Heather Cox Richardson on American Gun Culture

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for talking with us.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, HISTORIAN: It’s a pleasure to be here.

MARTIN: How did we get here? It is a fact – is it not – that a majority of Americans favor some form of gun safety regulations? Correct?

RICHARDSON: Oh yes.

MARTIN: So, given that a majority – an overwhelming majority – of Americans favor these kinds of things, how did we get to the point where a minority of the population, including a gun owning minority, so controls the policy here? The policies under which we all live. So take us back to the beginning. I mean, obviously the national rifle association is central to that, which was founded, what, in the 19th century? Did they always have this uncompromising position toward regulation of firearms?

RICHARDSON: No, they didn’t. And that’s part of the really interesting story of how we got to this moment. The NRA actually starts in 1871 and it starts as an opportunity for people who fought in the civil war, men who fought in the civil war to continue their firearm skills and the camaraderie of being in camp together, doing things like having shooting games at tin cans for example. At the same time, there was the rise as well of a sport of shooting, especially in Europe for which they were pretty large prizes. And so Americans get together and begin to have shooting competitions that are eventually under the umbrella of the national rifle association. And that association is designed not only to promote the sport of shooting, the camaraderie of the campfire from the civil war days, and also gun safety. So when I was a kid growing up in rural Maine, the NRA actually was in our schools teaching us gun safety because we were a hunting community and there were a lot of guns around. That changes dramatically in the 1980s.

MARTIN: What, why did it change and how did it change?

RICHARDSON: The story of the change is an interesting one because it’s so deeply embedded in our politics. And this is something important to remember when we talk about gun safety or gun regulation is the idea that it’s not just about guns, that you can’t separate that issue off. It’s very much part of what happened to our American politics in the 1970s and the 1980s. And what happened then was a dramatic backlash against the new deal coalition that had used the government to regulate business and provide a basic social safety net and promote infrastructure. You know, that world that we had lived under since the 1930s, and especially since after the 1950s had protected American civil rights. That backlash against that activist government that protected Americans, take shape in this image of the American cowboy who stands alone against a grasping government, a government that by the way, in the 19 – 1870s, when the cowboy image rose was called a socialist government, that whole language is not new. And that image of the gun-toting cowboy takes its shape from people like Barry Goldwater, who runs for president in 1964 as a Republican, as a cowboy. It’s an image that Ronald Reagan picks up, remember the image of Reagan in his cowboy hat. And what that image does is it solidifies a political movement that pushes against business regulation primarily, taxes, a basic social safety net, the idea of investment in our infrastructure. And part of that attack on infras – on government regulation focuses on things like civil rights, of course, but also on regulations about guns. And that image of the lone cowboy is really the image that comes out of the 1980s. And you can think about things like the fact that in 1977, the blockbuster image was that of Luke Skywalker, who is this individual guy taking on the empire. And a lot of Americans envision themselves as that in that period. And that’s the moment that the NRA changes from being about gun safety and about protecting the sport of shooting, which is still a big sport in America, and becomes about what they call gun rights. The right of the individual to act as he almost always wishes.

MARTIN: So how did it get to be that the level of violence that we are now experiencing in communities across the country – this kind of violence, especially mass violence, has become so prevalent. And yet the political system seems completely unable to deal with it. How did that happen?

