Tripe. Lifton attempts to paint gun owners with a broad brush as racist, homophobic white male neo-nazi terrorists. He uses adjectives like "troubling", zealotry, and radical to describe gun owners as some kind of homogenous group. Shame on him. If equally broad comments were used to describe homosexuals as self-absorbed, promiscuious disease carriers, he'd be pronouncing the author as "mentally distrubed".
This piece is just the first indication that the media will try to discredit and demonize gun owners. Editorials in other media outlets have said, in effect, gun owners actively help criminals obtain guns; that gun owners are responsible for crime; that they won't be responsible unless harsh laws force it on them and more. The media knows that a "daily drumbeat" of coverage will sway public opinion, whether or not there is an ounce of truth in it. They've adopted Himmler's adage about repeating a lie often enough and long enough. No doubt that as soon as new regulations are in place in Washington D.C., the media will jump on the first post-Heller decision homicide as "proof" the Supreme Court has blood on its hands.
Fortunately, statistics and research shows that Lifton and his ilk are wrong. Predictions of citizens running amok and shooting each other over fender benders or parking places have been proven false. Concealed carry licensing has been successful in every state (44 of them) and many law enforcement officials have converted from opponents to proponents.
Guns are not evil. They are inanimate objects. It is how they are perceived that makes the difference. Loftin views them as evil, but that's like saying a hammer or steak knife is evil. Nothing illustrates the point better than a 1995 DOJ-NIJ study of 20,000 households. In homes where boys owned legal guns, they had much lower rates of delinquency and drug use than homes with illegal guns and they were even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns." (Between 1 and 10% less than non-gun owning homes).
[Look for NCJ-143454, August 1995]
Loftin reveals his personal distaste for "American culture" by claiming there really isn't one. But what is really showing is, I think, his irrational fear of an inanimate object. While guns can be used for evil purposes by evil men, so can any object. It should be evil men he fears, not the objects they use.
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?
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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.
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