HISTORY IS NOT PAST
On June 22, 2016, following the horrific slaughter in Orlando ten days earlier that took forty-nine lives, a small group of Congressional Democrats staged an unprecedented live-streamed, twenty-five-hour sit-in led by former Civil Rights icon Congressman John Lewis. The protest grew to 170 lawmakers sitting on the floor of the House of Representatives singing “We Shall Overcome” and demanding a gun-control bill.1
Earlier in the week, the Republican-controlled Senate had rejected several gun-control proposals, one of which would have prohibited gun sales to all those listed on the Terrorist Screening Center’s “no-fly” list of suspected terrorists.2 Democrats had seized the Orlando tragedy as an opportunity to raise the ban, because the FBI had investigated Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, for possible terrorist leanings, but had not placed his name on the no-fly list. Even some supporters of gun control who were also concerned about the burgeoning security state were troubled by demands to expand the demonstrably flawed no-fly list.3
No legislation resulted from the action. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins drew up a compromise bipartisan proposal, supported by prominent Democrats, but it was not scheduled for a vote. The gun-control lawmakers blamed N.R.A. pressure on their Republican counterparts. Albeit without success in passing legislation, the sit-in received positive mainstream press coverage and public approval. Polls had long shown support for restrictions on gun sales and use, as well as support for background checks at gun shows. By 2016, nearly two-thirds of those polled favored stricter laws, and majorities even supported nationwide bans on the sale of semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15, and on the sale of magazines holding more than ten bullets. A majority also preferred that across-the-board federal laws should be created, rather than continuing the patchwork state regulations or lack thereof. Super-majorities of both Democrats and Republicans who were polled supported background checks at gun shows and in private sales. Even Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court’s Heller opinion, which found the Second Amendment to be an individual constitutional right, made clear that the decision did not bar gun regulation.4
While the sit-in was taking place, London’s Daily Guardian brought attention to a report released by the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association: “Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths of a greater magnitude.”5
The Australian gun-control regulations and gun buyback took place soon after the April 28–29, 1996, mass shooting in a favorite Australian tourist spot, Port Arthur, on the Australian island of Tasmania, which had its own haunted history: Between 1825 and 1832, British settlers in Australia carried out a genocidal campaign that nearly wiped out the Indigenous Tasmanians, and during the rest of the century, hunted and killed the survivors for sport. In the 1966 mass shooting, thirty-five Euro-Australians were left dead and twenty-three wounded. Marin Bryant, the shooter, was a twenty-eight-year-old Euro-Australian who survived, was tried, and although deemed mentally impaired, was found guilty and received a life sentence for each fatality, without possibility of parole, as Australia, like European and Latin American countries, does not have the death penalty.
The Australian people were in a state of shock following the massacre. In proportion to its population, Australia had experienced its share of mass shootings in the previous two decades. The country was among the top ten purchasers of personal firearms, as it had no domestic manufacturers. Prime Minister John Howard quickly put forward a strict gun-control package that became the National Firearms Programme Implementation Act of 1996, which passed with the support of all political parties as well as local governments.
The Australian gun-control success story was seized on as a model by gun-control advocates in the United States, particularly following the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting. Yet, despite many similarities between the racial violence and genocide that accompanied Europeans settling on Indigenous land in Australia and the United States, and the emergence of similar gun cultures in both countries, the Australian example has yet to prove an effective tool for enacting legislation in the U.S. Congress. The main difference between Australia and the United States is the Second Amendment. Neither Australia, nor any other country, has any such a constitutional or legal measure.
