Tuesday Voice: The gun debate

Not that there’s a real conversation

By Tom Lowe

I’ve pretty much stayed out of the debate on guns that has taken place over the last year or so, suspecting that little impact on people’s reasoning was likely. Basically, I disagreed with the reasoning of all the positions articulated, that their frames of reference assumed a rationality I doubted existed; but I wasn’t clear why. The language of the Second Amendment seems clear [A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed], yet somehow the current dispute ignores the first half.
    Essays I found on The Chronicle of Higher Education's blog The Edge of the American West, by Cornell University historian David Silbey, helped me clarify my understanding, particularly his essay, “Her Sight Was Not Long And Her Weight Was Not Small: A Gun of the Founders,” December 20, 2012. I know it’s long, but you’ll be glad I put the whole thing in front of you.

Just to remind everyone what the Founders had in mind with “keep and bear arms,” this is a not untypical weapon of the time of the American Constitutional era, the British “Brown Bess”:

    Built and used for over a century, the Brown Bess was a .75 smooth-bore musket. In the hands of a well-trained user, it could fire 3-4 shots a minute. It was terribly inaccurate, with a maximum effective range of about 100 yards and, practically speaking, much less. It weighed more than 10 pounds, and stood just under five feet tall. Because it used loose gunpowder, both for firing the shot and for igniting the charge, it was unreliable in all but the best (i.e. least windy and rainy) conditions. When fired, it gave forth a large cloud of smoke both from the front barrel and, less so, from the priming hole at the back, and kicked back with a heavy recoil. Those characteristics often caused inexperienced users to close their eyes and step back as they fired, increasing the gun’s inaccuracy. The ammunition was carried separately, unready to fire without preparation and loading, and was both bulky and unstandardized.
    The Brown Bess was a complicated and difficult to use machine, massively inefficient at its primary task. It was heavy, inaccurate, unreliable, required substantial training, and only really useful in military terms when gathered and fired by the hundreds if not thousands.
    Margaret Sankey, a military history colleague of mine who specializes in the 18th century, made a lovely point yesterday about the effect of musket technology on community:

The musket technology of the Early Modern era changed warfare profoundly. It was big, and ungainly, and it spat gunpowder and smoke in your face. It kicked like a mule and required multiple steps to use, none of which could be neglected without dire consequences, and a round fired from the smooth-bore barrel had little chance of hitting a specific target. Despite these drawbacks, it allowed a commoner to, quite literally, have a shot against a mounted knight, a draw that made the disadvantages worth working around. When Alexander Dumas, who spent his life in the shadow of a father who had helped to mold one of the world’s great Citizen Armies into an effective force against the Ancien Regime of Europe, gave his musketeers the slogan, “All for one, and one for all,” he was stating a shrewd truth about these new weapons. They empowered a man to stand up to the old order, or protect his family and property, but not on his own.
    In the New World communities of the 17th and 18th centuries, this was a basic fact that shaped everyday life. Not only did the local population center need skilled people to service and repair these weapons constantly, they had to be handled by people who trained regularly with them. A few people might have muzzle-loading rifles, a technology that delivered more accuracy at the price of slow, difficult loading and limited repeats of use, but muskets were the available tool. Like the fire brigade, the informal or more formally organized militia had to plan and train. Barbara Ehrenrich’s Dancing in the Streets and William McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time both explore the effect on a group of people who work together to synchronize their movements and act purposefully together, whether dancing, swinging sledgehammers, or doing musket drills. Along the way, you recognize who loads a little slower, who struggles with the height of the muzzle, whose movements are efficient and fast, an awareness of the physical presence of other people that few of us do outside of conducting social niceties.
    This awareness had the heavy weight of life or death. I once went on a field trip with adult colleagues, some of whom insisted on rushing, even running, from place to place while others brought up the rear far behind. We all got to the same place, but lost the interaction along the way. Muskets are a great leveler in that regard. It doesn’t matter if you loaded fast and without error–you’re moving to the achievable tune (3 shots a minute, maybe, for regular but not ruthless, driven, practice that couldn’t be expected of non-professionals) of what can be sustained. For a volley to work, everyone had to get to the same readiness at the same time and be able to continue that way under direction, sometimes in motion, certainly while being attacked. After the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the failed armed insurrection where I spend most of my time, the British government developed a simplified drill for their own counties, the Norfolk Discipline, which quickly became the guide for many colonial practices. When Farmer Bob misses two market day drills in a row, or when teenage Joe wants to join but is impatient and obnoxious, people are motivated to intervene. Just needing enough capable people to form a volley, and wanting to take part in the protection of your community are compelling sources of local stability.
    Not only did participants have to get to that state of physical readiness, they had to be willing to be there. Standing in lines, out in the open, facing an armed enemy is a profoundly humbling and frightening experience. You’re not firing from cover, you’re not able to obey your own brain’s impulse to run for some. You must stand, less than the length of a football field away from the enemy, shoulder to shoulder with other people, with the full knowledge that being hit likely meant amputation, infection or death. An individual might stand up to authority alone in court, or in the doorway of his house, but against armed men, the person with a musket had to be a vital part of a group, accepting commands to stay in sync and in tune to the movements of the whole line. Not only did you have to have the willingness to fight for something—a lot of your neighbors did, too. Defense of the community from an immediate, direct threat was an obvious reason, but a more abstract one or one farther away demanded explanations and investigation. This necessity spotlights the importance of people like Thomas Paine, whose works like Common Sense, read out loud in taverns and around campfires, cemented that communal purpose. Not only would you be counting on the commitment of the other people in the line, you knew that if it failed, the community risked the loss of people deeply woven into its survival and continued function. A powerful king might compel obedience, but a small town had to rely on willing compliance.
    From a modern perspective, a typical “Brown Bess” musket is a clumsy weapon alien to our familiar vision of conflict, frustrating and annoying my students who always start out thinking that people who stand in open fields in lines must be stupid. But maybe we should also consider that very technological aspect of the musket to be an important social and political force. By making it thinkable to challenge the old way, but impractical singly, it may well have provided important community cohesion and inculcated the necessity of weighing effects on the whole. In the 1780s, the idea of bearing arms was inexorably as much about linking arms in common cause. All for one. One for all.

