What’s a Gun to an American?

This article is part of a series of responses to Episode 2.7 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

Analyzing Giovanni Stradano’s 1580 album, New Inventions of Modern Times, is an inspired way into a genealogical account of American gun violence. As the introduction to Christopher Nygren’s recent podcast episode points out, the cannon takes a central place in the “visual logic of Stradano’s modernity.” But as I look at the frontispiece, I notice another striking emphasis. Allegorical figures of the future and past frame Stradano’s modernity, and Future—a young woman holding a snake eating its tail—indicates the large medallion depicting the Americas. The invention of the Americas—from invenio, to discover—is labeled “(1.)” in Stradano’s index of modern inventions. While the cannon stands as the dominant technological innovation constituting modernity, the discovery of the Americas stands as the geographic loadstone for that same vision.

Front plate, New Inventions of Modern Times

Taking my cue from this image, to trace a genealogy of American gun violence would seem to require tracing the genealogy of a double helix: the genealogy of guns and the genealogy of Americans with guns.

This episode does a wonderful job destroying the myth that gun control is something new, and the genealogy it traces (back to Europe) provides rich soil in which we can plant roots of continuity. But this history of gun control often turns on a very pragmatic axis: how do we avoid accidents? How do we avoid assassinations? How do we avoid well-armed rebellions? Much like Morris Birkbeck’s gloss in Samuel Galton Jr.’s broadleaf, these legal and pragmatic questions largely derive from the purpose of firearms: to disintegrate bodies. Pragmatic questions yield pragmatic laws: no guns in bars, libraries, or government buildings; no machine guns; no grenades; no shotgun barrels shorter than 18 inches, etc.

But there are other questions—theoretical and cultural questions. These questions include: what does owning a gun signify? What is the cultural value of a gun? Who gets to regulate guns? Who is responsible for crimes committed with guns? Can guns be beautiful? These questions require a context all their own. What guns mean in sixteenth-century Italy might not be the same thing as twenty-first-century America. Tracing a genealogy of American gun violence would seem to require a genealogy of Americans with guns and to consider that other modern invention: America.

The first set of questions are often the focus of gun-control advocates. This is the regulator’s point of view. As Chris Nygren notes in the episode, most gun control advocates “argue that in a law-abiding society, firearms don’t have a lot of purposes other than to inflict harm,” and thus gun-control advocates are often bewildered by the belligerence of the gun-owning community: why do they need a gun (especially that gun)?

But to focus exclusively on the utilitarian questions—the purpose questions—will miss what is animating most of the opposition to gun regulation. Although the language of utility is the only language we hear today—self-defense, land management, hunting, etc.—I want to suggest that we only hear that language because the debate originates with gun-control legislation. Therefore, pragmatic concerns set the terms of the debate. But if we set aside this purpose language for a minute and consider the symbolic work that guns do within the gun-owning community, a very different debate emerges—one that pits one modernity myth against another modernity myth.

For the gun-owning community, guns have a symbolic function akin, maybe, to fireworks on the Fourth of July. Fireworks incorporate us into an origin story. They provide an experience of the violence—and the victory—of our collective struggle for independence. Every year, bombs bursting in air enact a patriotic ritual in which we all become American once again.

Similarly, guns are freighted with symbolic significance, and for the gun-owning community, they are a kind of sacrament of freedom. To own a gun, or even to have the ability to own a gun, is to be given the power to resist injustice, become responsible for tyranny-suppression systems, and be inducted into a tradition of self-reliance, civic responsibility, and American exceptionalism. 

Consider that 80 percent of gun owners, and 95 percent of conservative Republican gun owners, believe the right to bear arms is essential to freedom (a right on par with the right to vote, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression), and 25 percent of gun owners think that owning a gun is essential to their very identity.

When the gun-owning community hears only pragmatic arguments for gun regulation—even one’s branded as “common sense gun laws”—they see their identity totems reduced to the status of a shovel. Of course, if guns are just destructive tools or toys, then there is a lot of sense in breaking with the past and recognizing that in the twenty-first century, us moderns have as little need for rapid-fire guns and large magazines as we do for butter churns, washboards, or other outmoded technologies. Of course, kids aren’t being murdered by butter churns and washboards, so, ad fortiori¸ there seems to be even more incentive to separate ourselves from our gun-dependent ancestors. 

Winslow Homer, A Huntsman and Dogs (The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924)

And this seems to be the crux of the matter for the gun-owning community. People outside that community want to regulate guns because they seem to want more “modernity talk.” Gun control advocates seem to want to acknowledge an America beyond the threat of tyranny, just as it is beyond the need for hunting. But to the gun-owning community, the fear of deracination looms large. Guns connect us to the minutemen who won our independence; to Davy Crocket, “Old Betsy,” and the heroes of the Alamo; to the Winchester repeater and the Colt revolver—the “guns that won the West.” To gun owners, guns make us less modern; guns affirm our familial connections to a noble past. Guns burden us with responsibility by incorporating us into that past.

But perhaps even more important than the mythos that undergirds American gun culture is the idea that the gun is one of the most visceral responsibilities of a certain American moral imagination. When a gun owner says that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” it is not so much an argument for technological neutrality, but for human responsibility. Without the ability to exercise responsible gun ownership—with very powerful guns—we relinquish a seemingly essential moral responsibility. From this point of view, not misusing a firearm is actively exercising a virtue essential to my American identity.

This episode gives gun control roots—roots as deep as the sixteenth century. What I look forward to is more of the story in future work: that part of the gun control story that will speak to those who oppose gun control by incorporating them into a new kind of responsibility and new mythos. Acknowledging the symbolic work that guns do in the American imagination, I think, will encourage the gun-owning community to regulate itself and break through the idea that the American virtue of responsibility is a sovereign virtue. When a gun owner takes responsibility for another gun owner killing kids, then the gun-owning community will be inspired to incorporate gun regulation into the ethos of the American gun owner.

James DeMasi holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Dallas, with an emphasis on Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance. He is the Executive Director of Beatrice Institute in Pittsburgh.