SIX

THE SECOND AMENDMENT AS A COVENANT

The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the writings of the “Founding Fathers,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag,1 Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, the Second Amendment, and even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are all bundled as sacred fetishes² and rituals that comprise the U.S. state doctrine—American Exceptionalism—which is capable of absorbing and adjusting to disruptive cultural and political changes, such as by taming Dr. King’s radicalism. An aspect of this most visible today is the all-powerful “gun lobby,” whose members are devoted to the presumed sanctity of the Second Amendment. In the forefront of these Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old British and Northern European settlers who say that they represent “The People” and have the right to bear arms, the right to have military bases around the world, and the right—even the duty—to overthrow any government that does not, in their view, adhere to the God-given covenant.³

In a satirical essay written following the Orlando nightclub mass killing that took forty-nine lives, historian and theologian Garry Wills concluded that gun control in the United States is “inconceivable.”

And it is historically inconceivable—everyone knows that guns are what made this country great, taming the West, keeping up our fighting spirit, shoving sissies aside as we make our tough progress.

It is also theologically inconceivable. God gave us guns to show us who we are. Giving up the gun would be surrender to evil, taking us abruptly into eschatological time.

So this time let us skip all the sighing and promising and moments of silence. Why keep up the pretense that we are going to take any real and practical steps toward sanity? Everyone knows we are not going to do a single damn thing. We can’t. We are captives of The Gun.

The Gun is patriotic.

The Gun is America.

The Gun is God.4

According to the founding narratives of the United States, colonists from Europe acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who lacked a concept of private property, and therefore could claim no right, in any Western sense, to the land. The historical record is clear, however, that English colonizers aggressively displaced a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed. These nations maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them; they were stewards of one of the seven locales of agricultural civilization, which they created over tens of thousands of years. Many have noted that had North America been an unpopulated wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived without forcibly appropriating the Indigenous peoples’ developed lands and resources. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, cotton, and other crops domesticated centuries before the arrival of European invaders who took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.

The United States is not unique among nations in forging origin myths, but one of the few in which its citizens seem to believe it to be exceptional by grace of the Creator, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify genocide, appropriation of the continent, and then domination of the rest of the world. Other such exceptionalist national entities are Israel and the now defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both of which were founded in 1948, as well as the Ulster-Scots colony of Northern Ireland. None of these, however, openly pursued global “full-spectrum dominance” by formal military doctrine, as has the United States.5 The origin narratives of these colonizers are based on Judeo-Christian scripture, but the states they founded were not theocracies. According to their narratives, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their god, in turn, vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.

The influence of scriptures was pervasive among many of the Western social and political thinkers whose ideas the founders of the first British colonies in North America drew upon. Historian Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that “certain societies, in certain eras of their development,” have looked to the scriptures for guidance, and likens it to the way “the human genetic code operates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, directly determined what people would believe and what they would think and what they would do.” Dan Jacobson, a citizen of Boer-ruled South Africa, whose parents were immigrants, observes that, “like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England, [the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the heathen, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf.”⁶

Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the United States had a similar sense of a providential opportunity to make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, “it is from [the] scriptures that western society learned how to think historically.” The key moment in history, according to covenant ideology, “involves the winning of ‘the Land’ from alien, and indeed evil, forces.”7

The principal conduit of the Hebrew Scriptures and covenant ideology for Christians was John Calvin, the French religious reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the British invasion and colonization of Ireland. English Puritan settlers drew upon Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay colony, as did the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding their South African colony during the same period. In accord with the doctrine of predestination, Calvin taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are “called” by God and are among the “elect.” Salvation therefore has nothing to do with one’s actions; one is born as part of the elect or not, according to God’s will. Individuals could never know for certain if they were among the elect, but outward good fortune, especially material wealth, was taken to be a manifestation of “election”; conversely, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin, were taken as evidence of damnation. “The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists . . . is obvious,” Akenson observes, “for one could easily define the natives as immutably profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue.”⁸

The U.S. Constitution represents for many citizens a covenant with God, and the covenant concept goes back to the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. Forty-one of the “Pilgrims,” all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking God’s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed there “to plant the First Colony” and did therefore “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic” to be governed by “just and equal Laws” enacted “for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”

The original Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, adopted an official seal designed in England before their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, “Come over and help us.”9 Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the U.S. military veterans of the “Spanish-American War” (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed U.S. soldier and a sailor, with a U.S. battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue, calling it “humanitarian intervention.”

