INTRODUCTION
1. “Firearms Numbers in the United States 1945–2012,” Gun Watch, June 28, 2015. Accessed July 29, 2017: http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2015/06/firearms-numbers-in-united-states-1945.html
2. Evan Osnos, “Making a Killing: The business and politics of selling guns,” The New Yorker, June 27, 2016. The kinds of weapons include 110 million handguns and the same number of rifles, plus 86 million shotguns.
3. Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964. Accessed July 31, 2017: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
4. Ibid.
5. Senator Barack Obama, while campaigning for the presidency in 2008, was recorded saying to a private donors’ gathering in San Francisco that disaffected white people “cling to their guns and religion.” Ed Pilkington, “Obama Angers Midwest Voters with Guns and Religion Remark, The Guardian, April 14, 2008.
6. Warren E. Burger, “The Right to Bear Arms,” Parade, January 14, 1990, p. 4.
7. “Open Carry,” Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Accessed July 29, 2017: http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/firearms-in-public-places/open-carrying/
8. Jiaquan Xu, M.D.; Sherry L. Murphy, B.S.; Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A.; and Brigham A. Bastian, “Deaths: Final Data for 2013, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 64, No. 2; p. 84, table 18. Accessed June 19, 2017: www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
9. Sharon LaFraniere, Sarah Cohen and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “How Often Do Mass Shootings Occur? On Average, Every Day, Records Show,” New York Times, December 2, 2015. Accessed June 13, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/how-often-do-mass-shootings-occur-on-average-every-day-records-show.html?smid=tw-share
10. Eyder Peralta, “Study: Most Gun Deaths Happen Outside of Mass Shootings,” the two-way, National Public Radio, February 1, 2013. Accessed June 19, 2017: www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/02/01/170872321/study-most-gun-deaths-happenoutside-of-mass-shootings
11. Nate Silver, “Did Democrats Give Up in the Gun Control Debate?” New York Times, January 11, 2011.
12. David Cole, “The Terror of Our Guns,” New York Review of Books, July 14, 2016.
13. Ibid., referring to the claim made in one of the books reviewed by Cole on the history of the gun industry, with the Winchester Rifle Company the central case study: Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, New York: Basic Books, 2916. The other two books Cole reviews are: Robert J. Spitzer, Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; and Firmin DeBrabander, Do Guns Make Us Free? Democracy and the Armed Society, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Spitzer argues that the regulation of guns from the time they were invented, including throughout U.S. history, is not a contradiction to the Second Amendment or to the Heller decision as individual rights. See also: Mark Anthony Frassetto, Firearms and Weapons Legislation up to the Early 20th Century. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Law Center, 2013). This history ends in 1935, but many of the laws are still in effect.
14. Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Waldman is president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. See also on the Second Amendment: William Briggs, How America Got Its Guns: A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017, pp. 75–108.
15. The Congress shall have Power To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress. . . .
16. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016, pp. 7–39.
17. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815−1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 9.
CHAPTER ONE
1. For the central role of George Washington as a land speculator and colonial militia leader in the French and Indian War, see: William Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017, pp. 3–80.
2. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 147.
3. Joseph Doddridge, Notes on the Settlement and Indian Wars of the Western Parts of Virginia and Pennsylvania from 1763 to 1783, Inclusive, Together with a Review of the State of Society and Manners of the First Settlers of the West Country. Clearfield, PA: Clearfield: reprint edition, 2012, pp. 109–110.
4. James Lindgren, “Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal,” Yale Law Journal (June 2002), Vol. 111, p. 2204.
5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 23.
6. Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971, pp. 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008.
7. Domestication of plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approximately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica); the South-Central Andes in South America; and eastern North America. The other original agricultural centers were the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Yellow River of northern China, and the Yangtze River of southern China.
8. Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake, pp. 19–44.
9. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013, p. 32.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Sherman Alexie, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. New York: Little Brown, 2017, p. 297.
2. John Grenier, The First Way of War, 1607-1814. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10.
3. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800−1890. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994, p. 53.
4. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 5, 10.
5. Ibid., p. 1.
6. Bernard Bailyn, Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600−1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
7. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 29–34, 36–37, 39.
8. Ibid., pp. 192–93.
9. Ibid., pp. 40–41, 205.
10. Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of American Violence,” The Journal of Women’s History, 2008, Vol. 20: No. 2.
11. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 221–22.
12. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 7.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Ibid., pp. 223–24.
15. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
16. Grenier, First Way of War, p. 14.
17. Ronald T. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown, 1993, pp. 85–86
18. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum Macmillan, 1992, pp. 455−457.
19. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820−1875. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
20. Kaplan, Robert D. Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House, 2005, pp. 8–10.
21. Dexter Filkins, “James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2017.
22. Grenier, First Way of War, p. 222.
CHAPTER THREE
1. See: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2011.
2. Mumia Abu-Jamal, To Protect and Serve Who? San Francisco: City Lights/Open Media Series, 2015.
3. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 2.
4. See: Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York: NYU Press, 2014, pp. 23–42.
5. Hadden, Slave Patrols, pp. 11–12, 15, 24.
6. Ibid., pp. 25–28.
7. Ibid., pp. 32–35.
8. Ibid., pp. 39−40.
9. From Edward Cantwell’s 1860 judicial hornbook The Practice at Law in North Carolina: Hadden, Slave Patrols, p. 105.
10. The assumption that poor white men dominate gun ownership and violence remains current, when, in fact, those who make less than $25,000 a year are much less likely to own guns. See: Lois Beckett, “Gun Inequality: US study charts rise of hardcore super owners,” The Guardian, September 19, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/19/us-gun-ownership-survey
11. Hadden, Slave Patrols, pp. 71–72, 102–103.
12. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 222–223.
13. Ibid., pp. 234–35
14. Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2015, p. 133, quoting Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 177.
15. See: Pamela D. Bridgewater, “Un/Re/Dis Covering Slave Breeding in the Thirteenth Amendment Jurisprudence,” Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2001: pp. 12–44. Accessed July 27, 2017: http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=crsj
16. Sublette and Sublette, The American Slave Coast, p. 312.
17. Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820−1875. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005, pp. 238−39, 151. Also see: Robert M. Utley, Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers, New York: Berkley/Penguin, 2003, and Utley, Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers, New York: Berkley/Penguin, 2008.
18. Anderson, The Conquest of Texas, pp. 198–202, 204–205.
19. Hadden, Slave Patrols, p. 205.
20. See: Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Also see: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
21. Ibid., p. 206.
22. Ibid., pp. 208–209.
23. Malcolm Harris, “The Future of the United States,” a review essay of Sublette and Sublette, The American Slave Coast, in Pacific Standard Magazine, January 26, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2017: https://psmag.com/a-future-history-of-the-united-states-2965a114f8ee#.6t82shj6j
24. Hadden, p. 216.
25. Hadden, p. 219.
26. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books, 1990, Chapter Four.
27. Saul Cornell and Eric M. Ruben, “The Slave-State Origins of Modern Gun Rights,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2015. Accessed October 16, 2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-origins-of-public-carry-jurisprudence-in-the-slave-south/407809/
CHAPTER FOUR
1. “Jesse James” or “The Ballad of Jesse James” (traditional, ca. 1882).
2. Written by Robbie Robertson, Copyright © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
3. Ralph J. Gleason, Rolling Stone, October 1969, quoted in Peter Viney, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” Jawbone, Issue 5, Winter 1997, online at: http://theband.hiof.no/articles/dixie_viney_old.html
4. In the 1960s, a distinguished leftist British historian, the late Eric Hobsbawm, famously created the concept of the “social bandit,” and included Jesse James as an example of a Robin Hood type. The popularity of his work on the outlaw as a social bandit, given his left politics, may have contributed to the revival in 1960s culture of the mythology of an earlier era. See: Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, New York: W.W. Norton, 1965; and Hobsbawm, Bandits (1969), New York: The New Press; Revised ed., 2000.
5. Forrest Carter, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, 1972; reprinted as Gone to Texas, New York: Delacorte, 1975; reprinted New York: Dell, 1980.
6. Forrest Carter, The Education of Little Tree, New York: Delacorte Press, 1976; published in a new edition as The Education of Little Tree: A True Story by Forrest Carter, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.
