Our gun obsession has deep and sinister roots in our country’s history | Opinion
On Monday, Kentucky became the 132nd site of a mass shooting for this year barely into its fourth month. Close to 11,000 people so far have died of gun violence, on pace to produce a record-breaking gun-related death total utterly unique among advanced nations.
The response from the Republicans, who have gained a stranglehold on the politics of this state with their supermajority in the legislature, was predictably fatalistic. Josh Bray, the Republican representative from rural Rockcastle County, smugly declared that no existing or contemplated state or federal law could have prevented this from happening. Bray, it should be pointed out, is the author of Bill 153, the so-called Second Amendment Sanctuary Bill, which enjoins state officials from carrying out any federal firearm regulation issued since Joe Biden took office that bans guns, ammunition, or gun accessories.
If Representative Bray knew more of this country’s history, he would realize that his legislation is in lockstep with the nullification movement that Southerners in the antebellum period joined in their increasingly frantic efforts to preserve slavery from the Republican crusade to abolish it. So they claimed the right of any state to render null and void any national legislation they found unconstitutional.
Of course, today’s Republican Party has precious little in common with the party of Lincoln, which, to the Kentucky voters of 1860, represented the gravest threat to everything they held dear. In fact, the Kentuckian John Breckinridge was the candidate for the Southern wing of the Democratic Party which ran on a platform calling for the federal protection of slavery in the territories, but in spirit advocating no restrictions on slavery anywhere, even in free states. Some more radical Southerners were calling for the revival of the importation of bonded Africans to ensure slavery’s future growth and expansion. When Lincoln gained the White House with a plurality of the votes in the four-way election, eleven states applied the ultimate logic to the doctrine of nullification and seceded from the Union.
The eleven states subsequently formed a government which effectively established one-party rule, to minimize dissent against a nation founded, as its vice-president proudly proclaimed, upon the cornerstone of slavery. Today, in virtually every Republican-controlled state, Republicans have set their sights on achieving one-party rule through attaining a supermajority in the legislature, which brooks no opposition from either the Democratic minority, or the executive or judicial branches. When judges have ruled gerrymandering in several states to be unconstitutional, the Republican legislatures simply plowed ahead in what may be called judicial nullification. For neutering Democratic governors, the Republican supermajorities simply strip these governors of as much power as they can devise ways to do so. Supermajorities, in brief, are the best guarantor of an unfettered gun culture. At the national level, the filibuster has proven to be the most reliable tool for defeating efforts at gun reform.
The defend-slavery-at-all costs fever which swept through the South in the late antebellum era resulted in a civil war which nearly brought down this republic. The promotion of a society which will abide absolutely no regulation of guns, no matter how lethal nor how or where they may be displayed has, at its root, the same moral virus—racism— that raged among a large swath of the American population on the eve of the Civil War.
At the conclusion of the war, many white Americans, by no means all of them south of the Potomac, were convinced that the ultimate price of granting freedom to enslaved Blacks would be a race war. The resistance to Reconstruction did, in a number of states, amount to a race war, as scores of thousands died trying to build a biracial society dedicated to sharing political power and economic opportunity.
A century and a half later, that racist thinking persists, at least on a subliminal level, among a much larger portion of white society than we would care to admit. It is the unspoken rationale for fiercely resisting any attempts to ban assault rifles or other weapons of war. It is the animus which leads some of the more fire-eating members of the Sedition Caucus to flaunt AR-15s on their lapels. It is why Kentucky lawmakers require assault weapons which police have seized from criminals to be recycled through auctions. For the coming war white nationalists will need every possible weapon of mass destruction.
The longer we do nothing about the outrage of gun violence in this society, the better the odds that these neo-Confederates will prevail.
Robert Emmett Curran is Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University. This spring the Louisiana State University Press will publish his “American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.”
