NINE

ELUDING AND RESISTING THE SECOND AMENDMENT’S HISTORICAL CONNECTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY

In the past, historians have shown little interest in researching the U.S. arms industry, even though gun making was one of the nation’s first successful manufacturing industries domestically and globally, and one of the few that escaped deindustrialization. That changed after the U.S. Congress passed the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” effective October 26, 2005, a measure that shields gun manufacturers and licensed dealers from liability for deaths resulting from their products if occurring in a criminal act. With frequent mass shootings in the years before and after, as well as suicides and accidental gun deaths, more scholars and journalists began research into gun violence as a health issue.

Dr. Gerald J. Wintemute, an emergency room physician who has studied gun violence for thirty-five years, experienced research funding drying up. As the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis Health System, he was virtually alone in the task. But things got worse in 1996, when the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress passed the “Dickey Amendment,” which barred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using federal funds to promote gun regulations, stripping the CDC of the nearly $3 million it had been devoting to the study of injuries and fatalities relating to gun use. While some funds from other federal sources were made available under the Obama administration, the gun-rights debate was highly charged, so that research findings or interpretations could be met with threats of violence. These scholars must take precautions that few in academia find necessary.1 Even for scholars not researching anything related to guns, there is fear of the 2016 Texas law that extended open-carry rights to public university campuses in the state, leading the president of the faculty senate at the University of Houston to create a PowerPoint presentation to show in faculty forums. One slide suggests that faculty members “may want to be careful discussing sensitive topics; drop certain topics from your curriculum; not ‘go there’ if you sense anger; limit student access off hours; go to appointment-only office hours; only meet ‘that student’ in controlled circumstances.”²

In all the debates and research, little scrutiny is given to the gun manufacturers—the industry itself—with attention mostly directed toward the victims of gun violence, the purchasers and users of firearms, and the gun sellers, particularly those who exhibit at gun shows. The 2016 publication of historian Pamela Haag’s meticulously researched and documented book, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture3 was a welcome corrective. The book is a global and detailed survey of the history and present situation of the U.S. firearms industry, containing a more detailed case study of the 150-year history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The founder, Oliver Winchester, had been a shirt maker before he went into the gun business and became a very wealthy Connecticut corporate giant.

In the United States, there is an acute awareness of the powerful influence and grip of corporate advertising, but no other product sold legally on the market bears any similarity to a gun. Guns are made to kill, and except for hunting, that usually means killing other humans or oneself, either intentionally or accidentally. Most critics of easy access to firearms place blame on the N.R.A. for its effective lobbying and for having an outsize influence on its highly active members, suggesting a cult-like relationship. Haag includes the N.R.A. in her condemnation of the unregulated firearms industry, but mainly for the revenue it receives from gun industry advertisements in the organization’s publications and on its website. Haag goes to the source and bores in on the gun industry itself as the main culprit, not only ethically, for producing a deadly product, but also for its relentless advertising, which has normalized and domesticated that product, even making getting a gun a coming-of-age milestone for every boy.

Haag writes that her motivation for starting this project was to figure out “what allowed Oliver Winchester and his successors not to feel at least a small bit encumbered by the fact that they manufactured and sold millions of fearfully destructive guns. . . . The gun debate has been mired in rights talk for so long . . . that it is forgotten as a matter of conscience.”4 But what she claims to have discovered in the process is the fallacy of the assumed “gun culture” that historian Richard Hofstadter theorized and which still reigns; rather, she argues, “gun culture” was manufactured by the gun industry and is not some inherent characteristic of U.S. history and society: “An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there.”⁵

Haag claims that this narrative includes the false assumption that the Second Amendment has always been regarded as a sacred right for the individual to bear arms, and she denies that the idea of gun regulation is new and abnormal. She scoffs at what she calls “the American gun story:”

The American gun story is about civilians and individual citizens, and they are its heroes or its villains—the frontiersman, the Daniel Boone “long hunter” who trekked far into the wilderness alone, the citizen-patriot militiaman, the guiltily valorized outlaw, and the gun-slinger . . . and this mystique is about individualism: guns protect citizens against overzealous government infringement of liberties; they protect freedom and self-determination. ⁶

