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Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture And American Democracy

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A friend told me about this book and I checked it out from the library to read it for myself. I'm glad that I did so but I would NOT recommend buying it to anybody. For those interested in an OBJECTIVE look at gun issues, pro and con, I would recommend instead "The Gun Control Debate: You Decide", edited by Lee Nisbet (Amazon.com page http://tinyurl.com/y8p4we).

As for "Gun Show Nation", it's a nasty book: the author spends half her time spewing vitriol regarding white males. While I happen to BE a white male, I in no way believe that we are any better than other segments of our society. However, I also do not think we are any worse and frankly hold people who subscribe to this petty Balkanization in complete contempt.

On to the contents of the book itself. If I may digress, what is the reason that people do not walk around wearing sunglasses all of the time? Because they make everything look dark and deprive the wearer of a high degree of visual sensitivity. Well, this author seems to have taken it upon herself to look at gun owners with dark sunglasses on: she sees only a darkened image of what is there and misses out on a great deal of what makes gun ownership something that gives substantial enjoyment. Take her contemptuous comments regarding Charlton Heston, for example. She seems to have decided that since he was an NRA leader for a number of years that he's some sort of bigoted fool. The fact that he marched on D.C. with Martin Luther King Jr. apparently means nothing to her. He opposed racial segregation AND McCarthyism but since he also chose to support a right she disapproves of, he is a bad guy. The thing is, one of our country's biggest problems is how willing people are to only support rights that they themselves want to exercise and to condemn (and try to ban the exercise of) rights they dislike. We should support the ACLU and NARAL as well as the NRA if we want to make this country healthier.

On to the NRA itself. While Burbick is correct in thinking that the NRA has been predominately white and male in membership, it has at times been way AHEAD of society in the area of promoting equality. For example, Elizabeth Topperwein broke the gender barrier by competing in the National Rifle Match in 1906, winning a medal "to the cheers of the admiring men". Show me any other sport in which women competed with men on an equal footing 100 years ago! Looking back at those same American Rifleman magazines that Burbick finds antiquated, I see plenty of issues from the 1940s and 1950s (before women's liberation had even become a leading viewpoint) lauding female shooting competitors.

NRA support for equality went beyond firearms used for "sporting purposes", too. In the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement took off, Robert William (president of a North Carolina NAACP chapter) formed an NRA chapter due to threats from the KKK (many of whom were police officers), to teach black folks in the area how to use firearms for self defense. An article (by David B. Kopel) in the February 2005 issue of Reason magazine (http://www.reason.com/news/show/32889.html) details the long correlation between the restrained capability of self defense with firearms and the social justice community.

In Burdick's book, however, this ability to defend ones self would be viewed with a jaundiced eye, as something that negatively affects society. One would wish that she viewed peace and freedom as something that resulted from a positive interaction between citizens and the government, not something bestowed by government on a helpless citizenry. Owning guns is and should be a right that augments basic police preservation of a peaceable society. Armed individuals have protected other individuals and even police officers from being murdered by criminals. And while government can be a great servant of the people, history shows that circumstances can arise at any time (e.g., Hurricane Katrina) in which the onus is on you to defend yourself for a period of time.

Reading Burbick's book left me with the impression that she would have a problem with the very notion of a private citizen using a firearm to protect another citizen or a police officer. This leaves me wondering whether she would similarly look with disfavor upon people who choose to practice martial arts (who are after all predominately...male), whether she would assume that they want to go around acting violently. In fact, martial arts training includes a strong ethic in which the practitioner is taught to avoid violence, if at all possible. Similarly, gun owners have a strong incentive to avoid violent situations because abusing their right can result in their losing it.

Writing this book would have been a great opportunity to provide insight into the half of the US population who keep and use firearms responsibly. It is too bad that the author chose to support bigoted stereotypes instead.

I checked this book out at the library with an open mind, looking to get another viewpoint on the gun-control debate. What I quickly realized, unless you are are a far-left feminist, is that this book will offend in virtually every way possible. With little tolerance or deference to pesky facts, Ms. Burbick effectively alienates anyone choosing to uphold the 2nd Amendment and even asserts that by doing so, you are a bigoted fascist who only wants to segregate and demonize blacks and women. She is a perfect expample of the "tolerant" liberal establishment lashing out at a viewpoint they dislike.