Another pivotal essay was "Thom Hartmann: The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery," on AlterNet, January 15, 2013:

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference—see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote [ratifying the Constitution itself]. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that...and we all should be too.
    In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states. In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
    As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998,

The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search “all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition” and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.

It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains. The “well regulated state militias” of that day were busy:

[S]lave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings.

As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
    And that need to maintain slave-hunting state militias was critical to the maintenance of the Southern aristocracy — just as was the creation of the explicitly anti-democratic U.S. Senate, by the way. But back to these militias; Hartmann again:
    If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband—or even move out of the state—those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether. These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).
    Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

Not that any real conversation is occurring in the so-called gun debate—which puts it on the same level as every other public policy debate of the moment. But this one, I suspect, is even more intransigent because it taps into one of the oldest mythologies of the country, a myth that remains unexamined. I’m not going to get into the semantic problems of the Second Amendment, but it must be one of the worst-written pieces of legislation ever drafted. So, mythology about the “original intent” lies strictly in the eye of the beholder. And the beholders have created one heck of a mess, since at root their positions are irrationally based.
    The prospect that this society will “reason together,” and arrive at a compromise, seems very small. The economic and social stresses of the present day do not promote trust or moderation. A significant part of the population are “clutching their gun and their bible” while watching Fox News, another segment is reading The New York Times and wondering when the next incident of gun violence will occur; neither group believes in the good intentions of the other. As for the political classes, they keep hoping someone else will bell the cat, while trying to say nothing that will come back to haunt them come the next election. Impasse is the only word for it.
    This society is close to the situation of the 1850s, when North-South politics could no longer ignore slavery. Then, as now, the Constitution was waved around, with each side creating its own reality. We recall how that impasse was broken, let’s try to not go there again. I’m highly pessimistic that anyone is likely to display good sense, and doubt that anything will come of the current alarm. When Obama’s letting a fool like Joe Biden assume leadership how could it? So, what are those of us who do not have a dog in this fight to do? As Sergio Leone once put it: Giù la Testa (Duck, you sucker!)
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Copyright © 2013 by Tom Lowe [The essays quoted at length are copyrighted by The Chronicle of Higher Education and AlterNet, respectively.]

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