GUN SHOW NATION
Gun Culture and American Democracy
by
Joan Burbick
The New Press
Hardcover, 217 pages
ISBN 1-59558-087-5
Previously published in
In Gun Show Nation, Joan Burbick undermines the arguments of the powerful gun lobby and attempts to show how the gun rights movement has become part of a larger backlash against the civil rights movement. The author of three other works of nonfiction, Burbick reports with the kind of detail obtained only by rubbing elbows with and interviewing those who are pro-gun. She has lived in the rural West for 30 years, shot guns herself, and wrote and taught at the university level. Her bias, however, is readily apparent. To discredit the gun lobby, she frequently refers to the white men who are far and away the largest contingent of those pursuing gun rights, that they are sexist and racist, and that the issue of gun rights is only part of a larger conservative movement to maintain white power and deny civil rights to minorities and women.
It is unfortunate she found herself compelled to rely on stereotypes. It is also unfortunate that, at times, she makes conflicting arguments that defeat themselves. Specifically, when she outlines the use of guns in the South after the Civil War to maintain white supremacy, she states that The effective disarmament of blacks was necessary to create an apartheid regime in the Southern states. This obviously implies that armed blacks might have prevented such apartheid. She then reverses course and argues that, in the Colfax Massacre, blacks who armed themselves were slaughtered by armed whites anyway. This, she argues, proves the right to bear arms does not guarantee protection. Instead, protection came only when the right to vote was guaranteed to minorities, such that minorities became involved in government, and that Government of the people and for the people can protect an entire land. What she does not address is how the Government of the people and for the people actually provided protection by sending in armed troops to enforce civil rights.
She is on much firmer ground when she directly attacks the pro-gun arguments, the most common of which is the Second Amendment. According to those who support the right to guns, this part of the Bill of Rights absolutely and without question guarantees each individual s right to bear arms. Here s what it actually says:
A
well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a
Proponents of gun-control assert
that the first clause, regarding a militia, limits the second clause, regarding
the right of the people to bear arms. In
other words, there is no individual right to a gun, but only a collective
right, in the form of a regulated militia, such as the National Guard. This is consistent with the historical
context of the Second Amendment by which the Founding Fathers asserted the need
for a state militia, well-regulated, to ward off potential predations by an
abusive government. What Burbick does
not address is how this principle of the Second Amendment shares common ground with
pro-gun advocates that individuals need weapons to fight a tyrant. The difference is that the weapons should be
in the hands of a well-trained, well-regulated, and properly led militia. A good example of how the Second Amendment
was intended to apply, being necessary to a
The gun-lobby ignores the reference to both a militia and the requirement that it be regulated. Instead, the gun-lobby focuses solely on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, which the gun-lobby interprets to mean not the right of the people as a whole in the form of a militia such as the National Guard, but as the individual right of each and every person. As Burbick points out, the phrase well-regulated militia should not be ignored but was intended to mean something:
Trust
was placed in these men to defend the community and the state. With that trust supposedly came
responsibility and regulation, and officers and training were part of the
militia experience. The adjective
well-regulated was not an afterthought because a fear of the unruly, armed
mob haunted the essays and letters of the post-revolutionary writers.
This
intent of the Second Amendment has been lost on the NRA and its followers. Instead, for gun advocates, each individual
with a gun is a patriot, a defender of the nation s freedoms, and a fighter of
crime. Using this as a selling point, gun
sellers have steadily increased the sale of guns since World War II, with sales
peaking in 1993 at the time of the Brady Bill.
Sales in
And what are all these guns used for? Hunting has steadily declined, target practicing has become more difficult due to the lack of shooting ranges, but killing has kept pace with drug trafficking, bank robberies, and physical assaults. So how has the sale of guns decreased crime? It hasn t. Rather, as Burbick states, the bumper-sticker language of political freedom attached to the gun has become an advertising gimmick to help foster sales. Or better yet the concept of the absolute right of an individual to own a gun is a lie that helps us live with a disturbing truth.
The truth is how guns are used to kill. Since 1960, 500,000 Americans have been murdered with guns, and since 1965, another 500,000 Americans have committed suicide with guns. Each year, 1.5 million women are raped or physically assaulted by intimate partners, and the risk of even greater harm from guns in the home is so great that it is a federal crime to possess a firearm while subject to a restraining order from an intimate partner or after a misdemeanor conviction of domestic violence. As Burbick states about the gun lobby:
No
one talked about domestic violence, because violence in the home didn t have
the emotional punch of a violent predator breaking into your home. Then the
homeowner was a hero defending his property, not a villain beating up on his
spouse. The vigilante gun owner could hang a sign in his window, announcing IS
THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH? TRESPASS HERE AND FIND OUT. Or, WARNING!! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN. But what kind
of sign could the battered wife hang up?
The absurd result of the position of gun activists is that guns are essentially constitutionally protected products. An extreme example of this is the sale of a .50 caliber rifle with a scope and tripod, advertised as the ultimate sniper rifle with a range of 1,000 yards ten football fields. It sells for $3,000 to $7,500. Who needs this kind of weapon? Are we all some crazed Ted Nugent in a loin cloth, peering through a scope and ready to drop anyone dead who comes within 1,000 yards of our home? This kind of gun is obviously nothing more than a killing machine for use only by a highly trained soldier in special-ops. But it is sold at profitable gun shows across the nation. The argument that we are safer in our homes because we have access to such a weapon, or a MAC-10, an Uzi, an AK-47, or any other similar type of military weapon, would be laughable but for the danger and risks posed by their availability to us on the gun market. The hard truth is that guns are profitable, gun shows make money for those who sell guns, and with approximately 5,000 gun shows across the country each year, there s a lot of money to be made. What s worse is the gun lobby, and its politics, have gone international to promote gun rights overseas to block efforts which might otherwise limit guns in areas of the Third World already rife with civil unrest and genocide.
Burbick s
book explores in detail a difficult and politically explosive subject. Her writing is spare and to the point. She doesn t flinch from her position on gun
control. She exposes the fallacious
arguments of those who argue we have a right to any kind of gun and any number
of them. But she may be waging a losing
battle. The
The Miller
decision arose from the 1934 National Firearms Act, enacted in response to a
public outcry over the Valentine s Day Massacre. That statute required the registration of
certain guns including fully automated weapons and sawed-off shotguns. In Miller,
two suspected bank robbers and moonshiners were arrested for having an
unlicensed sawed-off shotgun. The
Supreme Court ruled that in the absence of evidence that a sawed-off shotgun
had some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a
well-regulated militia, the Second Amendment did not guarantee the right to
keep and bear such a weapon. (See
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