The Myths and Lies of American Gun Culture
A conversation with historian Dominic Erdozain on "One Nation Under Guns."
In One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, historian Dominic Erdozain unpacks some of the legal, historical, and philosophical myths that make our debate around guns so distorted and distant from reality. We spoke this week about what the Framers actually thought about guns, their relationship to changing conceptions of manhood, and the myth of the “law-abiding citizen.” This interview is also available as a bonus episode on the Boundary Issues podcast, which of course you should subscribe to. A transcript is below.
Paul Waldman: Gun advocates often characterize the Second Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny, that we all need to have guns in case we have a need to overthrow the government. Is there any evidence that the Framers actually saw it that way?
Dominic Erdozain: I think they wanted it as some kind of protection against tyranny, but not of the kind that modern gun advocates imagine. I think the concern for the Founders and the republican philosophy that they drew upon was that a professional army, what they called a standing army, was the high road to tyranny. They looked at the history of ancient Rome, they looked at the English Civil War and the rise of Cromwell's protectorate, and they saw the close connection between a kind of charismatic leadership and a professional army. They wanted a bulwark or an alternative to that, which is a well-regulated militia. Now this is a kind of constitutional protection against the tyranny of an uncontrolled military state. That doesn't mean that the militia is going to take up arms against the state. It's a kind of constitutional alternative.
Paul Waldman: So after the Civil War, we see the rise of this thing that I had not heard of before called the “true man doctrine,” which says that if there was a duty to avoid violence and even murder, then that would turn men into cowards. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and what it was supposed to represent about how this vision of manhood intersects with the law as we construct it.
Dominic Erdozain: It's a strange phenomenon to trace because 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. Joanne Freeman's excellent book, The Field of Blood, talks about the violence in Congress being almost universally of Southern slave owning origin and how Northern congressmen often declined these challenges and certainly were reluctant to be drawn into fighting duels, which were illegal after all.
And 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.
Paul Waldman: And that gets wrapped up with the ideology of the frontier. This idea of what the frontier represents and how deeply American it is takes shape, and we begin constructing this myth around it, that the embodiment of the truest American spirit is what happens out on the frontier. And supposedly people are constantly shooting each other, and that's what it means to be truly American.
Dominic Erdozain: The key word there is “constructing,” because the real frontier was violent initially. A lot of the violence was conducted by the US Army in clearing native peoples off their lands. And broadly it ended; the true American model actually was the establishment of the rule of law and establishing of courts and legal process. But the mythology of the frontier is one that develops just as the actual frontier closes.
And 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. So it's a romanticism and some critics, female critics of Theodore Roosevelt, who's one of the beacons of it, called it a kind of inverted Americanism because it set a kind of patriotism against the American traditions of the rule of law.
Paul Waldman: Anyone who has actually held a gun knows that it gives you this kind of immediate feeling of power. And I think it is something that those who haven't experienced it really ought to, because there's something extraordinarily powerful about it. That may be a product of the culture that we all grow up in, but there is no question that that even just holding it gives you a sensation of potency. And I wonder if that's something you've thought about and what kind of danger that produces.
Dominic Erdozain: Well yes, to look at it more positively, for people like Roosevelt speaking for a kind of emasculated urban generation of grayness, and clerisy of these anonymous urban jobs, for them there was that appeal of the romance. And you're right, potency is the word. To skip a few generations, I think of Edward 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. And I think, as you say, for people who handle a gun, it is a kind of mesmerizing or an empowering experience, even if the reality, as we know, doesn't always work out as you might expect or hope.
Paul Waldman: And then it becomes something that's so deeply symbolic of things that go beyond what's happening in that moment. I was struck by your description of Michael Dunn's last words to Jordan Davis. Jordan Davis, people may know he is Congresswoman Lucy McBath's son. Before he killed him over an argument about loud music, Dunn said, “No, you're not going to talk to me that way.” And it was an assertion that I'm going to regain the status that I feel that I have lost, maybe as a middle-aged White man who feels like the world is changing around him. And he goes down to the gas station and there are these young Black men who think that they can just play their music as loud as they want. And before he fired his gun, he was making a statement, this is taking back my power. You don't get to talk to me that way, because of who I am. And I'm going to show you.