7. “Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure,” New York Times, August 26, 1976. Accessed September 10, 2017: www.nytimes.com/1976/08/26/archives/is-forrest-carter-really-asa-carter-only-josey-wales-may-know-for.html
8. Matthew Christopher Hulbert, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016, p. 6. Hulbert argues that the Confederate Missouri guerrillas became a symbolic vanguard of U.S. counterinsurgent wars of conquest in the West following the Civil War. In doing so, he contributes to an understanding of the normalization of guns, the revolver in particular, in U.S. American culture.
9. Ibid., pp. 7–19.
10. Ibid., p. 57. In comparison, the eleven states that made up the Confederacy had a population of 9 million, more than 3 million being enslaved Africans. Seventy-six percent of the settlers owned no slaves, while 24 percent did. Seventeen percent of slavers owned one to nine slaves, and only 6.5 percent owned more than ten. Ten percent of the settlers who owned no slaves were also landless. See: “Selected Statistics on Slavery in the United States,” Causes of the Civil War: www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm. Accessed December 10, 2013.
11. T.J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2002, p. 81.
12. Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991, pp. 43–45.
13. Beccy Tanner, “150 years later, Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence still stirs deep emotions on both sides,” Wichita Eagle, August 17, 2013. Accessed July 30, 2017: www.kansas.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-story-of-kansas/article1121021.html
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. John Newman Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 1877, quoted in Hulbert, Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory, p. 53.
17. Hulbert, Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory, pp. 50–53.
18. Ibid., p. 64.
19. Ibid., p. 183.
20. Ibid., 183−84. Belle Starr was assassinated in 1889 at age 39, not far from where she lived at “Youngers’ Bend” in the Cherokee Nation near the Arkansas border.
21. Ibid., pp. 184–85.
22. Carl Degler, Out of Our Past. New York: Harper, 1959, p. 511. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better know as Mark Twain, was a child of this migration, and his family was quite similar to that of Jesse James, who was twelve years younger. Clemens’s mother was from Kentucky, his father from a wealthy slaver family in Virginia, both of Scots-Irish heritage. Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and when he was five years old the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up. His family always owned or leased enslaved Africans; Clemens had an enslaved woman nanny. He escaped the Missouri-Kansas border war of the 1850s, moved to New York City at age eighteen, and made New York his home most of the rest of his life, except during the Civil War, when he lived in Nevada. In 1869, he married into a family of abolitionists and became friends with many of the illustrious ones, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe. His publishing career and fame followed in the late 1870s and through 1910.
23. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, p. 42.
24. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.
25. Ibid., p. 393.
26. Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 39–86.
27. Hulbert, Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory, p. 82.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. “Gun Ownership Trends and Demographics,” U.S. Politics and Policy Section 3, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, March 12, 2013.
2. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition Paperback. New York: Picador, 2000, p. 156.
3. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985, p. 81.
4. Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York: Random House, 1992, pp. 71–72.
5. Slotkin. Regeneration through Violence, pp. 394–95.
6. John Bakeless, Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness. Originally published 1939, reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 1989: pp. 38–39.
7. Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation, pp. 49–51. For Roosevelt’s views on eugenics and class, see Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016, pp. 188–194.
8. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was married to Elizabeth Schuyler and managed the buying and selling of the family’s enslaved Africans.
9. H.W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 126.
10. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p. 37.
11. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
12. Daniel Hayes, “Donald Trump Takes Aim,” New York Times: Opinion Pages, August 20, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trump-takes-aim.html?_r=0
13. Ibid.
14. Robert Schenkkan, The Kentucky Cycle. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1994.
15. Ibid., author’s note, p. 9.
16. Bobbie Ann Mason, “Recycling Kentucky,” The New Yorker, November 1, 1993, p. 56.
17. Ibid., pp. 59–62.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 62.
20. Daniel Hayes, “Why I Hunt,” in Daniel Hayes, ed., Guns (Kindle edition), Thought Catalog: Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2016.
21. Ibid.
CHAPTER SIX
1. See: Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 1999.
2. A fetish is an object believed to embody supernatural or symbolic powers, a man-made object that gives the owner power over others. Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay “On Fetishism,” retooled the term: “In all the cases the meaning and purpose of the fetish turned out under analysis to be the same. . . . The fetish is a penis-substitute . . . for a particular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost.” Accessed July 28, 2017: www.scribd.com/doc/31127300/Freud-Fetishism-1927e#scribd.