In making this argument, she dismisses outright any significance of the Second Amendment or of “how the West was won” history: “The story that highlights the Second Amendment, frontiersmen, militias, and the desires and character of the American gun owner is not to be found in the pages of this book.”7

Haag’s work is invaluable for offering a deep study of a particular product and industry; her book resembles those of other contemporary thinkers, such as Mark Kurlansky in Salt and Cod, and Mark Pendergrast’s investigation of the Coca-Cola Corporation. Haag reveals how consumer capitalism works, but she seems not to have a problem with consumer capitalism and advertising per se, only with the fact that the gun has been so culturally normalized that it is sold alongside children’s toys, clothing, food, and mouthwash at the low-end chain store such as WalMart, the nation’s top seller of guns and ammunition.⁸ To support her arguments, not only is the historical context for the Second Amendment ignored, United States history is ignored—absent are the voluntary militias that destroyed Native towns and raped, tortured, and slaughtered the families they found here; no armed slave patrols can be found in her work, no people enslaved, bred, bought, and sold. In accounting for the “celebrity” of the Winchester Model 73, Haag writes: “When considered from a business perspective, however, it becomes clear that the quintessential frontier rifle flourished later, in the ‘post-frontier’ early 1900s. Its celebrity biography backdated its diffusion and even its popularity.” Strangely, the author argues that after the Civil War and a lack of demand for firearms, the Winchester Company suffered a depression in sales, and changed its pitch for selling the rifle from war to “domestic” use:

Winchester’s approach meshed with the hard paramilitary realities of conquest and settlement. Indeed, it is worth contemplating how much America’s heavily armed civilian population owes to the peculiar domestic nature of both the most cataclysmic nineteenth-century war, the Civil War, and its most violent conquest, of Native American cultures. Unlike in Europe, which kept the U.S. gun business alive, but does not today have our civilian gun violence, in America war and conquest were both domestic, and the guns deployed stayed put within American borders. Western emigrants, de facto, were somewhere between soldier and civilian, their everyday existence to some extent militarized in a land in between battlefield and settlement. In Europe, conquest involved imperial expeditions; America’s conquest blurred settler into soldier—and the Model 73, in both design and germinal mystique, suited that hybrid environment.9

To the reader, this may sound very much like “gun culture.” But, there is a serious problem with Haag’s “domestication” of U.S. (and local militia) wars against Native peoples, which were, after all, foreign nations to be conquered, not an inchoate race of random individuals. Referencing only the Indian Wars in the West that followed the Civil War, Haag assumes firearms were not necessary to dispossess and ethnically cleanse the entire eastern half of the continent. In order to make this argument, Haag has to completely ignore the nearly two centuries of Anglo-American colonial violence against Native nations of the Atlantic seaboard, and the aggressive theft of Native land after negotiating international treaties with them as sovereign nations. Nor does she deal with armed slave patrols in the colonies, then in the slave states of the South.

Haag also leaves out the two-year invasion of Mexico and U.S. occupation of Mexico City, with Marines landing in Veracruz and creating a path of destruction filled with corpses of Mexican resisters all the way to the capital, where they ransacked and terrorized the population, while the U.S. Army of the West doubled the country’s continental territory by annexing the northern half of Mexico’s territory, including the illegally occupied so-called “Texas Republic.” It was a two-year foreign war, 1846–48, declared by Congress. It’s not clear how Haag comes up with the “domestic” argument, except for the very significant U.S. Civil War, which permanently escalated the level of domestic violence against African-American freedmen. Unfortunately, the discredited ideology of “Manifest Destiny” is the bedrock of Haag’s analysis.

The thesis of The Gunning of America is that “gun culture” does not exist as a historical and organic reality, but rather as a commercially manufactured ideology created by the gun industry. That can be proven, the author argues, by the fact that there was no gun culture in the nearly two hundred years of the founding and development of the Thirteen British colonies in North America, nor was there such after Independence until the Civil War period in the mid-nineteenth century, when they began to be mass produced and widely distributed during five years of intense combat. Haag makes this argument based solely on her assumptions about technology, the fact that individual gunsmiths made each firearm, and none were duplicated, plus the fact that ammunition was powder, making the weapon difficult to load and reload, and clumsy to use. She argues that very few individuals owned guns, that guns were rarely used, and that they were regarded as simply another tool, like an ax. This argument is made briefly as a backdrop to dismissing the Second Amendment as meaningful or relevant, maintaining as well that the militias were ineffective. Then, she plunges into the study of the rise of the gun industry, mass production, and the search for markets.