Dominic Erdozain: Absolutely. That was such a striking case and one that takes you back to the 19th century and this kind of patrician quality of lordship. I wrote a piece for Time magazine a couple of months ago called “The Tyranny of Guns” where I tried to make this direct analogy between arbitrary power and what a gun enables and how the Founders actually understood tyranny. There was an editorial from the Honolulu Advertiser which literally had as a title, “Save Us From The Tyranny of Guns,” and it made the point that far from guns making society peaceful, they allow the person to hold the gun to have absolute power over another. And in any situation of conflict, the person without the gun will have to submit. And that's really no way for us to proceed as a democracy. So yes, it's arbitrary and it's absolute.
Paul Waldman: You ask this question that really struck me. You say, “Does the law-abiding citizen even exist?” And this is so central to the gun rights side’s rhetoric about what to do about guns, that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys. As Wayne LaPierre always says, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And so the idea is that there is a strict separation. And any kind of policy choices we have are about either keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys so they're only in the hands of good guys, or just erecting walls and security systems that will make it more difficult for bad guys to come with their guns. I wonder if you could unpack that idea of the law-abiding citizen and what it represents.
Dominic Erdozain: This is the phrase that really struck me as a British-born scholar, as an outsider that I couldn't get my head around: the sense of innate or natural superiority of the law-abiding citizen to the criminal. It just ran against everything I thought of as a scholar. Just as a bit of a sidebar, I've just finished Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold's Ghost, about the atrocities of Belgian imperialism in the Congo. Time again in this book, the point is made about the fine line between civilization and barbarism, or what we think of as civilization, and how feeling that we come from a superior culture makes us casual, almost indifferent, unfeeling about violence. So that's one thing.
In practical terms, how do we know who's who, who’s going to have a good day, who's going to have a bad day? But I think the thing I found most compelling when I looked into the psychology – the sociology and the criminology shows emphatically that most gun homicides are conducted by ordinary people, ordinary Americans who do not have criminal records. So you can dispel this division with the data, but what I found most compelling with these books by the psychologist Hans Toch and Rollo May's book Power and Innocence, which made the point that a perception of innocence, of being holier than other people, better than other people, actually authorizes violence. It salves the conscience in a way, because we know in advance by our identity or our perceived identity that we're better than that other person. So this idea that's supposed to save us from gun violence actually is one of the great motives of it.
Paul Waldman: So we really need to be afraid of the quote-unquote good guy. That's who the problem is.
Dominic Erdozain: Absolutely. And what's extraordinary is, I thought when I started on this project, I'll be drawing on these radical thinkers like Tolstoy and Spinoza, the people I've been reading before I started. And then I started reading James Madison and even John Adams is an obvious one who subscribes to this way of thinking, Alexander Hamilton, saying, we all think we're good people. But when push comes to shove, even our reason, even our highest faculties of conscience are just manipulated by our pride and our self-interest. And really, you don't want to trust the deracinated individual, the individual who speaks and answers only for himself. And the most optimistic of the Founders is probably Thomas Jefferson, and he has the most kind of sanguine or positive view of human nature. But even he scoffs at the idea that he ever believed that virtue was going to be sufficient to govern America, that people would be naturally good. And his attempt to reform penal law reflected a naively positive view of human nature. So all of the Founders subscribe to this sort of skepticism about virtue. The quote I always use is James Madison saying if men were angels, government wouldn't be necessary. And that's the idea that I think modern gun culture has lost.
Paul Waldman: I'm curious about your perspective coming from a society where guns are almost non-existent, certainly in private hands and certainly handguns. We have a perspective here – or at least let's say the gun advocates have a perspective that they try to persuade other people of – that says that guns are the thing that will prevent chaos and that that's what they're for. They're to protect you from chaos. And if you don't have a gun, then the mayhem and crime and murder that surrounds you on all sides will infiltrate its way into your home and your life. And you need a gun to stop the chaos and to impose some kind of an order.
And if you have a society in which lots and lots of people have guns then that's orderly. There's an expression that an armed society is a polite society, that we'll all be living in fear that we're all going to murder each other and therefore we'll all be polite, and therefore it can become an instrument of order. But I'm wondering, my impression has always been that people in Europe look at the United States and think that we are the chaotic society, that their own societies where there are very few guns are places of much greater order than we have here. And I wonder if that was your feeling before you spent a lot of time in the US and how you think about that now.
Dominic Erdozain: 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 the one I just mentioned 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.