3. Fredric Jameson aptly calls the U.S. Constitution a “formational fetish.” Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London, New York: Verso Books, 2016, p. 67.
4. Garry Wills, “A Nation Captive to the Gun,” Boston Globe, June 15, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/06/14/nation-captive-the-gun/eVN6Kh8hVhodxxMTZnrtBM/story.html
5. “‘Full-spectrum dominance’ is the key term in ‘Joint Vision 2020,’ the blueprint DoD will follow in the future.” Jim Garamone, American Forces Press Service, “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance,” DoD News, June 2, 2000. Accessed July 22, 2017: http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289
6. Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991, pp. 151–82, 227–62, 311–48.
7. Ibid., pp. 30–31, 73–74.
8. Ibid., p. 112.
9. See: Perry Miller, Errand in the Wilderness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956; and Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates, New York: Riverhead, 2008.
10. Akenson, God’s Peoples, p. 118.
11. Thomas F. Rzeznik, Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial-Era Philadelphia. State College, PA: Penn State University, 2013.
12. “Second Amendment,” NRA-Institute for Legislative Action. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.nraila.org/second-amendment/
13. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). Accessed July 28, 2017: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/
14. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans in Agreement With Supreme Court on Gun Rights,” Gallup, June 26, 2008. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.gallup.com/poll/108394/americans-agreement-supreme-court-gun-rights.aspx
15. Robert H. Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal: 47:1 (Fall 1971). Accessed July 27, 2017: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4149&context=fss_papers
16. Claudia Luther, “Bork Says State Gun Laws Constitutional,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1989, p. B5. Accessed October 16, 2017: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-15/local/me-587_1_state-gun-laws-constitutional
17. National Archives, “Timeline of Events Leading to the Brown v. Board of Education Decision, 1954.” Accessed July 27, 2017: www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brown-v-board/timeline.html
18. See: Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
19. Joel Achenbach, Scott Higham, and Sari Horwitz, “How NRA’s True Believers Converted a Marksmanship Group into a Mighty Gun Lobby,” Washington Post, January 12, 2013. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-nras-true-believers-converted-a-marksmanship-group-into-a-mighty-gun-lobby/2013/01/12/51c62288-59b9-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html
20. Mark Ames, “From ‘Operation Wetback’ to Newtown: Tracing the Hick Fascism of The NRA,” Pando, December 17, 2012. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/newtown/
21. Mark Ames, “A Brief History of American Gun Nuts,” Pando, June 26, 2015. Accessed July 27, 2017: https://pando.com/2015/06/26/brief-history-american-gun-nuts/.
22. “Trump Tells N.R.A. Convention, ‘I Am Going to Come Through for You.’” New York Times, April 28, 2107. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/us/politics/donald-trump-nra.html?_r=0
23. George Zornick, “Trump and the NRA,” The Nation, July 17, 2017, Vol. 305, Issue 2.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Hulbert, Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory, p. 5.
2. See: Bonnie Berkowitz, Lazaro Gamio, Denise Lu, Kevin Uhrmacher and Todd Lindeman, “The Math of Mass Shootings,” Washington Post, July 27, 2016. These 128 events do not include gun shootings during a robbery, spree shootings (shooting two or more victims in a short time in multiple locations), or gang deaths, nor domestic homicide or suicide. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/mass-shootings-in-america/. See also the database of mass shootings compiled by Mother Jones magazine, which is frequently updated. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/
3. Sharon LaFraniere, Sarah Cohen and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “How Often Do Mass Shoootings Occur? On the Average, Every Day, Records Show,” New York Times, December 2, 2015. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/how-often-do-mass-shootings-occur-on-average-every-day-records-show.html?_r=0
4. Jane Mayer, “The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings,” The New Yorker, June 16, 2017. Accessed September 10, 2017: www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-link-between-domestic-violence-and-mass-shootings-james-hodgkinson-steve-scalise
5. Monte Akers, Nathan Akers, and Dr. Roger Friedman, Tower Sniper: The Terror of America’s First Campus Active Shooter. Houston: John M. Hardy Publishing, 2016. See also: Gary M. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1997.