RICHARDSON: It’s crazy. It’s worth – I will answer that, but it’s really worth sitting for a moment with the idea that we are literally a country in which our children, our elderly, our churchgoers are gunned down and our system says, this is the way, this is the price of freedom, as Bill O’Reilly once put it. So the question of the – to answer the question that you just asked of how we got to a place where the government seems unable to handle the fact that 90% of us want common sense gun regulations. And at the same time we have legislators saying, you know, this is not the time to talk about gun safety regulations. Again, it’s about politics. So beginning in 1986, we get the Republican party beginning to talk about voter suppression. They call it ballot integrity at the time, but they’re private memos saying that they’re expecting to throw black people off the rolls. We get opposition to the motor voter act of 1993, which enables people to enroll in voting at motor vehicle registration places, and welfare offices, for example. And we increasingly get focusing on – we get the focus on voter suppression and making sure that only certain people get to have a say in our society. Now at the same time, gerrymandering in the states, which really takes off after 2010, with what was called operation red map, the idea of controlling state legislatures by the Republican party in such a way that they could redistrict those states dramatically to favor Republicans took off after 2010. And then of course, we get a number of Supreme Court decisions like the Citizens United decision that enables corporations to pour money into the, into political contests and decisions that the Shelby – Shelby versus Holder decision that cuts back on the voting rights act. Those things enable, first of all, people like the NRA to funnel money into the Republican party, and also make sure that the majority really does not have the power to influence our – the direction of our country. And then if you throw on top of that, the Senate, which is heavily weighted toward rural communities, and the fact that the Senate filibuster, which has been so extraordinarily abused of late, it means that that the majority of Americans don’t get to have a say in their government. And when you look at the horror that is happening right now in the country, part of the fury, I think is that the murder of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers illustrates that we are in fact, experiencing a tyranny of the minority. And a lot of the majority is no longer willing to put up with that.

MARTIN: Former president Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a gunman in 1981. His press secretary, James Brady was paralyzed for life. And it wounded a secret service agent, Tim McCarthy, and a police officer, Tom Delehanty. And after that, then Congressman Schumer now Senator from New York introduced legislation that became known as the Brady handgun violence prevention act to require background checks before gun purchases. Now, Ronald Reagan, a lifetime member of the NRA, he actually endorsed this bill, but the NRA opposed it. And there have been similar instances where people who were members of the NRA came forward to say, trigger locks are acceptable, but somehow these measures continue to be killed. So then the question is, is the NRA more powerful than the political leaders who presumably represent all of these parties? I guess I’m just trying to understand – how does a small interest group wield so much power over people who represent the entire country. Does that make sense?

RICHARDSON: It does. It’s worth remembering, first of all, if you’re just looking at the NRA that they’re extraordinarily effective at pressuring lawmakers. It also puts a ton of money behind political contests. Nonetheless – I mean, there’s plenty of lobbies that do that sort of thing. Nonetheless, I think what’s really important to look at when we look at gun safety issues in America, is that the confluence of the interests of the NRA, which by the way, really no longer represents the average gun owner. The NRA represents the guns arms industry and the ammunition industry, which are both big businesses. Guns and ammunition are very expensive and their sales are off the charts. So, you have the interest of the NRA as a body that represents the gun industry. You also have the confluence of our political moment with that the Heller decision that justice Antonin Scalia very famously wrote the opinion for in 2008 said that the government could not regulate the – under the terms that the case – that were in that case, and Scalia was famous for his insistence on what he called, I think quite unjustly, actually, an originalist interpretation of the constitution. Well, the whole point of originalism and the justices in the Supreme Court is to get beyond regulation, to get before regulation to say the original constitution didn’t have this sort of regulation, not only of guns, but also of business and of civil rights and of the many things that the modern day Republican movement doesn’t wanna have. So the idea of regulation of guns is not just about guns. It’s a wedge issue that talks much more largely about our government, about who gets to have a say in our government and what that government can do. At the same time, the people who oppose that have that cultural image of the cowboy and the idea of having your guns, which again, I grew up with people having guns on the back of their pickup trucks. It was not part of people’s identity. It was not part of their political identity. It becomes so, as a political movement, after 1980, as this image of the cowboy who is standing against a government that does in fact regulate – what our society – members of our society can do. So we’re in this weird moment which is a new moment. It’s very much a new moment in our society because not just because of the NRA, but because of the confluence of the interests of what is now the national rifle association with the political moment that says that any kind of regulation is bad. And those two things have married and they have produced this American identity that depends on the idea that a single person can be armed to the teeth and there’s nothing that the rest of us can do about it.