So there is that sharp divide and there is that physical geographic divide of the ocean that has prevented that. That's the big difference really, but the idea that they protect from chaos, this is a myth because we know from the data that they don't. But I think that what's happened is that there's been a conflation of the individual gun rights and this honor culture we talked about earlier, and then the racial superiority that has underpinned guns from the outset, that has been merged with the constitutional tradition, which would say that guns do protect us from chaos to some degree, but when they're regulated, but not just regulated in terms of how they're used, but in what context, who is in charge. We forget very easily that the militia was actually a state army and people were under orders. The idea that individual gun ownership prevents chaos just hasn't been borne out by history.
Paul Waldman: You mentioned the militia, this is something I want to ask about too, because there are a couple of key gun rights cases. And you spend some time unpacking D.C. v. Heller, Antonin Scalia's decision in 2008 that for the first time established an individual right to own guns. And one of the things that you do is demonstrate how differently the Framers thought about what the militia was. In Heller, they basically just write it out and essentially treat it as though it's irrelevant. That first clause of the Second Amendment, we don't even have to worry about it anymore. But in your account, the militia was actually a very important idea to the Framers in general and to the way that they were crafting the Second Amendment and what its purpose was.
Dominic Erdozain: I think this is the hardest thing to explain or to argue with both gun owners, gun advocates and people who are kind of indifferent or really don't have much interest or knowledge about it, is that what the Second Amendment was about, what the worry was, what the fear was that prompted the demand for an amendment to protect the right of the people to keep and bear arms. We are used to having a military now. It's very hard to understand that the founders of this republic wanted an anti-militarist or a post-militarist state where there would only ever be professional soldiers used for a limited period and under exceptional circumstances. And for nearly all the time, security protection from foreign invasion and domestic insurrection would be handled by a citizen army of temporary soldiers, soldiers on occasion, citizens always.
It was an idea, because in reality it never really worked, and we can see people like George Washington, no less, Alexander Hamilton and others, and finally, Jefferson, the great advocate of the militia, admitting as president that really a militia is not up to the job. Any kind of distant service is impossible. And you have Washington talking about men flying from their shadows. So we know that in military terms, it was never effective.
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.
Paul Waldman: But they did want the militia to be something that was highly organized, and that was the context in which they were understanding the Second Amendment as they wrote it.
Dominic Erdozain: The draft constitution seemed to authorize professional soldiers for a period that seemed unacceptable and it seemed to establish a standing army by default and it gave the federal government worrying control over the state militias. So everyone wants the militias to be organized; the question is, who's going to do that? Is it going to be the federal government? Is it going to be the state government? And nobody's saying that you'd have an unregulated militia, and you have commentators saying a poorly disciplined or a poorly trained militia is worse than none at all.
The law specified that the militia was under martial law during times of service. William Blackstone, the jurist, talks about it, and if you want to read the rather grisly history of George Washington's time as a commander in the British Army in the Seven Years War, he had militiamen court-martialed and faced some pretty dismal consequences for abandoning their posts. So yes, you certainly were under authority.
Paul Waldman: Gun advocates have been very successful at monopolizing the language of rights. And the whole essence of rights is that they are inviolable. If you have a preference and I have a right and they're in conflict, then I win because the right is more fundamental. We never talk about the non-gun owning public having any rights at stake in this. So is there a way to construct a rights-based argument for the other side of the gun debate?
Dominic Erdozain: I hope so. I've been talking to the artist Suzanne Firstenberg about this, and her piece Alienable Right to Life, about moving the conversation away from gun rights to the right to life and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We don't talk enough about domestic tranquility. Guns threaten us at so many different points. Even if we can say the numbers are relatively small, depending how you measure that, and that few of us are directly affected, we're all indirectly affected. All of us make decisions about where we go, how we speak to people and how we interact or don't interact based on the fear of lethal force that guns represent.
I talked a little bit about my problems with the phrase “common sense” or “gun safety,” phrases that just seem to move around the problem. And common sense is a movable feast, it seems to adjust year after year. And I would love to see a more robust narrative about the right to life, and the kind of freedom that encompasses what the Founders talked about freedom, which is a tranquility of mind. That's a word that comes up again and again, a kind of peace of mind which you cannot have if you live in fear of fellow citizens.
I would love to know how people with hand and long guns would overthrow a government with stealth bombers, hundreds of military installations worldwide and the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons would prevail.
"Anyone who has actually held a gun knows that it gives you this kind of immediate feeling of power. And I think it is something that those who haven't experienced it really ought to, because there's something extraordinarily powerful about it." Bullshit. Holding something designed solely to deliver death is terrifying, or it should be. Spare us the macho nonsense.
I was so happy to find your substack today! This was the first thing I read. Really great conversation, thanks!