Certainly the National Rifle Association carries weight through the persistent agitation of some of its most dedicated members, but they can hardly be the cause of the apparent lack of enthusiasm and depth to gun-control efforts, making it impossible to even refer to a gun-control “movement.” Except in African American communities, particularly in Chicago, there has been little passion for gun control woven into the fabric of the culture at the local level, so that those who support gun control appear to be isolated individuals or small civic groups without membership representation, while the majority of the population passively supports gun regulations. Three days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara specializing in U.S. civic associations and leadership, contributed an op-ed piece to the New York Times contending that an activist-based organizaorganization such as the N.R.A. can only be challenged by an equally activist-based organization for effective gun control, arguing that money, petitions, and classic lobbying will not work:
Understanding the choices gun-control advocates have begins with understanding where the outsize power of the National Rifle Association originates. . . . Most people assume its power comes from money. The truth is that gun-control advocates have lots of money, too. Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg have pledged fortunes to supporting gun control. . . . The N.R.A.’s power is not just about its money or number of supporters or a favorable political map. It has also built something that gun-control advocates lack: an organized base of grass-roots power. . . . Local gun clubs and gun shops provide a similar structure for the gun-rights movement. There are more gun clubs and gun shops in the United States than there are McDonald’s.6
This situation must be due in large measure to the fact that the great majority of U.S. citizens accept the Second Amendment as an individual constitutional right and view the Constitution as sacred. Following the 2008 Heller decision, Gallup asked in a poll: “Do you believe the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns, or do you believe it only guarantees members of state militias such as the National Guard units the right to own guns?” Seventy-three percent agreed it was an individual right, while 20 percent said it was not.7
Perhaps reverence for the Second Amendment and the privileging of individual rights over collective rights, not the N.R.A., are the source of the problem with enacting firearms regulations. Some even argue convincingly that the N.R.A. is losing members among the majority of sportsmen, who feel they are getting a bad name due to the N.R.A.’s alignment with the political right.8
Mark Ames’s 2005 book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond,9 tended to blame mass shootings on inchoate gun craziness, and, as he put it a few days after the Sandy Hook mass killings, “the hick fascism of the NRA.”10 Three years later, in the wake of the Charleston church massacre, he wrote:
But it’s not enough to call them irrational, un-normal, or gun-nuts—the real question is why, from a Darwinism-of-politics standpoint, the gun-nut cult has proved to be so successful. What is it about the gun cultists’ fanaticism and paranoia that has made them thrive as a force in the post−New Deal ecosystem, as opposed to so many other sects here fueled by fanaticism, paranoia, and petty malice?11
Ames focuses on the promotion of individualism by the ruling class of corporate giants to explain why the gun situation is allowed to exist in a modern industrial society, arguing that gun-rights politics fit with the corporate agenda that profits from atomized individualism. “If all you do when you think of guns is think of an instrument that is dangerous, can kill, and is usually seen being waved around by dangerous criminals or pot-bellied white jerks in pickups, then you don’t see the angles.” He rightly dismisses the idea that the wealthy fear an armed populace; rather, what they worry about is government regulations on their capacity to make profit, and this is increasingly the case with the tech industry. Ames asks: “So why does the Big Business lobby align so seamlessly with the gun cultists?” He recognizes that Second Amendment advocates, nearly 75 percent of the population, truly believe that guns are a source of political rights and political power: “That guns in fact are the only source of political power. . . . If you think guns, rather than concentrated wealth, equals political power, then you’d resent government power far more than you’d resent billionaires’ power or corporations’ hyper-concentrated wealth/power, because government will always have more and bigger guns. In fact you’d see pro-gun, anti-government billionaires like the Kochs as your natural political allies in your gun-centric notion of political struggle against the concentrated gun power of government.”12
Ames’s argument reflects contemporary reality, but it also extends from a much deeper historical dance between the wealthy and politically powerful, who dominate the economic and social order by making sure some symbolic power sedates those who actually have little financial leverage and thus, extremely limited political power.
