THE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS
I’ve more than a passing interest in the Boxing Day firearm amnesty that
took place in Los Angeles. It appears that some people had even forgotten about
guns stashed under their beds. Some had been ‘gifted’ firearms and shoved them
into lofts and garages together with all the other unwanted tacky gifts after
the holidays. So it’s no surprise, being the season of goodwill and everything,
that those who showed up at the amnesty bearing arms, were given $100 and $200
supermarket vouchers, depending on the size and capacity of the weapon they
handed over. My only hope was that they don’t use it as some sort of upgrade
coupon.
It’s been impossible not to sense the global hubris around the recent
slaughter of the innocents in Connecticut. How easy it’s been to say, in the
aftermath of such horrors, that America have got it so very wrong when it comes
to gun control and the freedom to bear arms. How easy it’s been for everyone to
judge and relate the madness of a single psychotic gunman against the National
Rifle Association and come up with a flawed image of a nation and its
constitution. And whenever we think of the NRA merely upholding their
constitutional right, the world has the audacity to then question what
America’s perception of freedom actually is. It seems to be, historically
speaking, that everybody’s confusing ‘freedom’ with ‘imposition.’
Whenever something is taken away from us within British politics, we
somehow comply, subliminally feeling that it was probably for our own good –
even if we are paying for the act of a single madman. This collectivism works
here, but America is less structured around the docility of its citizens. So,
we have to wonder whether a firearm amnesty would actually work? Let’s face it;
you can’t unmake an atomic bomb. And you can’t redefine gun control in a
country that has come of age with that culture without opening up even more
outdated cans of worms within the amendments of the same constitution.
I think perhaps it’s time we took an honest side step and think about
how America became an armed nation in the first place. For that we need to go
beyond the romance culture that dictates that guns and money look somehow sexy
together. We need to have a brain amnesty within our collective language
regarding firearms and what we all believe America represents on the subject.
For instance, maybe next time you pass Abercrombie and Fitch you’ll look beyond
that enormous image of a healthy, naked male torso and replace it with the
hunched, bloated figure of Ernest Hemingway leaning over, with a rifle in his
mouth. It was, after all, at Abercrombie and Fitch that the American writer
purchased the gun he used to kill himself.
This romanticism is where current British piety falls flat within the
dangerous, judgmental island mentality, particularly when we proudly state that
our laws are set up so that the only gun on British soil would be an illegal
one. In the past gentlemen dueled against each other, I say ‘gentlemen’ here because the
lower classes were only allowed to use their fists. It was colonialism, again
very much a class thing, that took this same firearm culture further afield,
usually to places where unruly ‘natives’ refused to play ‘fair’ when it came to
handing their sovereignty and land over. The seeding of the current crisis is
when portable firearms such as muskets were introduced as inter-tribal currency
in places such as South Africa, New Zealand and indeed, the USA. If ever the
missionaries were taking their time utilising the calming methods of religion
and spirituality then the seat of colonial power would only use firepower force
to hasten things up. Let’s face it time is, after all, money.
I still find it hard to look at the paintings and etchings of partially
clothed natives being handed government documents they can’t even read, in
return for a share in what was their own sovereignty. These romantic gatherings
always seem to obscure a very different landscape as they shield the body mounds
in the burnt villages that stretch out far behind them. It’s no surprise that
these so-called ‘savage natives’ look so relieved in these images – probably
because they’d never witnessed first hand the new technology of a musket
before.
It was within these exchanges that the first handover of firearms was
instigated as an unwritten right to defend oneself from such atrocities ever
happening again. Don’t forget that selling someone their own freedom back is
the oldest trick in the book.
At this point weaponry became a colonial tactic, which was a forbearer
of what we now know as ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s always been an intertribal
catalyst with the knowledge that with one side fully armed it could only lead
to a hasty defeat of the other. The colonialists could just leave them to it
and return later as a voice of reason within the mayhem, with treaty in hand,
and separate the warring tribes ‘peacefully’, thus taking control. In this way,
it’s hard not to draw parallels between urban gang and gun culture of the late
20th century without thinking of the real colonial roots of inter-racial gun
crime.
Throughout these crazy colonial times it was important that Britain
remained whiter than white as well as gun free. The seat of colonial power would
not tolerate the internal threat of the same ‘freedoms’ (dressed up as
insurgent actions) coming from its own people, as did the French, Spanish or
some other neighboring ‘liberated’ countries.
Gun control in Britain was about keeping the monarchy safe (remember,
the only guns on the streets were used exclusively by the upper classes and
around issues of honor). It would only be much later that the working classes
would be entrusted with firearm technology, and then only in the trenches to
exercise their own feelings of honor. And when that war was over, the weapons
went back into the toy box and the country was again clean. Don’t forget that
the first world war was not just the first modernist war, it was also the first
post-colonial war.
It is important to remember that the right to bear arms is not actually
a right or freedom but an imposition. The same guns used in Connecticut also
hail from a time of colonial force, which became translated into a
constitutional text as a ‘freedom’. And by stating it as a ‘freedom’ (second
amendment) it means that the individual citizens become culpable because they
ultimately have a choice to bear arms. What this effectively does is
postulate the murdering of children, or anyone else, as a birthright by placing
the onus back onto the citizen’s shoulders.
The Right to Arm Bears Published Article. Beige Magazine. January 2013