6. Lawrence Wright, “America’s Future Is Texas,” The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2017. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas
7. Ibid.
8. “San Ysidro Massacre,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 19, 1984. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-san-ysidro-massacre-1984jul19-story.html. For a biography of the shooter, James Huberty, see: http://murderpedia.org/male.H/h/huberty-james.htm
9. Richard Woodbury, “Ten Minutes in Hell,” Time, October 28, 1991.
10. Paula Chin, “A Texas Massacre,” People, November 4, 1991. Accessed October 16, 2017: http://people.com/archive/a-texas-massacre-vol-36-no-17/. A similar incident of a gunman targeting women took place two years earlier in Montreal, Quebec, at a technical school engineering class, killing twenty-eight people, half of them women. Before he began shooting, the gunman announced that he was fighting feminism and called the women “a bunch of feminists.” He left a suicide note blaming women for ruining his life, including a list of nineteen women he wanted to kill. Barry Came, D. Burke, G. Ferzoco, B. O’Farreli, B. Wallace, “Montreal Massacre: Railing Against Feminists,” Maclean’s Magazine, December 18, 1989.
11. Mark Follman, Gavin Aronsen, and Deanna Pan, “US Mass Shootings, 1982–2016: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation,” Mother Jones, June 12, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/
12. A year and a half before the Newtown massacre, a right-wing Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, heavily armed and disguised as a policeman, took a ferry to a small island near Oslo where a summer camp for some six hundred teenagers from the youth wing of a left political organization was in session, killing 69 and wounding 110, the youngest fatality being fourteen years old.
13. Chuck Haga, “Family: Teen had ‘good relationship’ with grandfather he killed,” Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, March 25, 2005; Jeremy Lennard, “Ten Dead in US School Shooting,” The Guardian, March 22, 2005. See also: Jodi A. Byrd, “‘Living My Native Life Deadly’: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of Competing Genocides,” American Indian Quarterly 31 (Spring 2007): pp. 310–332.
14. Daniel N. Paul, “We Were Not the Savages,” August 31, 2008. Accessed July 22, 2017: www.danielnpaul.com/NativeAmericansDemonized.html
15. Before going on the killing rampage, Cho mailed a video of his manifesto to NBC News headquarters in New York: www.nbcnews.com/id/18187368/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/va-tech-killers-strange-manifesto. The video can be seen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmE4t6BnEhQ
16. Washington Post Staff, “How the Las Vegas Strip Shooting Unfolded,” , October 3, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/las-vegas-shooting/?utm_term=.2575b4799866
17. “Las Vegas Shooting: N.R.A. Supports New Rules on ‘Bump Stock’ Devices, New York Times, October 5, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/las-vegas-shooting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
18. Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 5, 10.
19. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
20. Jeremy Herb, “Congress proposes defense budget $37 billion higher than Trump’s,” CNN.com, June 22, 2017. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/congress-trump-defense-budget/index.html
21. See: Iain Overton, The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms. New York: Harper, 2016. For a review of Overton’s findings, see: C.J. Chivers, “How Many Guns Did the U.S. Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands,” New York Times Magazine, August 24, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/magazine/how-many-guns-did-the-us-lose-track-of-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-hundreds-of-thousands.html
22. Overton, Way of the Gun, p. ix.
23. Thom Shanker, “U.S. Sold $40 Billion in Weapons in 2015, Topping Global Market,” New York Times, December 26, 2016. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/us/politics/united-states-global-weapons-sales.html?_r=0
24. SIRPI, “Increase in arms transfers driven by demand in the Middle East and Asia, says SIRPI,” February 20, 2017. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2017/increase-arms-transfers-driven-demand-middle-east-and-asia-says-sipri
25. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Accessed July 27, 2017: www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/att/
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. When a hollow-point bullet strikes a person, the bullet expands on penetration, opening up like a parachute, causing far more damage to tissue, organs, and arteries. Michael S. Schmidt, “Background Check Flaw Let Dylann Roof Buy Gun, FBI Says,” New York Times, July 10, 2015. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/background-check-flaw-let-dylann-roof-buy-gun-fbi-says.html?_r=0
2. “Donald Trump, Jr. Speaks at Neshoba Fair,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 27, 2016.
3. Ibid.
4. From the Christian Posse Comitatus Newsletter, quoted in Kenneth S. Stern, A Force upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, p. 50.
5. Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep. Oakland CA: AK Press, 2017.
6. Ibid., p. 2.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., pp. 95–96.
9. Ibid., pp. 97–98.
10. Ibid., pp. 206, 254.
11. Ibid., pp. 96–101.
12. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement. Washington DC: FBI Counterterrorism Division, October 17, 2006. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf
13. Samuel V. Jones, “FBI’s Warning of White Supremacists Infiltrating Law Enforcement Nearly Forgotten,” The Grio, May 12, 2015. Accessed July 28, 2017: http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/
14. Lois Beckett, “Gun Inequality: US study charts rise of hardcore super owners,” The Guardian, September 19, 2016. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/19/us-gun-ownership-survey
15. Daniel Trotta, “U.S. Military Battling White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis In Its Own Ranks,” Huffington Post, October 21, 2012. Accessed July 28, 2017: www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/us-army-white-supremacists_n_1815137.html
16. Ibid.
17. Matt Kennard, Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror. New York: Verso Books, 2012, p. 13.
18. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2013; reprint of the original 1962 book. Text accessible at: https://libcom.org/files/Robert%20Franklin%20Williams%20-%20Negroes%20with%20guns.pdf
19. Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
20. “Armed Black Panthers Invade Capitol,” Sacramento Bee, May 4, 1967. Accessed October 16, 2017: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/history/article148667224.html
21. Caroline E. Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017, p. 128.
22. Ibid., p. 165.
23. David Cay Johnston, “William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies,” New York Times, July 24, 2002. Accessed July 29, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2002/07/24/us/william-pierce-69-neo-nazi-leader-dies.html?_r=0
24. The full text of The Turner Diaries can be read free online. Accessed July 29, 2017: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0xb4crOvCgTSk9CcXRLYkN4TUU/view
1. Emma Pettit, “The New Gun-Violence Scholars,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22, 2016.
2. Joe Helm, “Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence, and death,” Washington Post, August 14, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/ ; “Unrest in Virginia: Clashes over a Show of White Nationalism in Charlottesville Turn Deadly,” Time Magazine, August 14, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: time.com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/; Christina Caron, “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman,” New York Times, August 13, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/heather-heyer-charlottesville-victim.html; “Trump says both sides to blame for Charlottesville violence,” YouTube, August 15, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlhn8EKvoZU.
3. See: Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, New York: Melville House, 2017; Alexander Reid-Ross, Against the Fascist Creep.
4. Colleen Flaherty, “Don’t ‘Go There,’” Inside Higher Ed, February 24, 2016. Accessed July 27, 2017: www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/24/u-houston-faculty-senate-suggests-changes-teaching-under-campus-carry?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=183bc9e3a3-DNU20160224&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-183bc9e3a3-197425449#.Vs8zo9rq4zM.mailto
5. Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
6. Ibid., p. x
7. Ibid., p. xi.
8. Ibid., pp. xi, xii.
9. Ibid., p. xii.
10. It is indeed the case that Walmart is a major driver of gun sales in the United States. See: George Zornick, “How Walmart Helped Make the Newtown Shooter’s AR-15 the Most Popular Assault Weapon in America,” The Nation, December 9, 2012. Zornick writes, “A massive recent spike in gun sales has boosted Walmart’s flagging profits, making it the top seller of firearms and ammunition nationwide.” Accessed July 21, 2017: www.thenation.com/article/how-walmart-helped-make-newtown-shooters-ar-15-most-popular-assault-weapon-america/. Also see: MJ Lee, “Why Walmart will keep selling guns,” CNN, June 25, 2015. Accessed July 24, 2017: www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/politics/walmart-guns-confederate-flag/index.html
11. Haag, Gunning of America, pp. 179, 183.
12. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, p. 110. After Knopf halted publication of the book, it was picked up by Soft Skull Press, Berkeley, CA, in 2003 and remains available.
13. Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,” New York Times Book Review, September 10, 2000; Edmund S. Morgan, “In Love with Guns,” New York Review of Books, October 19, 2000.
14. Nick Sanchez, “25 Best Charlton Heston ‘Gun Freedom’ Quotes,” Newsmax, July 22, 2017. Accessed July 24, 2017: www.newsmax.com/TheWire/charlton-heston-gun-quotes-top/2015/10/23/id/697700/
15. James Lindgren, “Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal,” Yale Law Journal (June 2002), Vol. 111, pp. 2234– 2249.
