America and the Cult of the Gun

 

by Lael Ewy

In the United States, our attitude toward firearms is not governed by reason or by practicality: it is a matter of faith. I do not mean this figuratively; I mean it literally. Guns, as much as the LDS church or transcendentalism, form a distinctively American system of belief.

Each era of American history is demarcated by firearms of choice:

The revolutionary era had its muskets, giving us a founding myth in "the shot heard 'round the world."

The repeating rifle and the Colt revolver we associate with westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, with "how the west was won," with what brought "the law" to "the wild west." The Colt single-action six-gun became known as the "peacemaker"; American transvaluation of values begins early and continues anon.

The early-to-mid 20th century celebrated the .45 caliber automatic, the Tommy gun, the .50 caliber machine gun. Here, the associations are both with lawmen and with gangsters. Notably, the means they used to enforce their wills were the same: the gun justifies and sanctifies the action.

Since the last half of the 20th century to the present, which "side" you are on has been determined by your firearm of choice: M-16 vs. AK-47. This split characterized the Cold War, and, not ironically, came to characterize the militarized police force versus the increasingly up-armed street gangs, with cops wielding army-surplus M-16s against the AK-equipped "thugs" in the War on Drugs. These fights were venerated via cop shows like Miami Vice and through gangsta rap.

The AR-15, the "civilian" version of the army's M-16, now wielded in many mass shootings, is also worn in silhouette as a lapel pin by members of congress, as with an American flag pin and a cross, in order to signal their piety to the cult of the gun. This inter-marrying of an ancient faith and a newer religion is nothing new: witness the pagan rituals in current Christianity. Rather than being a contradiction, this is how religion has always operated throughout time, intermixing signs and symbols to suit the beliefs of the current population. Contradictions in theology or ideology are easily papered over or, as often, simply ignored.

This, then, is what we as Americans believe: guns solve problems. It defines who we are.

The US has written the right to bear arms into the Constitution, after all, not because it makes any sense to do so but because those who wrote the Constitution also genuinely believed this as well. It runs counter to reality, of course, but that only underscores my contention: evidence, proof, is immaterial in matters of faith. We believe it because we believe it.

Many of my other liberal friends have argued in our discussions on social media that the NRA has colluded with right-wing politicians to gerrymander congressional districts, assuring that pro-gun politicians remain in power. I have no reason to believe this is not true. But the existence of the NRA as a political entity is as much an effect of cult of the gun as it is a social phenomenon reinforcing its values and power. It exists in no small part because millions of Americans are its loyal supporters, tithing to fund its operations and accepting without question its "grading" system for politicians. All of those people remain free agents in the voting booth; they vote in a way that aligns with their beliefs. And for as much as polling may indicate that the majority of Americans think this or that gun restriction is a good idea, collectively, we act in a different way.

It's sort of like asking Christians if they think there ought to be restrictions on when churches can ring their bells. Many would agree there should be, but all would also agree that there are times when church bells should ring out strong and clear.

At this point, a reasonable person might be thinking "Yeah, but church bells don't kill people."

But despite—or maybe because of—our public acts of grief when there's a mass shooting, we still believe the basic tenant of the cult of the gun: guns solve problems.

It's not that we believe that guns solve problems that makes our belief a matter of faith; it's how we believe it. The self-same logic that drives the mass shooter drives those entrusted to stop mass shooters: that guns solve problems, that their ethereal noises bring forth in their wielders godlike properties. By the logic of the cult of the gun, by its values and principles, possessing a gun gives its possessor not merely the power over life and death but the right to choose who lives or who dies. It is specifically that right that is enshrined in the 2nd Amendment, that right that gun cultists insist is theirs.

When the NRA's Wayne LaPierre said that "the only thing that stops bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," nobody on the left or the right, no reporter or pundit or pol, called him out for the statement's obvious lack of logic. And that is because this statement, while noted for its extremism, aligns with our cultural values, our true faith. It fits our images of ourselves: the white-hatted gunslinger facing down the black-hatted gunslinger, the revolutionary irregular facing down the redcoat, the bandanna-ed Rambo facing down the entire Vietnamese army, the "good" cop who ruthlessly murders the "bad" criminal.

Scroll through the cable channels, the broadcast channels, the streaming services and see how often these images, or some variation of them, are repeated throughout. They form an entire genre of video games. I am not arguing that these images cause us to believe that guns cause problems, though they may reify the idea. Rather, they proliferate in our media for the same reason believers display crosses on their walls, for the same reason men spent their entire lives building cathedrals, the completion of which they would never see.

Faith systems need not make sense, after all, and humans have often promoted wars, mass murders, even genocide in their honor.

Human sacrifice didn't end with the with the beginning of written history; it merely changed forms, acquired a different set of justifications. The cult of the gun is one of ours.

Gun Violence from a Trauma-Informed Perspective

by Lael Ewy

In what ways does a trauma-informed, harm-reduction approach make sense in challenging the prevalence of gun violence?

Let's make the assumption that the presence of a gun and the beliefs associated with that gun are important to the gun owner. This is a pretty safe assumption given the outsized emotions that even low-level discussions of gun violence elicit. The trauma-informed perspective would lead us to see these beliefs and emotions as linked to a sense of safety for the gun owner, that while guns themselves are dangerous, the safety they provide outweighs the danger.

By this perspective, any statistical, regulatory, or traditionally argumentative approaches to addressing gun violence are destined to fail.

Only by looking behind the gun to whatever need is being met by the presence of the gun can we begin to address what's really going on. We need to take the emphasis off the sacred object itself and onto the felt sense it satisfies or worldview it completes.

Let's go back to the sense of safety. If, as is often noted by gun-rights activists, a gun makes them feel “safer,” and they feel they need that gun wherever they go, the obvious conclusion is that they feel unsafe most of the time, indeed, that the world itself is not merely unsafe at this time but fundamentally an unsafe place. For these people, for some reason or another, threats loom around every corner, and the most likely target for those threats is the individual.

If so, then banning guns will be just about as effective as banning drugs has been: people will get them anyway. The drugs are meeting a need that the person feels she cannot meet any other way, and so also with the gun.

Whatever happened in the lives of gun activists, from assault to combat, from the presence of Mexicans to the election of a black president, makes them feel that an existential threat is ever-present, and that so they must be ever vigilant.

How much of this rises to the level of actual trauma or whether it's simply due to the overactive imaginations of otherwise high-strung people is immaterial; again, you can't argue someone out of a feeling of existential threat. But we can begin to help people address why they feel so constantly scared.

Unfortunately, it will require us recognizing and listening, without judgment, to perspectives that are often very difficult to hear.