Haag’s thesis—particularly her de-emphasis of individual gun ownership, gun culture, and the historical significance of militias in the early Anglo-American colonies and the early U.S. republic—is identical to the argument made sixteen years earlier by historian Michael A. Bellesiles in his discredited book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Bellesiles made the same points Haag does about the paucity of technology before 1850, although Haag does not “count” guns, or miscount them as Bellesiles did, or make a clear quantitative argument, which was central to Bellesiles’s project. Haag does not reference Bellesiles’s book or the controversy that followed its publication, but makes the same argument based on technology, whereas Bellesiles thesis was based on research into probate records from the colonial and early national periods that purported to prove very few households possessed guns. Bellesiles wrote: “The vast majority of those living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use.”10

Arming America was released in September 2000—weeks before the Bush v. Gore election and dispute—receiving a long front-page feature review in the New York Times, written with glowing eloquence by prestigious University of Chicago historian Garry Wills. That review was followed by an equally uncritical review in the New York Review of Books by eminent colonial U.S. historian, Edmund Morgan.¹¹ This must have been quite heady stuff for an obscure history professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. A torrent of positive reviews and attention followed in academic publications as well as in the commercial press, including an interview with the author in Playboy.

Bellesiles’s credibility was enhanced for liberals by the usual pushback and crude membership pile-on from the National Rifle Association, at the time still headed by the obnoxious Charlton Heston, who a few months before the publication of Arming America had riveted the audience at the 129th N.R.A. convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina, bellowing, “For the next six months, Al Gore is going to smear you as the enemy. He will slander you as gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, bloodthirsty maniacs who stand in the way of a safer America. Will you remain silent? I will not remain silent. If we are going to stop this, then it is vital to every law-abiding gun owner in America to register to vote and show up at the polls on Election Day.” Heston then raised a handmade colonial flintlock long rifle and intoned: “So, as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: ‘From my cold, dead hands.’”12

In addition to the N.R.A.’s disapproval, there were a few negative reviews of the Bellesiles book by conservative and libertarian magazines such as National Review and Reason. Yet, within a few months after publication, multiple errors had been identified and discussed online. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2001, the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history went to Arming America. It would be a year after the book’s publication—in the fall of 2001—that critiques appeared in print in the prestigious peer-reviewed William and Mary Quarterly, as well as in law reviews.

A year after questions arose about the book and grew into massive evidence of falsifying sources and misreading others, Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren made an exhaustive study of Bellesiles’s arguments and the sources he used to document them, and concluded: “What made the book such a sensation was his description of guns in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. He claimed that guns were exceptional rather than common, in poor condition even in private hands, not stored in the home but rather in central armories, too expensive to be owned outright by most men, and restricted by law to the Protestant upper and middle classes. None of this is true.”¹³ Indeed, the opposite was the case—the colonists were armed to the teeth. “Since the book’s publication, scholars who have checked the book’s claims against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number of discrepancies, errors, and omissions. When these are taken into account, a markedly different picture of colonial America emerges: Household gun ownership in early America was more widespread than today (in a much poorer world).”14

The numerous historians and legal specialists who challenged Bellesiles’s sparse gun counts found that household gun ownership in comparison to other items owned was high: Bellesiles not only miscounted drastically, he also did no comparative analysis. Lindgren cites a reliable 1774 database of 813 itemized male inventories in which 54 percent of the estates listed guns, compared to only 30 percent of estates listing cash, 14 percent listing swords or edge weapons, 25 percent listing Bibles, 62 percent listing a book other than the Bible, and 79 percent listing any clothes. A search of databases came up with similar numbers, with guns being more common than Bibles and as common as books.

