Existential Threat and Gun Ownership
The recent spate of shootings in the US has led to the usual reactions from all the usual participants to discussion. Democrats and progressives have rung the alarm bell and lamented their inability to pass even the weakest of gun control bills. Republicans and conservatives have blamed illegal immigration, street crime, and spread doubt about the motives of various gunmen without addressing root causes of gun violence.
The problem in America is clearly guns. If there were fewer weapons in American hands there would be less shootings, and less death. It’s not a value statement to say as much. Even if I were to be a firm supporter of the ability to own guns, which I would partially say I am, it simply is the case that the root issue for every shooting is the ability to shoot, ie, having a gun. However our attempts to legislate away that reality are bound to fail if we don’t first address the human element of guns.
Gun violence is endemic in America, you can’t go more than a week without another shooting occurring somewhere across America’s wide landscape. And while fewer guns would result in fewer shootings it’s also not the primary hindrance to slowing shootings in America. Even if we took half the guns out of homes, there would still be an arsenal big enough to arm 200 million Americans. While there have been successful examples of state action to reduce the amount of guns and thereby reduce gun violence, any such attempt at the federal level in America would surely be less successful than places like Australia, or Brazil. For one thing, both of those countries were able to first enact legislation making certain firearms illegal, which they then followed with the buyback of the now illegal weapons (impossible with America’s current political roadblocks). But secondly, they didn’t have to reckon with the weight of identity and culture around guns.
America’s gun problem, or should I say its problem with handling its gun problem, is the cultural factors that have formulated around gun ownership and fear. Add in polarization, where one political movement sees shootings as a product of gun ownership and the other sees shootings as a product of anything else they can think of at the time, and you are left with a country that is unwilling to construct any attempt to mitigate the spread of gun violence.
Identity politics is often bandied about as a dirty word for politics that are related to elements of being as opposed to broad principled stands or values. That’s of course reductive, everyone operates on some level of identity politics, if you discounted your own identity in selecting your political beliefs how would you ever have the grounding to make choose those beliefs in the first place? We are all products of our identity, some we choose ourselves, some we are born with, and some we acquire through the happenstance of life. And that’s not all bad. Identities give us markers on what we think about ourselves and what we find important in life. Not all identities are the type that make for the intractable political differences of today. I’m from Minnesota. I’m a Minnesotan, and while that identity has surely imparted some level of political belief on me, it’s not the kind of identity that would make me uncooperative to compromise.
The politics of identity can be intractable. When politics meets the edges of individual or group identities a system can run up against a brick wall. Democracy requires give-and-take, a push-and-pull of ideas and ultimately compromise. You rarely get everything you want in a democracy but you also rarely get everything you didn’t want either, and there is always the ability to revisit the subject later when attitudes shift. Identity politics can impede the push-and-pull of democracy because some matters of identity are so indelible with the person that to compromise would be to allow for a part of themselves to die. This existential threat is the bane of democratic society, when members of a whole feel that their very beings will be put at risk by legislation, their ability to accept and compromise transformers into fighting for dear-life.
The gun movement in America has built more than just an enthusiast network or human interest group, they have crafted a true political identity. An identity which sees any strengthening of gun laws as a direct threat to their very being. This is why gun legislation is lately doomed in America. The people fighting for their rights to keep and bear arms believe they are in an existential struggle against the state to maintain their arsenal and their identities.
Existential threat emboldens groups and individuals. Look no further than the courageous fight of the Ukrainian people against Russian invasion. Even as no outside intelligence agency gave Ukraine even a fighting chance to hold off the Russians, they have managed to not only hold out but have already scuttled Russia’s most ambitious war aims. No doubt Ukraine has benefited from the outside military support of America and to a lesser extent Europe, but their real fighting strength comes from a form of identity politics. The Ukrainian identity is worth fighting and dying for.
American gun owners believe gun rights are worth dying over, or at least they espouse as much. But perhaps the most fascinating element of gun identity politics and existential threat of gun control is that things are actually going really well for gun identitarians. In 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that the second amendment of the US Constitution does in their reading ensure the right of individual Americans to own firearms. The battle over permitted conceal-and-carry saw the expansion of that right to nearly every state in America during the 90s and 00s while the expansion of a completely unregulated “constitutional carry” has now prevailed in 25 states meaning that anyone is allowed to carry a firearm in public regardless of training or experience. Furthermore, the rightward bent of the current Supreme Court seems likely to smash even more small scale gun control measures in the coming years.
It seems odd to believe that your identity is under existential threat when the reality is that it is becoming easier and easier to be you wherever you want whenever you want. So what then is driving this sense of threat?
The transformation of the gun lobby organization, the National Rifle Association (NRA) from a responsible gun ownership lobby to lobbying for the constitutional right of individuals to arm themselves like a solo military is part of the story. The other part of the story is the internalization of existential threat in the form of fear.
The gun industry uses the fear of its identitarians to juice sales and record record profits. That’s why the election of Democratic presidents corresponds with increased gun sales. As identitarians fear that politicians will be coming for their guns they go to supplement their arsenals. The language and imagery used by gun manufacturers to sell their products has become increasingly dark, aggressive, and fearful. Convincing their consumers that they need their products in order to protect themselves, their property, and their families against the numerous foes who haunt our country. This language necessarily works because it fits the world view of someone who has been hyped on an identitarian existential threat for decades even as we keep marching towards a more heavily armed America.
Internalizing fear, even irrational fear, can lead to dangerous circumstances. When you’ve been repeatedly told to fear for your property, family, or self, you are going to be more willing to take dramatic action to protect everything you hold dear. Add in that being armed with the most efficient form of individual weaponry humankind has ever crafted and you can better understand the spate of seemingly pointless shootings of people who have only dared to knock on the wrong door or drive into the wrong driveway.
American gun owners are winning, but don’t tell them that.
America’s gun problem is ultimately a culture problem. While the root cause is the number of guns, it fails to take into account the incredible power that a culture of gun identitarianism and existential threat has been built around gun law. The first step to reducing the gun violence epidemic is to find a way to de-radicalize gun ownership. We need to find a way to show gun owners that the world is less dark, less dangerous, and more amenable to them. We need to be clear that gun identitarians have won at almost every legal and political turn for the last three decades and that their fear of the government coming to take their guns is not only irrational, it’s virtually impossible.
It may feel like a hostage situation, but in order to ratchet down on American gun violence we need to prove to gun identitarians that they are not under threat and that America accepts a certain level of gun culture. We can counteract the corrosive effect of gun marketing by passing laws which limit the use of militarism and fear-mongering in gun ads. It should be fine to market your products to a willing consumer base but it should not be fine to use parallels to the American military or to engage in hypothetical conspiracies against fellow citizens. We could pass laws which prohibit political lobbies from engaging in violent threats toward lawmakers.
Neither of these suggestions would bring down the number of guns in America and ultimately they may not make a discernible impact on the overall number of gun deaths in America. However, decades of existentialism and fear have created a class of gun owners who need to be de-radicalized and calmed before we can continue a rational discussion about gun violence and prevention. It’s a deeply unsatisfying conclusion, and it might be so incrementalist as to amount to nothing in the face of American carnage, but democracies must always be mindful of identitarianism, because a minority that perceives existential threat will always be more motivated than a majority who doesn't.