British settlers in North America brought with them the covenant ideology of Calvinism that had been the work of the Scotsman John Knox. John Locke, also a Scot, would later secularize the covenant idea into a “contract”—the “social contract”—whereby individuals sacrifice their liberty only through consent. Adam Smith, another Scot, during the period of the founding of the United States further developed Locke’s theories, which were embraced by the “founding fathers,” so that the U.S. republic became the first independent nation state founded on the ideology of capitalism, of land as a commodity.10

In other modern constitutional states, constitutions come and go, and they are never considered sacred in the manner patriotic U.S. citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written constitution. The Magna Carta is an important and inspiring historical document, but it does not reflect a covenant. U.S. citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the “founders” of the United States and continuing to the present, the cultural persistence of the covenant idea of exceptionalism, and thus the bedrock of U.S. patriotism, represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identities. Both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and the advent of Nationalist Party rule in South Africa were emulations of the U.S. founding; certainly many U.S. Americans, particularly evangelical Protestants, closely identify with the state of Israel, as they did with Afrikaner-ruled South Africa. Patriotic U.S. politicians and citizens take pride in exceptionalism. Historians and legal theorists characterize U.S. statecraft and empire as those of a “nation of laws,” rather than one dominated by a particular class or group of interests, suggesting a kind of purity or quasi-holiness.

Parallel to the idea of the U.S. Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, and promising “free land,” even bribed—immigrants to populate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work in mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for citizenship mandate adherence to the Constitution through taking the Citizenship Oath, which involves swearing to “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law . . . so help me God.” Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be faithful and patriotic, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, their historical role is different from that of the colonial settlers who founded the republic. The original settlers are those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain, but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed Indian blood, before and after Independence, in order to gain possession of land; these were English Pilgrims, the Scots-Irish, and French Huguenots, Calvinists all, but also German Moravians and English Quakers, who took the land they believed had been bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. This remains the ideology that rules the United States.

New evangelical offshoots refashioned Calvinist doctrines to do away with church hierarchies and decentralize. Frontier settlers continued to regard themselves as chosen people of the covenant, commanded by God to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel, and many towns in the United States, like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, reflect this fervor with their Biblical names. Many settlers saw themselves, as their descendants see themselves, as the true and authentic patriots, specially endowed individuals entitled to the land through their blood sacrifice. The land won through bloodshed was not necessarily conceived in terms of particular parcels for a farm that would be passed down through generations. Most of the settlers who fought for it kept moving on nearly every generation. Land was property and interchangeable with other tracts of land for commercial agriculture. In the South many lost their holdings to land companies that then sold the land to slavers seeking to increase the size of their plantations. Without the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, a farmer growing cash crops could not compete on the market. Once in the hands of settlers, the land itself was no longer sacred, as it had been for the Indigenous. Rather, it was private property, a commodity from which to earn profit—capable of making a man a king, or at least wealthy. Later, when Euro Americans had occupied the continent and urbanized much of it, this quest for land and the sanctity of private property were reduced to a lot with a house on it, and “the land” came to mean the country, the flag, the military, as in “the land of the free” of the national anthem, or Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Those who died fighting in foreign wars were said to have sacrificed their lives to protect “this land” that the old settlers had spilled blood to acquire. Expunged from national memory is that the majority of the blood spilled was that of Indigenous families.

These then were the settlers upon which the national origin narrative is based, the ultimately dispensable cannon fodder for the taking of the land and the continent, the white foot soldiers of empire, the “yeoman farmers” romanticized by Thomas Jefferson. They were not of the ruling class, but a few slipped through and later were drawn into it as elected officials and military officers, thereby maintaining the facade of a classless society and a democratic empire. The founders were English patricians, slavers, large agribusiness operators, or otherwise successful businessmen thriving on the slave trade, exports produced by enslaved Africans, and property sales. After Independence, when descendants of the common settlers—overwhelmingly Presbyterian or otherwise Calvinist Protestant—were accepted into the ruling class, they usually became Episcopalians, members of the elite church linked to the state Church of England.11

The Second Amendment is one of ten amendments comprising the original “bill of rights” for individual citizens that were added to the completed U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment, “freedom of speech,” is most revered, and is considered an attribute of U.S. exceptionalism. The Second Amendment was drafted by James Madison and added to the U.S. Constitution in 1781. Little attention was paid to the Second Amendment until it became controversial during the second half of the twentieth century, and it continues coinciding with political, social, and economic shifts that opened nearly everything to question in the 1960s, particularly segregation and anti-Black racism. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, some white men, increasingly buttressed by the National Rifle Association, began pointing to the Second Amendment as an absolute right for the individual to bear arms and as justification for limiting firearms regulation, raising gun ownership as a constitutional issue, a covenant matter. On the National Rifle Association’s website, every possible argument for gun control is contested based on the exact wording of the Second Amendment, in part by quoting the founders:

George Mason asked, “[W]ho are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.”