In essence, she carries on the same smear campaign against a large segment of the population in a similar fashion as those on the right she so abhores. She is a professor at Washington State (I believe) and is the poster child for why many feel there is bias in our public intitutions. Her biased writing and level of vitriol mimic a narrow-minded psyche similar, albeit polar opposite, to that of those she hates!

The author attempts to frame gun ownership as something only advocated by people on the political far right and Christians. A reading of The Federalist Papers should put that thinking to rest. I am neither a conservative nor a Christian, and I'm aware of a huge, mostly quiet, diverse group who recognize that the 2nd Amendment guarantees rights that our founders considered of utmost importance. In fact, they were clear that we needed to be ready to protect ourselves from aggression (outsiders) and tyranny (our own government). They warned us not to raise permanent armies, in fact, because of the very real threat of tyranny by whomever was in power. Our right to keep and bear arms is the one amendment that ascertains the others will remain intact.

Never mind that firearms are the only reasonable means of personal protection for women, people of short stature, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Or that a 911 call or pepper spray are useless in the middle of a violent assault.

Yes, old white boys are the ones front and center at gun shows, just as they are in government, business, and in all aspects of our society. They held all the power for many years, and power-sharing is not something that happens overnight--culture creeps. And yes, they are mostly the ones who fought in the wars and developed an interest in firearms history. But that's changing. Women are starting to listen to the words of Susan B. Anthony, who advocated for females protecting themselves and not relying on males. More women are studying the Federalist Papers and other documents written by our founders.

Some of the history presented is interesting, and yet the author's bias is obvious throughout. When the Supreme Court reinterpreted the 2nd Amendment, they examined it only out of context. A closer look in context alongside the other amendments clearly shows it guarantees the individual right to keep and bear arms.

What I found most troublesome with this book is the author's jumping on the political bandwagon of framing the sales, ownership, and use of firearms as representing something called the "gun culture," as if the 2nd Amendment isn't affirming our right to keep and bear arms for very good reasons with which the founders were intimately familiar. The words of the founders are clear--they were warning that tyranny and aggression happen. They taught us to be armed and ready.

This book is an alarmist opinion piece that contains some interesting--but incomplete--history. In that sense, it's dangerous, because the author presents herself as an expert rather than an ideologue.

This book, which might have been an interesting history of American gun culture, is instead a tedious political tract. The author tries to tar every movement and organization which supports gun rights, encouraged gun ownership, or opposed gun control with the racism brush. Each and every organization is labelled as appealing to whites, or as serving the interests of whites, or of promoting a white ideal of America. While most such groups shared in the racism of their times, the author presents no evidence whatsoever that any of the groups she discusses were more particularly racist than the society at large, or anti-gun groups of the same period. The racist history of gun control movements in America is completely ignored, and no person or group supporting gun control is ever described with racial qualifiers, and are only ever mentioned as acting in the public interest. This overwhelming bias makes the book a waste of time to anyone other than the student of propaganda.

I got this book from the local library, intrigued by its title. I was amazed at how bad the book is. It is primarily a collection of anecdotes sprinkled liberally with the author's opinions. Although the author claims to be a professor at Washington State University, do not be fooled into thinking that this book is an academic work. It is anything but.

I was aware that this book was a propaganda piece before I read it; so I borrowed it from the library to avoid giving any financial support to the lunatic left. I really wanted to learn how the enemy thinks and I must say that after suffering through her extremist rant I have the answer: they simply don't think at all. If you were to cross out those passages expressing her vicious hatred of white males, and were to eliminate the anti gun rhetoric that she regurgitates as fact, there would be nothing left. It should not surprise any one that she would write such drivel or be able to find a publisher. The far left consists of just two types: dedicated Marxists, and the "useful idiots" who do their bidding. The really frightening thing about this is that this "author" is a tenured university professor who is spreading her extreme views in the classroom. Don't waste your time and especially not your money on this leftist nut.

I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness.