It is the case that for rural settlers of the North American British colonies, and for U.S. American settlers after Independence, a firearm was regarded as a necessary utensil for the settler’s task—as with a hoe, an ax, a team of oxen or horses—a point made by some gun-control advocates as evidence that guns were meaningless. However, it’s illogical to assume that the gun’s utilitarian role outweighed the immediate sense of power and domination that firearms offer. The land that the hoe, the ax, the ox, and the slave’s body were used to cultivate was taken by armed force and repression; the land was already home to Indigenous societies that for millennia had been engaged in agricultural and animal husbandry, and had developed distinct languages, cultures, and traditions. That is the way of settler-colonialism, and that is the way of the gun—to kill off enemies and, in the case of the North American colonies and the independent United States, to control African Americans. Violence perpetrated by armed settlers, even genocide, were not absent in the other territories where the British erected settler-colonies—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand but the people of those polities never declared the gun a God-given right; only the founding fathers of the United States did that. And the people of the other Anglo settler-colonies did not have economies, governments, and social orders based on the enslavement of other human beings. The United States is indeed “exceptional,” just not in the way usually intoned by politicians and patriots.
Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson put it succinctly: “Without guns, there would be no West,” adding that his grandfather had settled in the Wyoming territory two years before Custer’s defeat by the Sioux and the Cheyenne nations at the Little Big Horn.13 “The West,” of course, is a metaphor for the continent, as it began on the Atlantic seaboard. But in this interview Simpson was not only speaking historically about what the guns were for—to kill Indians, always the implied enemy, in order to seize more land—he was promoting gun rights in the present. He pointed out in another interview that in Wyoming, “how steady you hold your rifle, that’s gun control in Wyoming.”14 Here Simpson reveals that when firearms were no longer needed to appropriate Indigenous Peoples’ lands, the firearm became a representation of ongoing racist domination—a kind of war trophy—not just of Native Peoples and their territories, but of African Americans and the world. The degree of racist pathology inherent in this perspective has become so normalized that it was barely news when George Zimmerman openly auctioned the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin, selling it for $250,000 to a mother who bought the gun as a birthday present for her son.15 In his auction listing “Mr. Zimmerman touted the weapon, a Kel-Tec PF-9, as ‘an American firearm icon’”16 and vowed to help stop the Black Lives Matter movement. “Regeneration through violence,” is what Richard Slotkin calls the martial tradition that goes to the root of the founding and behavior of the U.S. settler-state in the world after the “closing of the frontier,” which continues to this day domestically in multiple violent forms.17
The elephant in the room in these debates has long been what the armed militias of the Second Amendment were to be used for. The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment had long existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the armed march to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the enslaved African population that is, the control of land and people, and using them disposably for profit. But this is not just history.
The renewed gun culture and the transformation of the N.R.A. coincided with the end of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was not the first twentieth-century “Indian war,” meaning U.S. military interventions attacking noncombatants, burning their homes and fields, and conducting operations to search, destroy, and kill anything that moves.18 The United States invaded the Philippines in 1898 and occupied the country for the following forty-eight years.19 Under the pretense of supporting a force of thirty thousand indigenous Filipino rebels who had just fought and won independence from Spain, the United States brought in two hundred thousand of its troops to carry out a three-year search-anddestroy war that left 20 percent of the Filipino population dead, mostly civilians.20 A U.S. commander, Admiral Dewey, referred to the Filipinos as “the Indians” and vowed to “enter the city [Manila] and keep the Indians out.” Twenty-six of the thirty U.S. generals in the Philippines had been officers in the North American “Indian wars.”21 When Theodore Roosevelt became president and oversaw the war, he referred to the Filipino independence leader Aguinaldo as a “renegade Pawnee” and observed that Filipinos did not have the right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy it.22
Other twentieth-century U.S. military operations were carried out in Haiti and Nicaragua, the latter a prolonged counterinsurgency against a guerrilla resistance led by Augusto Sandino to drive out the occupying U.S. Marines and the U.S. Standard Fruit Company (now the Dole Food Company) and other corporations stripping the northeastern Nicaraguan tropical rain forest of its resources and ecology. The Marines left, but not until they had trained a vicious national guard under the first Somoza who then had Sandino assassinated.23
The Vietnam War was something different, going from small units to all-out invasion, a half million U.S. servicemen on the ground, yet it too became a brutal savage war that targeted civilians. Following the 1954 defeat and withdrawal of French occupation forces, the Eisenhower administration, already aiding the French efforts to prevent Vietnam’s independence, took over the counterinsurgency; this morphed into full military invasion and occupation of the South of the country in 1965, continuing another decade until the United States was also defeated and fled.