Lindgren writes, “Contrary to Arming America’s claims about probate inventories in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, there were high numbers of guns, guns were much more common than swords or other edge weapons, women in 1774 owned guns at a rate (18%) higher than Bellesiles claimed men did in 1765−1790 (14.7%), and 83−91% of gun-owning estates listed at least one gun that was not old or broken.” Furthermore, “Bellesiles misclassified over 60% of the inventories he examined. He repeatedly counted women as men, counted guns in about a hundred wills that never existed, and claimed that the inventories evaluated more than half of the guns as old or broken when fewer than 10% were so listed.” Lindgren found that during period 1765−1790, the 14.7 percent average of estates listing guns that Bellesiles reported is mathematically impossible given the regional averages he reported.15

Bellesiles’s assessment of the quality and effectiveness of militias was equally misrepresented in his book. One of many instances provided in military historian Robert Churchill’s review of the book concerns the Connecticut colony’s preparation for war in 1746. Bellesiles wrote that the colony had difficulties in raising troops and finally managed to amass six hundred, but 57 percent were without guns. Churchill looked at the records Bellesiles had cited and found that, on the contrary, of the 454 men mustered, 371 or 81.7 percent had guns, and two of the five units reporting were fully armed, with only one of the five at 57 percent armed. Of the five units reporting their arms, two were 100 percent armed and the worst armed of the other three was 57 percent armed. Professor Lindgren writes about this finding:

It is hard to know exactly what Bellesiles did, but he may just have seized on the number of the worst-armed unit and reported that number for all units, but only after flipping it to 57% unarmed. By misleadingly counting the worst-armed unit as the entire company and flipping the results from armed to unarmed, Bellesiles is able to make a very well-armed Connecticut militia (82% armed) appear to be a mostly unarmed militia (43% armed).¹⁶

Lindgren concludes his exhaustive review of the errors in Bellesiles’s account puzzled as to the motives:

The book and the scandal it generated are hard to understand. How could Bellesiles count guns in about a hundred Providence wills that never existed, count guns in San Francisco County inventories that were apparently destroyed in 1906, report national means that are mathematically impossible, change the condition of guns in a way that fits his thesis, misreport the counts of guns in censuses or militia reports, have over a 60% error rate in finding guns in Vermont estates, and have a 100% error rate in finding homicide cases in the Plymouth records he cites? We may never know the truth of why or how Arming America made such basic errors, but make them it did.17

Bellesiles did not elucidate a political agenda in his densely academic book—and it is unacceptable to admit to a political agenda in the field of academic history. Yet, it does appear that the only explanation as to why he would fabricate and misstate sources was in order to support an unprecedented thesis. Had guns not been widely owned or valued by individuals in colonial Anglo-America, then the Second Amendment to the Constitution could not be interpreted as implying an individual right to bear arms.¹⁸

Early on, both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians officially defended Bellesiles’s scholarship and objected to the right-wing attacks, and those of gun advocates, on his book. And even after the publication of Lindgren’s compilation of errors in the book, some historians continued to promote and affirm its thesis while admitting that some errors had been made.

One such prominent historian was Jon Wiener, a prolific author and professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. In an article for The Nation, Wiener related that when Bellesiles appeared at the Irvine campus to talk about the controversy in early 2001, there were “unusually large men,” one wearing a flak jacket and another with a shaved head, distributing a brochure titled “The Lies of Michael Bellesiles.”

The large men were activists in the pro-gun, anti-Bellesiles movement, which had been campaigning to discredit his work since before the publication of Arming America by Knopf in September 2000. The book argues that our picture of guns in early America is all wrong: the picture where America is settled by men with guns, hunting game and fighting Indians; where, in 1776, militiamen grabbed their guns to go fight for independence; where the Founding Fathers protected individuals’ right to own guns. Bellesiles argues that instead, gun culture is a fairly recent development in American history. . . . Not until the Civil War put guns in the hands of millions of men did gun culture flourish.19

Wiener pointed out in the article that there were clear “political implications” in the thesis that threatened the National Rifle Association.

