I’m a white woman, and I own a gun. My husband is retired military, and was a firearms and safety instructor for the Navy, and he has made it a point to teach me everything I need to know about gun safety. We enjoy target and clay-pigeon shooting, and although I’m not a hunter, I do not begrudge those who hunt deer and elk to put meat on the table: Hunting is just not for me. But aside from hunting and target-shooting, why is it that the images of freshmen GOP congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene toting assault rifles on social media so disturbing? And more to the point, what is it with white people and guns?
According to Janoathan Metzl, PhD, a psychiatrist and sociologist from Vanderbilt University, the answer to understanding America’s gun debate is rooted in white supremacy. In his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, Metzl argues that the intensity and polarization of the US gun debate is based on the context of whiteness and white privilege. Dr. Metzl says that white Americans defend their status in the racial hierarchy by opposing issues like gun control and decrying banning assault weapons. Carrying guns in public, and posting photos on social media is a demonstration of white privilege, just as storming the US Capitol on January 6th was a demonstration of white privilege. If we look at history, many aspects of American gun culture are embedded in whiteness.
Way back when, in colonial America, landowners could carry guns, and only white people could own land, and the justification was that they needed firearms in order to put down Indian and Negro uprisings. Believe it or not, the KKK was America’s first gun control lobby, and explicitly targeted disarming and keeping guns out of the hands of African Americans. When African Americans, such as the Black Panthers, started to carry guns in public during the civil rights era, white America went ballistic, and suddenly the second amendment didn’t apply to African Americans, and white people started to scream about gun control.
Before the Civil War ended, many states had “Slave Codes” that prohibited slaves from owning guns. And even after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and after the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery was adopted, states still persisted in prohibiting blacks, now freemen, from owning guns under laws renamed “Black Codes.” The reasoning behind the “Black Codes” was that blacks were not citizens, did not have the same rights as whites, and that included the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.
A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017, showed that white males make up the bulk of America’s gun owners. The in-depth study showed that 31% of whites own guns, with white men making up a much larger share of that than white women. However, only 32% of Americans are white men, but white males make up 61% of gun owners. And while 31% of whites report that they are gun owners, 24% of African Americans and 15% of Hispanics are gun owners. Also, the study showed that there is an urban rural divide to gun ownership as well, as gun owners are more likely to be white, male, and rural. People who don’t own guns are more likely to be nonwhite, female, and urban or suburban.
Over the past several years, states like Missouri changed their laws to allow the open carry of firearms, and as a result, there were parades of white Americans wearing their bullet-proof vests, camoflauge jackets and carrying guns and assault weapons through downtown St Louis, they would march into coffee shops, supermarkets and Walmarts, and were applauded as patriots on social media. Last year, More than 22,000 mostly white, armed gun-rights activists filled the streets around Virginia’s capitol building protest gun-control legislation making its way through the newly Democratic-controlled state legislature.
More recently, when 17-year-old white Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two of them in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer, the police wouldn’t even accept his surrender and let him walk on by. But when African American gun owners show up at the same places, they tend to get shot, because standards are different for black gun owners. For example in 2018, JemelRoberson was working security at a Robbins, Illinois, bar when he was shot dead by police while holding at gunpoint a man involved in a shooting. Roberson, who had a firearms permit, was a security guard, he was doing his job. This is one of many instances where blacks with guns are perceived as threats by police, and arrested or shot.
It is clear that legislators such as Lauren Boebert, Andy Harris and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who plaster photos of themselves with guns all over social media, and refuse to give up their firearms while entering the Capitol, and whining about metal detectors are just another example of white privilege. Imagine if Cory Booker or Reverend Warnock did the same? It would be a very different story. So, the answer to the question: “What is it with white people and guns?” Guns have been an integral part of white privilege and entitlement since the colonial era, and until we overcome racism and enact proper gun laws, I don’t see this changing for the better in the future.
Sources:
2. Http://www.people-press.org/2013/03/12/section-3-gun-ownership-trends-and-demographics/