Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy

Nearly everyone trying to understand the surge of right wing political strength over the last twenty five years seems to be fixated on the role of religion; Burbick, for a change, focuses on that other social issue, gun control and second amendment rights. She gives a sweeping history of the last hundred years, and the tradition of white males in the US proudly arming themselves while African Americans are disarmed. She also shows the way right wing advocates appropriated and revised the discourse of civil rights to claim to be oppressed by the threat of gun control laws. Expanding on the theme, she shows the way the gun rights discourse intersects with anger at ex-wives (laws against those under restraining orders possessing firearms are opposed because of the many police officers they effect(!)), the religious right, and fear of a UN-controlled America (i.e. restraints on US foreign policy). I wish she'd looked a little more into the intersections of veterans, law enforcement, militias, etc, but overall, quite good.

In GUN SHOW NATION, Joan Burbick accomplishes the unusual, although perhaps intended, feat of subverting her own book title. While the United States may well be (to borrow Eric Schlosser's coinage), a fast food nation, Ms. Burbick argues that case that we are hardly a gun show nation. To the contrary, she goes to great Constitutional, historical, and sociological lengths, coupled with first -hand observations, to assert that America's so-called gun culture (gun shows, the NRA, etc.) is largely the province of white, Anglo-Saxon males, mostly in the Western U.S. Burbick traces the history of white gun ownership from the late 1800's of Wild Bill Cody and arguments over the need for state militias, through the 1920's and the KKK, the 1950's and the Communist Red scare, and into the last half of the 20th Century with its anti-authoritarian and civil rights movements, Vietnam, Rambo and the Terminator, and the alignment of gun rights activism with the right wing of the Republican Party. In her view, the gun is for many white men the last and ultimate repository of personal freedom, both a symbol and an actual lever of power exerted by the individual for the sake of self-protection and the exercise of democracy. Guns represent the white male's mythic role in the creation of the United States: conqueror and settler, defender of land and family from people of color and other imagined threats, now conflated through gun rights movements into safeguards of democracy. From Burbick's perspective - although she never says as much -- the gun is overtly phallic. The loss of "white power" to the civil rights movement in the 1960's spurred the NRA's growth, and with it an explosion in gun ownership, leading to the rabid politicization of the NRA and its membership as Republican Party defenders of the Second Amendment. The gun has become, in Burbick's words, "a political fetish,...a lie that helps us live with a disturbing truth...the act of buying a gun can mimic genuine political action. Gun shows are markets for these political pantomimes that simulate the exercise of political powerwith objects that seem to contain and convey personal power...Gun purchasing is a redirection of energy to perpetuate a political system that disempowers the buyer." This last sentence is strongly reminiscent of Thomas Frank's arguments in WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? about white, lower- and middle-class conservatives acting (i.e., voting) directly against their own self-interest. Ironically, it turns out that the rather nasty joke is on the white gun owner - "the most common lethal use of a gun in the United States is a white man killing himself." A half million Americans have been murdered with guns since 1960, but the same number have committed suicide with guns since 1965. Ten times more people die from gun suicide than gun accident; women are three times more likely than men to attempt suicide, but men are four times more successful thanks to their democracy-defending gu