The Second Amendment, this suggests, was not adopted to protect the widespread ownership or popularity of guns—it was instead intended to address the inadequacy of the weapons in the hands of local militias, on which the early nation relied in the absence of a standing army. So gun-rights groups targeted Bellesiles and his book, and large men in flak jackets came to his talk at Irvine and other places.20

In light of the questions being raised, Bellesiles’s employer, Emory University, launched an internal and external inquiry that found Bellesiles’s scholarship unsatisfactory, which Bellesiles challenged, but then he suddenly resigned in late October 2002. In December 2002, Columbia University, which awards the Bancroft Prize, rescinded the award that had gone to Arming America, stating that the author had “violated basic norms of scholarship and the high standards expected of Bancroft Prize winners.”²¹ Moreover, the publisher, Knopf, did not renew Bellesiles’s contract for the book and ceased publication. In 2003, a small, independent publisher in San Francisco, Soft Skull Press, gained rights to the book and issued a new edition that remains in print. Historians Gary Wills and Edmund Morgan expressed regret that they had been taken in by the book and moved on, as did most historians, assuming the matter was resolved.

However, historian Jon Wiener never budged in his support for Bellesiles. In his 2005 book Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Wiener places Bellesiles in the category of “Those Who Were Burned,” writing that after receiving high praise and an award for his book on guns, the gun lobby destroyed Bellesiles’s career, with the scholars who challenged the work apparently sheepishly complying, since “the critics came up with no evidence of intentional deception, no evidence of invented documents.” Wiener’s thesis is that some historians are punished or discredited while others are hardly touched by controversy, such as in the case of plagiarism by the renowned academics Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, which he attributes to the relative power of the historian involved, but especially to the power of groups outside the history profession.22

In 2010, the New Press, which had published Wiener’s book five years earlier, released a new book by Michael Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently. The galleys sent to reviewers noted:

A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous “swiftboating” campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize−winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000)—“the best kind of non-fiction,” according to the Chicago Tribune—which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.23

Scott McLemee, the “Intellectual Affairs” columnist for Inside Higher Ed, was appalled at this deceptive advance publicity, especially the mention of the Bancroft Prize without clarifying that it had been rescinded:

Bellesiles has a certain claim to fame, certainly, but not as “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign.”²⁴ He is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession’s standards of scholarly integrity. . . . It is true that he drew the ire of the National Rifle Association, and I have no inclination to give that organization’s well-funded demagogy the benefit of any doubt. But gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources. That his scholarship was grossly incompetent on many points is not a “controversial” notion. Nor is it open to dispute whether or not he falsified sources. That has been exhaustively documented by his peers. To pretend otherwise is itself demagogic.

If a major commercial press wants to help a disgraced figure make his comeback, that is one thing, but rewriting history is another.²⁵

Many of the comments following McLemee’s article, however, defended Bellesiles’s thesis, while the majority of others thought he should at least be given a second chance.

Meanwhile, as cited earlier, most liberal journalists and historians continue to make similar arguments that dismiss the Second Amendment, without citing the Bellesiles book or the controversy, as Haag does in The Gunning of America. However, it really is possible to discredit the Second Amendment without rewriting U.S. history; in fact, it is possible by writing accurate U.S. history. For those who see the Second Amendment as permission to own personal firearms without regulations and to carry them in public places, as well as those who insist that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says and revise history to fit the argument, it seems the histories of racial domination, land theft, and genocide from which the Second Amendment emerged are impossible to confront, or that sublimated history is acted out in deranged ways, such as through mass shootings, police killings of unarmed Black people, or as Sarah Winchester did, defending oneself from the ghosts of slaughtered Indians.

Fifty miles south of San Francisco is a Victorian home billed as a “ghost house” on billboards that start appearing in Oregon to the north and San Diego to the south. Winchester Rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester, the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, bought the house in the late 1880s and soon began building additions. By the time of her death nearly forty years later, the home covered six acres, containing hundreds of rooms, including ten thousand windows, forty-seven fireplaces, thirteen bathrooms, and six kitchens. Some of the forty stairways and two thousand doors lead nowhere.26 Tradesmen and craftsmen worked dawn to dusk daily and were still at work the day of her death. The tourist literature and published accounts, as well as the Hollywood movie about Sarah Winchester,27 portray her as a deranged crazy lady, a character in a ghost story, yet for nearly three decades, she personally designed every detail and worked directly with the builders.

Her stated purpose? To elude ghosts.