MARTIN: So your argument is that this is no longer just a political issue. It’s become a matter of identity. And some argue just to be frank about it, it’s become a part of white male identity or white nationalist identity. Well, if freedom is so profound, why are some of the same people who are most likely to own guns, the most willing to regulate access to abortion? Just to, just to be – I mean, just to be brutally frank about it. Why is it like white evangelicals, for example, are far more likely to own a gun than just about any other segment of the population. But white evangelicals for example, are far more likely to disfavor abortion rights. So how is it that on the one hand, there’s this belief in ultimate freedom, sort of an absolute vision of freedom, but that doesn’t extend to women’s rights to control their bodies?

RICHARDSON: So I think that you are missing the distinction between logic and image. So logically of course, which is where somebody like Barry Goldwater, would’ve been in 1964 in which he said, yeah, I don’t want the government to regulate civil rights. I don’t want the government to regulate women’s rights because I believe in sort of a libertarian branch of freedom. That’s no longer where we are. You know, we’re a generation further along than that. And one of the things that was crucial about that cowboy image, when it rose with Barry Goldwater and actually slightly before him and with the Republican party in the 1980s and post 1980s, is that the image of the cowboy was never about freedom. That wasn’t even really part of the language when it rose in the late 1860s, immediately after the American civil war. It was an image of a man, a young man, almost always unmarried. And the image was of a white man. Now, historically Cowboys, a third of Cowboys were men of color. That’s not the way the image played out. And that man lived in what I call a world of bromance. That is, there are not women in the cowboy mythology, except as wives and mothers or as sex workers. And the cowboy is this independent guy who doesn’t need the government for anything, which again, is not true. The government is more invested in the American plains than it is in any other region in the country. And at the same time, what he is doing is he’s using his gun, again, something that would not have been in a cowboy setting because it spooks the cattle, is using his gun to protect his people against the bad guys. And those bad guys are indigenous Americans, Mexican Americans, sometimes Chinese Americans and Mexicans as well. There is encoded in that cowboy imagery, not only racism, but also a brand of sexism. And that dovetailed really beautifully, of course, with the rise of evangelical Christianity in its current incarnation in that same period. So when cow – people who embrace that cowboy image now, and we know about 3% of Americans own 50% of our guns, they’re not embracing libertarian a libertarian world where they say, Hey, women should be able to do whatever they want. They’re embracing an image that is very deliberately a hierarchical image in which they’re the ones on top. And they get to exercise dominance over women and people of color, and the government should not do anything to stop them from doing it. And then that seems very logical that you take away women’s rights at the same time, you insist on your own right to own a couple of AR 15s.

MARTIN: For those who consider the level of violence in this country unacceptable, what do they do? How does that, how is that addressed?

RICHARDSON: I do think that you have put your thumb on a crucial problem. And that is that in the 1980s, the beginning to start this snowball rolling of being an American as being a good cowboy has now moved beyond the political class that started that. I think that the Republican leadership is now running behind those people who insist that their gun ownership is crucial to their identity. And that’s a crisis. Our political system doesn’t automatically create this kind of minority rule. These, we have gotten here by a series of deliberate decisions and they are deliberate decisions that have managed to give us a system that frankly does no longer work. I mean, think about it. Realistically, are Americans gonna put up with minority rule? I mean, every once in a while in our history, we’ve gotten a president who was elected with a minority of the popular vote. I mean, Rutherford B. Hayes, William – Benjamin Harrison, but it’s happening all the time now. We need to fix this. And the way we fix it is for people who care about it, to speak up and demand that we fix it. And obviously that means voting, but it also means talking about how our system works. And it means talking about who we are as Americans, that we are not Cowboys. We are not Shane, we’re the people in the community after Shane rides off. And we move that person out, say off stage. And we write our government in such a way that it in fact does protect our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that our government is now to move us to Lincoln, a government of the people by the people and for the people. That’s our history. That’s who we are, not this skewed moment that has been put in place in the 20th century, by a minority, really reaching back all the way to 1929 when they began to mess around with the electoral college. This is itself an unusual moment. What I’m hoping we can do is reclaim the meaning of American democracy. And we can only do that if everybody pitches in.

MARTIN: Professor Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for talking with us today.

RICHARDSON: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.