All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction.
Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color.
In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.)

One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.

Nearly everyone trying to understand the surge of right wing political strength over the last twenty five years seems to be fixated on the role of religion; Burbick, for a change, focuses on that other social issue, gun control and second amendment rights. She gives a sweeping history of the last hundred years, and the tradition of white males in the US proudly arming themselves while African Americans are disarmed. She also shows the way right wing advocates appropriated and revised the discourse of civil rights to claim to be oppressed by the threat of gun control laws. Expanding on the theme, she shows the way the gun rights discourse intersects with anger at ex-wives (laws against those under restraining orders possessing firearms are opposed because of the many police officers they effect(!)), the religious right, and fear of a UN-controlled America (i.e. restraints on US foreign policy). I wish she'd looked a little more into the intersections of veterans, law enforcement, militias, etc, but overall, quite good.

In GUN SHOW NATION, Joan Burbick accomplishes the unusual, although perhaps intended, feat of subverting her own book title. While the United States may well be (to borrow Eric Schlosser's coinage), a fast food nation, Ms. Burbick argues that case that we are hardly a gun show nation. To the contrary, she goes to great Constitutional, historical, and sociological lengths, coupled with first -hand observations, to assert that America's so-called gun culture (gun shows, the NRA, etc.) is largely the province of white, Anglo-Saxon males, mostly in the Western U.S.

Burbick traces the history of white gun ownership from the late 1800's of Wild Bill Cody and arguments over the need for state militias, through the 1920's and the KKK, the 1950's and the Communist Red scare, and into the last half of the 20th Century with its anti-authoritarian and civil rights movements, Vietnam, Rambo and the Terminator, and the alignment of gun rights activism with the right wing of the Republican Party. In her view, the gun is for many white men the last and ultimate repository of personal freedom, both a symbol and an actual lever of power exerted by the individual for the sake of self-protection and the exercise of democracy. Guns represent the white male's mythic role in the creation of the United States: conqueror and settler, defender of land and family from people of color and other imagined threats, now conflated through gun rights movements into safeguards of democracy.

From Burbick's perspective - although she never says as much -- the gun is overtly phallic. The loss of "white power" to the civil rights movement in the 1960's spurred the NRA's growth, and with it an explosion in gun ownership, leading to the rabid politicization of the NRA and its membership as Republican Party defenders of the Second Amendment. The gun has become, in Burbick's words, "a political fetish,...a lie that helps us live with a disturbing truth...the act of buying a gun can mimic genuine political action. Gun shows are markets for these political pantomimes that simulate the exercise of political powerwith objects that seem to contain and convey personal power...Gun purchasing is a redirection of energy to perpetuate a political system that disempowers the buyer." This last sentence is strongly reminiscent of Thomas Frank's arguments in WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? about white, lower- and middle-class conservatives acting (i.e., voting) directly against their own self-interest.

Ironically, it turns out that the rather nasty joke is on the white gun owner - "the most common lethal use of a gun in the United States is a white man killing himself." A half million Americans have been murdered with guns since 1960, but the same number have committed suicide with guns since 1965. Ten times more people die from gun suicide than gun accident; women are three times more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are four times more successful thanks to their democracy-defending guns. One senses in Ms. Burbick's writing a certain wry satisfaction at this turnabout.

GUN SHOW NATION alternates between historical perspective, legalistic interpretations of the Second Amendment, and anecdotal, on-the-scene reportage from gun shows. The latter chapters are the most interesting and truest to the book's title. More such first-hand reporting would have been welcomed, although the author's touch on these regrettably falls a bit short of the slice of life reporting of Barbara Ehrenreich or Mr. Schlosser. Ms. Burbick properly avoids the complications of assault rifles and Columbine-style shootings, but she offers few statistics and little hard evidence on the gun show nation she is describing. She also eschews commentary on gun control legislation or how to reconcile the cult-like worship of the Second Amendment with citizenry's own security against increasingly lethal weaponry. On balance, GUN SHOW NATION offers an interesting and well-written socio-historical perspective on the American gun rights movement and a disturbing introduction to the bizarre, (mostly) white male subculture of gun shows.