In 1885, Sarah Winchester moved to northern California from the family home in Connecticut, a seven-day train journey. The railroad for two decades had transported and continued to transport the guns and cartridges manufactured by the family business along the same route. As it did, Winchesters were in the hands of the Army posted to fend off Indigenous residents opposed to the intrusion of the rails in their territories. The weapons were also used to kill off the buffalo, the Native food supply, until, by the time of Sarah’s journey, there were only a few hundred left out of the 30 million that existed two decades earlier.

When settlers, railroad workers, and soldiers thought of a gun, they conjured a rifle, and its name was Winchester, generic, just as the brand name Kleenex is generic for facial tissue of any brand. On passenger trains at the time, hired staff told triumphant stories about killing Indians and buffalo. The railroad narratives were printed and survive, one example telling of an Army major’s heroics: “As an Indian fighter he had no superior. . . . He cleaned out whole tribes of hostiles.” Another told of one stop on the route, Fort Kearny, where Buffalo Bill had killed his first Indian with his trusted Winchester, and took the scalp as a souvenir. Passengers were also loaned Winchesters to shoot buffalo out of the train widows as they traveled across the Plains.

By the mid-1880s, as Mrs. Winchester traveled through the territory, adult Indigenous refugees of genocidal war had been disarmed, half starved, and held in concentration camps, their children taken to far-away residential schools, when they created a form of resistance that spread like wildfire in all directions from its source. A Paiute holy man, Wovoka, in Nevada. Indigenous pilgrims, including the Lakota holy man Sitting Bull, clandestinely journeyed to Nevada to receive instructions on how to perform the Ghost Dance, which promised to make the invaders disappear and the buffalo return, allowing those loved ones killed by bullets to return as well. It was a simple dance performed by everyone, requiring only a specific kind of shirt made of feed sack and hung with colored ribbons that was to protect the dancers from gunfire.

When the dancing began in December 1890 among the Lakota at the Pine Ridge Army Control Center, officials reported it as disturbing and unstoppable, warning Washington of a possible armed uprising. Sitting Bull was assumed to be the instigator of the dancing, so they put him under house arrest, heavily guarded. Sitting Bull was assassinated by one of his guards on December 15, 1890. But the dancing continued, culminating in the U.S. Army’s slaughter of three hundred unarmed and starving Lakota refugees attempting to turn themselves in to the Army. Blood-soaked Lakota survivors were dragged into a nearby church. It being Christmastime, the sanctuary was candlelit and decked with greenery. In the front, a banner read: PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN. The dancing stopped.

In official U.S. military annals, the massacre is called a victorious battle. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved in the killing. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. He wrote, “Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

And so it makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle.

Visitors trekking through the widow’s home are amused, then saddened, by the evidence all around them of the fears and anguish of a mentally disturbed person. The tour guides and literature point to the case of a seriously deluded rich woman. Yet there is another possibility, a message, a warning: that the house is a kind of hologram in the minds of each and every person on the continent, just barely below their consciousness.

Pamela Haag’s history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company gives credit to the agency of Sarah Winchester. But the author attributes Sarah’s obsession with ghosts to the general popularity of “spiritualism” in the late nineteenth century, and deems Sarah highly efficient and functional despite her obsession with ghosts. The U.S. savage war against the Lakota and Cheyenne that was taking place at the time does not appear in Haag’s account of Sarah Winchester’s fears. Haag does not even mention the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee massacre, which had to have affected Sarah Winchester profoundly.28

Any assessment of gun violence and the Second Amendment in the United States is incomplete or skewed without dealing with what the guns were for, and, given what they were for, what that means about their popularity and proliferation today. The United States created its armed forces and police to carry out a genocidal policy against Native peoples, seize Native land, and control African Americans, which continues to this day in other forms, including police shooting unarmed Black men and incarcerating a large percentage of them. In the process, the United States has invented enemies and spent hoards of wealth to erect the largest military force in history, including a vast network of hundreds of military bases in more than seventy countries and territories around the globe. In some regards, the official narratives the nation has formed to dissociate the Second Amendment from the atrocities it was used to commit are like the extensions on Sarah Winchester’s house, constructed so that The People can more comfortably elude the fellow human beings whose lives and land have been stolen, and whose names, traditions, and memories we are well armed to forget.