Marian Ronan

The Gun is Our God

The following is a review that appears in the current issue of Kerux, the newsletter of Pax Christi Metro New York, the New York chapter of the international Catholic peace association.

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. City Lights Books, 2018. 208 pp. $16.95.

To say that we have been hearing a lot lately about guns in the US, and about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, is to vastly understate the case. And the activism of the Parkland shooting survivors might even cause us to feel hopeful about US gun policy. Indeed, former SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stephens has recently called for the repeal of the Second Amendment!!

In Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides timely–and stunning–context for this conversation. Drawing on her expertise in the history of indigenous peoples and American history overall, Dunbar-Ortiz shows that the current gun crisis is actually about the identity of our country from its very roots. Changing it thus requires a good deal more than the repeal of the Second Amendment.

To begin with, Dunbar-Ortiz traces our “gun culture” back well beyond the writing of the US Constitution, to the “covenant ideology” of the earliest Puritan settlers. These settlers believed that since God had bequeathed the land to them, the massacring (with guns) of the indigenous people on that land was justified. Catholics might be tempted to a certain self-righteousness here since the author links these actions to the settlers’ Calvinist exceptionalist theology.  As the book proceeds, however, it becomes clear that a huge percentage of all white Americans eventually buy into this gun-powered exceptionalism. Dunbar-Ortiz also explains that the American Revolution was fought, in large part, because the British government had forbidden the settlers to cross the Appalachians to seize even more indigenous land, with the much-hated “Stamp Tax” used, in fact, to fund the British protection of those lands from settler appropriation.

The militias cited in the Second Amendment actually existed long before the Revolution, with male settlers forced to form a civilian militia to destroy indigenous villages and people during “King Philip’s War” in New England, 1675-78. In the South, these mandatory militias took the form of slave patrols to control enslaved Africans and kill those who resisted.  In each case, white male citizens were not merely entitled to own guns but were required to do so by law to protect and extend the profit-driven ownership of land and “chattel.” After the Civil War, slave patrol members—who had served in the Confederate Army in many cases–morphed into heroic cowboys like Daniel Boone and Jesse James. Romanticized in American fiction and later on television, these “cowboys“ had, in real life continued the historic American brutality against “the Indians” and slaves.

Absorbing as all this may be for those committed to peace-making, the final chapters of Loaded, in which Dunbar-Ortiz moves historic US gun culture into the present, prove to be even more galvanizing. For although the militias that murdered indigenous people and kept African-Americans enslaved were always supported, to some extent, by the military, the centrality of the military to that gun culture becomes ever more apparent throughout the twentieth century. From the US invasion and occupation of the Philippines, to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, to JFK’s invocation of the (new) “frontier,” to US troops describing Vietnam as “Indian Territory,” metaphors of Indian defeat and extermination have underpinned American militarism. Is it any surprise, then, that even as we face this national crisis of gun violence, seven out of world’s ten largest gun-manufacturers are US corporations, and that since the war in Vietnam the US has disseminated over a billion guns world-wide?

Repealing the Second Amendment is of course, a good idea, as is passing the gun-control laws demanded by our young people. But since, in America, as Dunbar-Ortiz argues compellingly, “the Gun is God,” we need a whole lot more than that to change things. We need conversion.