Sidney, I think you may have bought the entire mythology about guns in America. I hope someday you will understand that it is a marketing ploy more than anything. For example, did you know that during Revolutionary times, very few Americans owned guns, and that the marketing push came after the Civil War, when the military gun manufacturers were struggling to stay in business? I think this whole gun business has been glamorized by wrapping the American flag around it, but really the gun industry is a bad karma business like the cigarette makers, fueled by myth and feeding addiction:
The truth, however, is more complicated. Emory University historian
Michael Bellesiles has shown that from the Revolution to about 1850, no
more than a tenth of the population owned guns. So how did guns seep
into the culture? Samuel Colt and the Civil War. Colt was an impresario,
targeting his company's firearms at middle-class anxieties about
self-defense by giving his guns names like "Equalizer." Then came the real
boom: Fort Sumter. Between 1861 and 1865, guns went into mass
production, and both Union and Confederate soldiers kept their weapons
after Appomattox. Suddenly there was widespread ownership, and an
industry to feed a growing market. If we separate legend from history, guns
can be seen not just as inviolate relics of the Revolution but as what they
are: products.
newsweek.com
And here is a discussion of how strange American society is:
The Psyche of A 'Gunocracy'
Firearms are icons of freedom and power, 'equalizers' in an
egalitarian country. Can we change our myths and break this
troubling bond?
By Robert Jay Lifton
Beneath the murderous behavior of Buford O. Furrow Jr. flows a dark
undercurrent that deforms the American psyche: our unique bond with the
gun. That bond readily lends itself to zealotry, the dangers of which
become all the more terrifying in our age of high, unregulated technology.
The historian Richard Hofstadter once said that after a lifetime studying the
American experience, what he found most deeply troubling was the
country's inability to come to terms with the gun and its association with the
warrior subculture. Indeed, the gun has become close to a sacred object,
revered by many as the essence of American life.
The sources of our "gunocracy" date back at least to the Revolutionary
War and our romanticized visions of citizen militias, which place the gun at
the center of our national creation myth. That mythology was elaborated in
heroic frontier tales and given more recent expression in Western movies,
such as the John Wayne film sagas. Through the flux of people and ideas,
the gun remained entrenched as an essential aspect of our identity — the
icon of freedom, power and the rights of the individual. In that way, the gun
has filled much of the psychological vacuum created by the absence of a
traditional American culture. Looked upon early as the "equalizer," it
became an important vehicle for our sense of ourselves as an egalitarian
people.
The contemporary resurgence of paramilitary groups has been
accompanied by fierce resistance to political efforts to impose the mildest
kind of gun control. And this is not surprising, since even God, as
envisaged by these groups, is gun-centered ("Our God is not a wimp" is
one popular slogan). The violence committed in his name is likely to be
performed on behalf of a "white race" supposedly endangered by Jews,
blacks and homosexuals.
Whatever the social dislocations that fuel such racist ideology, the gun is
always available to provide an absolute solution. The gun is crucial, as well,
to the enactment of vengeance, so central to the martyrology of the racial
right. Furrow lived with the widow of Robert Mathews, who formed a
racist group called the Order and was killed in a gunfight with the FBI. The
Order, in turn, took its name from a novel by William Pierce, "The Turner
Diaries," about a revolutionary martyr who helps to overthrow a
Zionist-controlled American government and wipe out nonwhites. Seeking
to avenge other martyrs of the racial right, Timothy McVeigh timed the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing to coincide with the second anniversary of
the government's ill-advised attack in Waco, Texas, on the Branch
Davidians — and on the very same day that Richard Snell, a leading figure
in a number of far-right groups, was executed for murder.
Killers like Furrow and McVeigh have long since upgraded their arsenals
from flintlock rifles and Colt pistols to assault weapons and fertilizer
bombs. The latter are lethal enough, but we should not delude ourselves
into believing that weapons worship stops there. Aum Shinrikyo, the
fanatical Japanese cult that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways in
March 1995, killing 12 people and injuring 5,000, has another lesson to
teach us. Its guru and his disciples had no equivalent tradition of gunocracy
to draw upon. They turned quickly to weapons of mass destruction,
producing chemical and biological stockpiles and trying to acquire nuclear
weapons, as well. Such ultimate weapons are in no way outside the
imagination of the American racial right: all are embraced in "The Turner
Diaries," in which the destruction of most of the world's population is
achieved by nuclear "cleansing." In other words, the worship of the gun can
be extended to weaponry of any kind, including that which may destroy
everything.
Besides fanatics and mentally disturbed people (Furrow appears to be
both), many ordinary Americans have also become caught up in the cult of
the gun. For them, it is not a jarring source of violence but as much an
accepted part of the landscape as forests and rivers. Such people often
resist controls over the objects they revere. But human beings are capable
of modifying their own mythologies. After the tragedies in Littleton, Colo.;
Atlanta, and now Los Angeles, Americans have shown signs of a change in
their feelings about guns, seeing them increasingly as more dangerous than
sacred. That kind of collective psychological shift is necessary if we are
ever to transcend the crippling fraternity of the gun.
Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and
Psychology at John Jay College of the City University of New York.
His new book, "Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo,
Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism," will be
published by Metropolitan Books in October.
Newsweek, August 23, 1999
newsweek.com
These articles come from a recent Newsweek cover story on the pathology of guns in American life. I am sorry it is not quite so exciting as the development of the BreastNest and all that, and I hope that much profit is made on this worthy product, but I think this is more important. As I understand it, this is the fourth time in its history that Newsweek has taken an editorial opinion on a subject. It does this because guns are killing us, as individuals and as a society !! |