The narratives of the U.S. anti-war movement’s success often give the impression that there was widespread dissent against the Vietnam War, but this was not the case until the late 1960s, with bitter divisions, the majority of both the elite and the organized labor movement (still mostly white and male) strongly favoring the war; the majority who then turned against the war believed it could not be won. The burgeoning right-wing movement made significant gains during the war, with anticommunism a major bludgeon. With the humiliating U.S. military defeat and the war-induced economic depression that followed as well as intense government repression against the Civil Rights movement, which had gone national during the 1960s the right wing had by the late 1970s built an infrastructure of media, think tanks, and organized electoral constituencies that have been increasingly dominant ever since. No apologies or reparations have been offered by any subsequent administration, and the war, even at its fiftieth anniversary, was officially deemed a failed effort but a “noble cause” by the Obama administration.24 Even the date that the U.S. government uses as the historical start of its war against Vietnam, March 1965, ignores the fact that U.S. military operations there began a decade earlier.25 Perhaps the event that will shape the future narrative of the war is Ken Burns’s 18-hour patriotic documentary The Vietnam War, which premiered on PBS in September 2017.26
The populist frontier ideology has served the U.S. ruling class well for its entire history and once again found tremendous resonance in the Vietnam War as another Indian war. A key to John F. Kennedy’s political success was that he revived the “frontier” as a trope of populist imperialism, speaking of the “settling” of the continent and “taming” a different sort of “wilderness.” In Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic Convention, he said: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. . . . We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” The metaphor described Kennedy’s plan for employing political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Richard Slotkin calls “a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against communism,” to which the nation was summoned by Kennedy in his inaugural address. Soon after he took office, that struggle took the form of the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam and his creation of the Green Beret Special Forces. “Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination,” Slotkin reminds us, “American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’”27
On January 2, 2016, armed men arrived at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon and began an occupation of the headquarters and surrounding territory for the next forty days.28 In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt had carved out and appropriated most of Northern Paiute territory in Oregon, territory guaranteed by treaty; this then became the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. It was a part of Roosevelt’s “wilderness” conservation project that annexed dozens of Indigenous sacred sites, such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon, calling the federal theft “national parks.” Most Native land in the West was seized without the agreement of Native nations as “public domain,” and ever since has been leased at minimal cost to corporations and individuals for private ranching, and to corporations for commercial mining, oil drilling and pipelines, and timber cutting. The private exploitation of public lands is in addition to the vast privately owned ranch lands grabbed by settler-ranchers under federal homesteading measures in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Native communities by the U.S. Army of the West.29
Wealthy cattle ranchers like those who seized Malheur have long been lobbying and clamoring for the federal public lands to be transferred to the states, which, unlike the federal government, can sell off land and privatize all of it. In light of Native peoples’ demands for restitution of sacred sites and all federal- and state-held lands that were taken without treaties or agreements, this is a continuation of the Indian wars, fronted by ranching and fossil-fuel resource interests, but made possible by the continuing U.S. system of colonialism and a public blinded to its history. All these sacred sites and “public” lands must be returned to the stewardship of the Native nations from which they were illegally seized; none should be privatized. Malheur was indeed a “skirmish among colonizers.”30
Rapper Ice-T, in an interview in London soon after the Aurora, Colorado, movie house slaughter, was asked his opinion of guns in the U.S. and the gun-control effort. He replied “Well, that’s not going to change anything in the United States, no. United States is based on guns. Like KRS says, you’ll never have justice on stolen land.”31