Thomas Jefferson said, “No free man shall be debarred the use of arms.”

Patrick Henry said, “The great object is, that every man be armed.”

Richard Henry Lee wrote that, “to preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms.”

Thomas Paine noted, “[A]rms . . . discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.”

Samuel Adams warned, “The said Constitution [must] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”12

Up to the 1970s, there had been little juridical attention paid to the Second Amendment, and it was not held to be sacrosanct by anyone, its mandate being taken for granted. In 1876, while the U.S. Army of the West was slaughtering Plains peoples and the buffalo with thousands of Winchesters, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank that “the right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” There was no recorded negative reaction to that decision. A second Supreme Court decision in 1939, United States v. Miller, ruled that the federal government and the states could limit any weapon types not having a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” Various regulations ensued in subsequent decades. But, following some forty years of political lobbying and challenging regulations, in 2008 the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, that held the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess and carry firearms, the late Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority. For the first time, the highest court, the ultimate interpreter of the meaning of the United States Constitution, decided that the Second Amendment means “the individual” when it says “people.” However, the decision left open the issue of government regulations: “[N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”13

A Gallup poll released soon after the Heller decision found that 73 percent of those polled—a far larger percentage than gun owners or N.R.A. members—believed that the Second Amendment guarantees individual gun rights, while 20 percent believed it only guarantees the rights of state militia members. Only 7 percent had no opinion.¹⁴ But, overwhelmingly, U.S. citizens, not only white men or the N.R.A., accept the notion of sanctity associated with the Second Amendment, as with the Constitution as a whole. The lobbying efforts of the N.R.A. and advertising by U.S. gun manufacturers are the designated culprits in most arguments for gun regulations and bans of some weapons, but the N.R.A. and gun manufacturers’ success is due to a larger ideological hegemony that they did not create, but rather have exploited.

The majority argument in the Heller case is an example of the “originalism” that began as a marginal concept, slowly growing into a movement during the 1980s when conservative judges were appointed under the twelve-year stretch of the Ronald Reagan−George H.W. Bush administrations. The beginning of the movement is attributed to a speech in 1971 by the late Robert Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems.”¹⁵ Judge Bork was a professor of law at Yale and had served in government as Solicitor General and a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, but the Senate, with a Democratic majority, rejected the nomination. Civil Rights and women’s groups lobbied against Bork’s appointment, based on his record of having opposed federal intervention in enforcing voting rights in states and his call for annulling previous Supreme Court decisions on Civil Rights. However, Bork did not interpret the Second Amendment as applying to individuals and was critical of the National Rifle Association for promoting it as such.16 Bork was far surpassed during the following two decades by even more extreme judges, particularly Scalia, relying on originalism and gutting the Voting Rights Act, abortion rights, and affirmative action. But by the end of the Reagan presidency the Conservative movement, buttressed by a large evangelical constituency, had reached critical mass; Supreme Court decisions and legislation followed.

The genealogy of the ascension of constitutional “originalism” begins with the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools,¹⁷ with opposing arguments in favor of “states’ rights” and anti-communism. White Citizens Councils formed in the Southern states, along with other such groups, labeling all policies and acts of desegregation as communist-inspired. The John Birch Society, birthed in 1958 in Massachusetts by the scion of the Welch candy fortune, produced an ideology, a plan of action, and even a military arm in the “Minutemen.” Fred Koch, of the Koch Brothers industries that remain major “small government” and “free market” funders, was a founding member of the John Birch Society.

This highly public reassertion of white supremacy and the Birch Society’s methods of founding activist local chapters to take over school boards and other local offices across the country became a hallmark of the new right movement, embraced by the transformed National Rifle Association in the 1970s, coinciding with the rising visibility and politicization of the right-wing evangelical movement. The first time the movement revealed its collective power was in support of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964.18 Goldwater didn’t make it, but the movement grew, so that in California, the avatar of the new right, Ronald Reagan, was elected governor for two terms, serving from 1966 to 72, then became president of the United States in 1980.

During the period 1954–64, following the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and a stalemated proxy war between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China in Korea, national liberation movements arose in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, most succeeding in evicting French, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonizers from their countries. While these movements inspired activist African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Indigenous Peoples, Chicanos, and Asian Americans, as well as white anti-imperialist and anti-war activists and students, they had the opposite effect on those who feared the loss of white supremacy in the United States and the loss of U.S. supremacy in the world, and among the elite, who feared loss of confidence in capitalism.

