyed Native towns and raped, tortured, and slaughtered the families they found here; no armed slave patrols can be found in her work, no people enslaved, bred, bought, and sold. In accounting for the “celebrity” of the Winchester Model 73, Haag writes: “When considered from a business perspective, however, it becomes clear that the quintessential frontier rifle flourished later, in the ‘post-frontier’ early 1900s. Its celebrity biography backdated its diffusion and even its popularity.” Strangely, the author argues that after the Civil War and a lack of demand for firearms, the Winchester Company suffered a depression in sales, and changed its pitch for selling the rifle from war to “domestic” use:
Winchester’s approach meshed with the hard paramilitary realities of conquest and settlement. Indeed, it is worth contemplating how much America’s heavily armed civilian population owes to the peculiar domestic nature of both the most cataclysmic nineteenth-century war, the Civil War, and its most violent conquest, of Native American cultures. Unlike in Europe, which kept the U.S. gun business alive, but does not today have our civilian gun violence, in America war and conquest were both domestic, and the guns deployed stayed put within American borders. Western emigrants, de facto, were somewhere between soldier and civilian, their everyday existence to some extent militarized in a land in between battlefield and settlement. In Europe, conquest involved imperial expeditions; America’s conquest blurred settler into soldier—and the Model 73, in both design and germinal mystique, suited that hybrid environment.9
To the reader, this may sound very much like “gun culture.” But, there is a serious problem with Haag’s “domestication” of U.S. (and local militia) wars against Native peoples, which were, after all, foreign nations to be conquered, not an inchoate race of random individuals. Referencing only the Indian Wars in the West that followed the Civil War, Haag assumes firearms were not necessary to dispossess and ethnically cleanse the entire eastern half of the continent. In order to make this argument, Haag has to completely ignore the nearly two centuries of Anglo-American colonial violence against Native nations of the Atlantic seaboard, and the aggressive theft of Native land after negotiating international treaties with them as sovereign nations. Nor does she deal with armed slave patrols in the colonies, then in the slave states of the South.
Haag also leaves out the two-year invasion of Mexico and U.S. occupation of Mexico City, with Marines landing in Veracruz and creating a path of destruction filled with corpses of Mexican resisters all the way to the capital, where they ransacked and terrorized the population, while the U.S. Army of the West doubled the country’s con
tinental territory by annexing the northern half of Mexico’s territory, including the illegally occupied so-called “Texas Republic.” It was a two-year foreign war, 1846–48, declared by Congress. It’s not clear how Haag comes up with the “domestic” argument, except for the very significant U.S. Civil War, which permanently escalated the level of domestic violence against African-American freedmen. Unfortunately, the discredited ideology of “Manifest Destiny” is the bedrock of Haag’s analysis.
The thesis of The Gunning of America is that “gun culture” does not exist as a historical and organic reality, but rather as a commercially manufactured ideology created by the gun industry. That can be proven, the author argues, by the fact that there was no gun culture in the nearly two hundred years of the founding and development of the Thirteen British colonies in North America, nor was there such after Independence until the Civil War period in the mid-nineteenth century, when they began to be mass produced and widely distributed during five years of intense combat. Haag makes this argument based solely on her assumptions about technology, the fact that individual gunsmiths made each firearm, and none were duplicated, plus the fact that ammunition was powder, making the weapon difficult to load and reload, and clumsy to use. She argues that very few individuals owned guns, that guns were rarely used, and that they were regarded as simply another tool, like an ax. This argument is made briefly as a backdrop to dismissing the Second Amendment as meaningful or relevant, maintaining as well that the militias were ineffective. Then, she plunges into the study of the rise of the gun industry, mass production, and the search for markets.
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