16. Ibid., p. 2197.
17. Ibid., pp. 2208–2210.
18. Ibid., pp. 2205–06. Also see: Robert H. Churchill, “Guns and the Politics of History,” Reviews in American History, 2001, 29: p. 329.
19. Lindgren, “Fall from Grace,” p. 2232.
20. Ibid., p. 2197.
21. Jon Wiener, “Fire at Will,” The Nation, October 17, 2002. Accessed October 16, 2017: https://www.thenation.com/article/fire-will/
22. Ibid.
23. Official announcement by the Columbia University Board of Trustees, December 13, 2002. See full text at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1157. Accessed July 21, 2017.
24. Jon Wiener, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower. New York: New Press, 2005.
25. Ibid.
26. “Swiftboating” refers to the right-wing attack on Senator John Kerry when he was the Democratic candidate for president in 2004. Kerry had served as a Swift Boat captain in the Vietnam War, and his campaign was presenting him as a war hero who could better handle the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than President George W. Bush, his opponent. However, Kerry, who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his combat service, returned from Vietnam strongly against the war and joined with other Vietnam veterans in protests, including tossing their medals over the White House fence. Vietnam War veteran diehards and the right-wing militarists in general hated Kerry nearly as much as they hated Jane Fonda, and their vicious and pervasive attacks and lies about Kerry during the campaign came to be called “swiftboating.”
27. Scott McLemee, “Amazing Disgrace,” Inside Higher Ed, May 19, 2010. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/19/amazing-disgrace
28. Library of Congress. Accessed July 24, 2017: www.loc.gov/item/ca0959/
29. CBS Films, Winchester, starring Helen Mirren, scheduled release date: February 23, 2018. Accessed July 24, 2017: www.imdb.com/title/tt1072748/
30. Haag, Gunning of America, pp. 285–289.
CONCLUSION
1. Clare Foran, “The House Democrats’ Sit-In Comes to an End,” The Atlantic, June 23, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/house-democrats-sit-in-guns/488444/
2. “The Terrorist Screening Center, a multi-agency center administered by the FBI, is the U.S. Government’s consolidated counterterrorism watchlisting component and is responsible for the management and operation of the Terrorist Screening Database, commonly known as ‘the watchlist.’” Accessed July 24, 2017: www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/national-security-branch/tsc
3. Phillip Bump, “The Problem with Banning Guns for People on the No-Fly List,” Washington Post, June 13, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/07/the-no-fly-list-is-a-terrible-tool-for-gun-control-in-part-because-it-is-a-terrible-tool/
4. Emily Richmond, “Civic Lessons From the House Democrats’ Sit-In,” The Atlantic, June 28, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/civics-lessons-from-the-house-democrats-sit-in/489167/. Also see: Phyllis Bennis, “The House Sit-In Would’ve Been More Powerful If It Rejected ‘No Fly, No Buy,’” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 23, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: http://fpif.org/house-sit-wouldve-powerful-rejected-no-fly-no-buy/
5. Melissa Davey, “Australia’s gun laws stopped mass shootings and reduced homicides, study finds,” The Guardian, June 22, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/23/australias-gun-laws-stopped-mass-shootings-and-reduced-homicides-study-finds. See also: Simon Chapman, Philip Alpers, and Michael Jones, “Association Between Gun Law Reforms and Intentional Firearm Deaths in Australia, 1979−2013,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 316, No. 3, July 19, 2016. Accessed July 24, 2017: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2530362
6. Hahrie Han, “Want Gun Control? Learn from the N.R.A.,” Opinion section, New York Times, October 4, 2017. Accessed October 9, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/opinion/gun-control-nra-vegas.html
7. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans in Agreement With Supreme Court on Gun Rights,” Gallup, June 16, 2008. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.gallup.com/poll/108394/americans-agreement-supreme-court-gun-rights.aspx
8. Sarah Ellison, “The Civil War that Could Doom the N.R.A.,” Vanity Fair, June 27, 2016. Accessed October 16, 2017: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/the-civil-war-that-could-doom-the-nra. See also: Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. At its 2016 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, the N.R.A. endorsed Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and Trump addressed the thousands of enthusiastic attendees: Michele Gorman, “Donald Trump and NRA Endorse Each Other,” Newsweek, May 20, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-and-nra-endorse-each-other-462187
9. Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond. San Francisco: Soft Skull Press, 2005.
