Historian Dominic Erdozain has managed to make some important observations about a tired subject: our country's infatuation with privately owned weapons meant to kill.
... there's a value system that's current in the South before the Civil War, an honor code whereby a man is obliged culturally, socially, morally to defend his honor (and it is always him) when an insult is offered or made or even perceived in the most subtle of manners. And in the North, this was generally scorned. ...
... after the Civil War, we start to see the spread of an honor code, this time attached to a kind of patriotic mandate, the idea that the tendency of the American mind is against retreat. And you get judges drawing rather eloquently and emotively on their Civil War experience to make a similar argument that it's unmanly, it's cowardly to retreat, and it's effeminate, and the great jurists like William Blackstone who talked about the tenderness of life and the law always existing to protect life, they are seen as kind of old world and effeminate and there's a kind of patriotic mandate for authorizing violence.
... it's a kind of romanticism of redemptive violence and this kind of Manichean idea that you have the bad people, the dangerous elements, you have the Native Americans, and then you have the less suitable White settlers from poor European backgrounds usually. And there's a kind of eugenic dimension to this, a very racialized ideology of the worthy and the unworthy. And there is the romanticism of individual force, even though historians have shown that really we should be talking more about the mild west than the wild west. Certainly there was much more violence still in the South and in the Southern states.
... I think of Edward [Teddy] Kennedy describing a gun as being unique among weapons because it's an instrument of instant and distant death, the power that allows you to kill without fighting. So yeah, there's a potency that is, I think, seductive and it's intoxicating.
... One thing I don't want to do is come across as speaking for a world that has got the solutions and I think that reading books like [Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost] about colonialism in the Congo and reading some of my own history, the British history of imperialism and slavery in the Caribbean especially, you quickly realize that had the Caribbean bordered Hampshire or Surrey or the home counties close to London everybody in Britain would own guns.
There is no question from my own research and that of many other scholars I quote in the book that slavery is the master cause or the taproot of gun culture in the United States and the reason that we don't have a gun culture back home is that the atrocities of our own empire were conducted overseas.
... But the historical truth is that the Second Amendment was really kind of an anti-war measure because the early Americans did not want America to go the way of all flesh, the way of all empires. And they feared that a military establishment would lead to imperialism. So they wanted to reduce the military and their way of doing it was to lean on citizens in a way that was never really going to be sustainable. So that's just obsolete in a way. And that explains a lot of the confusion as to why the Second Amendment came about.
H/t to Paul Waldman for the interview with Erdozain.
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