The National Rifle Association was one of the formations transformed during this period of right-wing growth. Up to 1975, the N.R.A. had not opposed gun regulations and had not made a fetish of the Second Amendment. It had been founded following the Civil War by a group of former Union Army officers in the North to sponsor marksmanship training and competitions. Since the late nineteenth century, target shooting has been a part of the Olympics. In 1934, during the Depression, the N.R.A. testified in favor of the first federal gun legislation that sought to keep machine guns away from outlaws, such as the famous Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, and Chicago gangsters. During testimony, a Congressman asked the N.R.A. witness if the proposed law would violate the Constitution, the witness said he knew of none. When the N.R.A. opened a new headquarters in the late 1950s, its marquee advertised firearms safety education, marksmanship training, and recreational shooting (hunting).

By the time of its 1977 convention, the Second Amendment Foundation and its lobbying arm, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, founded in Washington State in 1974 seized leadership of the N.R.A. It was then that the N.R.A. centered the Second Amendment as its main concern.19 Harlon Carter was the primary actor in this “coup” that transformed the N.R.A. Carter, following the career path of his father, had been a U.S. Border Patrol chief with a checkered past. As a youth he killed a fellow teenager, who was Mexican, and was sentenced to three years in prison, which was overturned soon after. As a U.S. Border Patrol chief, Carter was head of the mid-1950s “Operation Wetback” program, a violent, corrupt, and massive roundup and deportation of people who were allegedly undocumented Mexicans. Journalist and author Mark Ames writes:

The seemingly strange amalgam that Harlon represents—pro-gun, pro−border guard, violent fear of dark southern immigrants, combined with a fear and hatred of the federal government—is still around today, the basic material of Ron and Rand Paul, both of whom have some crazy extreme ideas about massively militarizing the southern border and making citizenship harder to achieve, while at the same time railing against the federal government, and pushing for a culture in which every home is packed full of firearms.20

N.R.A. membership numbers soared during the early years of the Reagan White House. As California governor, Reagan had indulged the John Birch Society, which helped him win the California governorship in 1966; then in 1980, as a presidential candidate, he promised to implement Harlon Carter’s N.R.A. pro-gun agenda as soon as he took office. As for Carter, by the mid-1980s, gun cultists even more fanatic than he was threw him out of leadership. That trend continues today. As Ames puts it, “The formula is simple: The more batshit malevolent the gun cult gets, the more power they exert. Just ignore the periodic squeals from the rest of the country, and keep pushing the batshit envelope. There is power in acting like the crazy one who needs to be talked down, so long as you convincingly mean it.”²¹

The large N.R.A. headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, has the Second Amendment written on the lobby wall, but only the second part: “The right of the people to keep and Bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In April 2017, in Atlanta, President Donald Trump addressed the enthralled N.R.A. membership gathered at its annual convention: “Only one candidate in the general election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of the United States, standing before you. . . . You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”22 Trump had spoken at the N.R.A. convention in Nashville in April 2016, before winning the Republican primaries. Ironically, gun sales had been plummeting ever since President Obama left office. George Zornick writes on the N.R.A in a feature story for The Nation:

The Obama administration provided an eight-year sugar high for the industry, with imagined fears of a nationwide gun-confiscation program fueling sales. Particularly after the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, industry profits boomed: There were 19 straight months of increased year over year sales, according to FBI background-check data. (There is no public tracking of gun sales nationwide.) But as soon as Trump was elected, stock prices for the major gun companies plummeted, and they haven’t fully recovered. In April, a full third of the outstanding shares in Sturm Ruger, for example, are short bets.

“In the firearms segment, we’ve experienced the expected slowdown in demand for modern sporting-rifle products and handguns post the presidential election,” said Steve Jackson, chief financial officer of the Remington Outdoor Company, which now owns some of the biggest gun manufacturers in the country. Speaking to investors in an early April conference call, Jackson noted that inventory levels were problematically high, because “retailers and wholesalers expected a different political climate and hunting season that did not materialize.” Most of the publicly traded firearm companies reported similar situations in their first-quarter reports for this year.23

The more that gun-control advocates raise the issue of government regulation, particularly federal government regulation, the more ammunition is provided to those who hold the Second Amendment sacred to stand their ground. And because gun-control advocates erroneously misinterpret the Second Amendment provisions as being related only to the individual right to hunt and to militias as national guards, they delude themselves, failing to comprehend the history embedded in contemporary U.S. culture and social relations. The Constitution is the sacred text of the civic religion that is U.S. nationalism, and that nationalism is inexorably tied to white supremacy.