10. Mark Ames, “From ‘Operation Wetback’ to Newtown: Tracing the Hick Fascism of the NRA,” Pando, December 17, 2012. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/newtown/
11. Mark Ames, “A Brief History of American Gun Nuts,” Pando.com, June 26, 2015. Accessed July 28, 2017: https://pando.com/2015/06/26/brief-history-american-gun-nuts/
12. Ibid.
13. Ted Koppel, “Guns, A Family Affair,” CBS Sunday Morning, March 13, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.cbsnews.com/news/guns-a-family-affair/. Wyoming is the state with the most firearms per capita (196 per 1,000), three times as many as the next highest (District of Columbia), with more than half the population owning firearms and with one of the highest gun death rates. Accessed July 24, 2017: http://reverbpress.com/politics/firearms-per-capita-by-state/
14. Transcript: Face to Face with Alan Simpson, CBS News, February 23, 2012. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-face-to-face-with-alan-simpson/
15. Jessica Chia, “George Zimmerman ‘sells Trayvon Martin gun for $250,000 to a mother planning to give it to her son for his birthday’ and claims he auctioned it off because he’s sick of Hillary Clinton’s anti-gun rhetoric,” DailyMail.com, May 24, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3607507/George-Zimmerman-sells-gun-250-0000-mother-planning-pistol-son-birthday-claims-launched-auction-s-sick-Hillary-Clinton-s-anti-gun-rhetoric.html
16. Mike McPhate, “George Zimmerman’s 3rd Auction for Gun Brings $138,900 High Bid,” New York Times, May 18, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/george-zimmermans-3rd-auction-for-gun-brings-138900-high-bid.html
17. See: Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
18. See: Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013.
19. For photographs and documents, see Arnaldo Dumindin, Philippine-American War, 1899–1902. Accessed July 21, 2017: http://philippineamericanwar.webs.com
20. Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History Vol. 66, no. 4 (March 1980): pp. 810–31.
21. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House, 2005, p. 138.
22. See: Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
23. See: Gregorio Selser (Cedric Belfrage, translator), Sandino. New York: Monthly Review Books, 1982. Nicaraguans lived under the Somoza family dictatorship for half a century until a new generation, heirs of Sandino’s anti-imperialist struggle, overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Again, the United States created a counterinsurgency that devastated Nicaragua in the 1980s, forcing the Sandinistas out of power electorally in 1989.
24. See: John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam, Crime or Commemoration? New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016. The Pentagon, under the Obama administration, organized commemorative activities to take place from 2016 to 2025, covering the 50th anniversary of the decade of the war, 1966–1975.
25. Theresa Tuohy, “The U.S. is celebrating the wrong anniversary for the Vietnam War,” Washington Post, April 27, 2015. Accessed July 24, 2017: www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/27/we-were-already-in-vietnam-before-65-nows-the-wrong-year-to-mark-the-wars-50th-anniversary/?utm_term=.07652a1a7e72
26. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War, Public Broadcasting System, September 2017. Accessed September 21, 2017: www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/
27. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 1–3.
28. Liam Stack, “What We Know About the Standoff in Oregon,” New York Times, January 3, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/04/us/04oregon-listy.html?action=click&contentCollection=US&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article
29. Jacqueline Keeler, “‘It’s So Disgusting’ Malheur Militia Dug Latrine Trenches Among Sacred Artifacts,” Indian Country Today, February 17, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/02/17/its-so-disgusting-malheur-militia-dug-latrine-trenches-among-sacred-artifacts-163454
30. See: Kollibri Terre Sonnenblum, “The Malheur Wildlife Refuge Occupation: A Skirmish Among Colonizers, CounterPunch, January 6, 2016. Accessed July 21, 2017: www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/06/the-malheur-wildlife-refuge-occupation-a-skirmish-among-colonizers/
31. Quoted in Daniel Hayes, “Why I Hunt,” in Daniel Hayes, ed., Guns (Kindle edition), Thought Catalog: Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2016.