 
### Replace #2

### Guns & Race in America -

### How To Save Lives

### Elisha Lott Rountree

Published by Elisha Rountree at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Elisha Lott Rountree

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

# Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Section I : America's Gun Culture Develops

Chapter 1 : Guns and Liberty

Chapter 2 : Guns and the Frontier

Chapter 3 : Guns and Slavery

Chapter 4 : Guns and War

Chapter 5 : Guns and Indians

Chapter 6 : Guns and the Wild West

Chapter 7 : Bulls eye

Section II: Guns and Race Shape Modern America

Chapter 8 : Guns and Cities

Chapter 9 : Guns and Police

Chapter 10 : Guns and Crime

Chapter 11 : Guns and Gangsters

Chapter 12 : Guns and Hollywood

Chapter 13 : Guns and Mass Shootings

Chapter 14 : Guns and Women

Chapter 15 : Imagine

Section III: Moving on the Spectrum

Chapter 16 : The Second Amendment

Chapter 17 : Why We Need To Change The Second Amendment

Chapter 18 : How to Change The Second Amendment

Chapter 19 : Guns and Our Future

Chapter 20 : How to Participate in Change

Chapter 21 : Changing the Equation

Chapter 22 : p.s. I Love You

# Foreword

Guns kill too many people in America today. Or people with guns kill too many people in America today. In this book, I advocate a solution to this ongoing crisis. To do this I use an approach that I hope makes it readable. This is not a book of historical scholarship, nor is it a statistical study of sociology, and it does not pretend to be a statement of political philosophy.

Instead, Replace #2 challenges the reader to think about how America became such a well-armed and violent country, to ponder the tremendous cost of this tradition, and to ask if we can somehow move beyond the current political stalemate to make America a safer place to live. The observations that I make in this book are intended to provoke debate, and yes, some serious soul-searching by readers. This may spark strong reactions and controversy on this most contentious topic, but I do this intentionally to awaken readers to the possibility that if you change your perception of how we got where we are, maybe your attitude toward solutions will change.

I fully expect strong reactions to my basic thesis in this book. All I ask is that each reader hear my argument before dismissing it out of hand. This is not a scientific hypothesis. There are shades of gray in interpreting any idea, historical development, and in suggesting solutions to any problem. Please just ask yourself some questions as you read this: If I am right about the history of America's attachment to the Second Amendment and our gun culture, should it be a sacred text that cannot be questioned or changed? If we can take steps to make America safer and less violent, should that not be a common goal worth striving toward, no matter whether you own guns or belong to any group or political party? Finally, is questioning the Constitution, the motives of the Founding Fathers, and how to build a stronger American democracy off limits, especially if we can save lives, American lives, by doing so?

Please forgive my choice to forego the precision of serious scholarship to make this accessible to the widest possible audience. There are no footnotes, few statistics, and as few quotes as possible. I suggest how people can participate in change at the end of the book, but I do not represent or directly recommend any particular gun control group. So many are doing admirable work, but none are yet advocating what I propose.

Read on, by all means, and thank you for your time. This is a serious issue confronting America, and your careful consideration and participation will be crucial to our future.

# Introduction

America has been a racist nation since its founding. America was founded by racists. The founders owned guns. The founders used guns to protect life and property. They protected their lives when fighting to steal the land from the native peoples who fought back. The founders also used guns to keep slaves as property, to keep those slaves from escaping or revolting. Guns meant power in America, and white Americans used guns to keep power for themselves.

If the Founding Fathers were racist, many of them slave owners representing other slave owners, why should we obey them now since they enshrined gun ownership in the Constitution? The Second Amendment is the second biggest mistake in our founding document. The first is the cowardly, although perhaps wise, omission of the topic of slavery. America has had two great flaws. First, America had slavery. Second, America became obsessed with guns.

Much of American history can be admired as helping people to expand liberty and self-governance. To be sure, liberty was for white males with property, who would tightly control the government that they founded. Yet Americans inherited a respect for the written law from the many lawyers in the founding generation, and over time, the mechanisms written into law allowed the vote to be won by more people, until self governance in America would include all adults.

Slavery of course presented a challenge that divided and almost destroyed the young republic. The Civil War, as a violent crucible, forged a stronger America, the one envisioned by Lincoln that bound the people to each other and the Union for once and for all time perhaps. The feeble attempt to help the former slaves cast adrift in a racist society failed miserably, but the same respect for written law shamed American society to open more doors for their descendents a century later.

That first original sin or flaw in America, slavery, thus has been corrected, with long years of suffering and great bloodshed as the cost. Yet the second great flaw in America still torments Americans today, and we still endure more long years of suffering and great bloodshed as the cost. The liberty enshrined in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights permitting gun ownership costs thousands of American lives every year.

This does not need to continue permanently into the future. I believe that the Second Amendment protects a dangerous liberty from a racist past and that we can change it to build a safer America. The first step is to admit that our gun culture evolved from our racist, slave-owning past, and is not something to cherish and perpetuate at any cost. The next step is to boldly change the way our written law permits gun ownership, a move that will drastically reduce gun violence. This has to be done carefully, with a major push to change the Constitution, by replacing the Second Amendment. Only then can America truly emerge from the psychological shackles of its violent racist past. Only then can America shatter the deadly equation of _GUNS=POWER_. Only then can America become a genuinely safe place, welcoming to all, reinvigorating its democracy and self-governance in the process.

Replace #2 examines the connection between race and guns in American history. The pervasive nature of our gun culture masks the ways in which guns allowed white American men to protect their liberty against all others, not just non-whites but foreigners and even females as well. The violence of the Civil War, the subduing of the frontier and the native tribes, the Wild West, later yielded to the increasing militarism of the United States as world power with the weapons of every type to keep the peace. As America became more crowded and urban, gun culture conflicted with the reality of crime in the city. The answer generally tended to be more guns in the hands of more police, and a passionate defense of gun rights even more focused on interpreting the Second Amendment as a sacred text.

Replace #2 then lays out the solution that will be so hard to swallow for a people weaned on the gun culture from childhood that it will require a radical change in perception. We need to replace the Second Amendment with a new approach to gun regulation. After comprehending the racist past of our shared gun culture, we need to move toward a safer and more limited conception of gun ownership that will make our society safer. The path of amending the Constitution is both difficult and can be slow. Yet this is the only way to fix this flaw ingrained in the very text of the Bill of Rights itself. Just because this solution will require a tough fight does not mean we can avoid it. The new amendment also allows not only gun ownership but creates a federalist approach to state control that may seem burdensome.

Yet, my point in writing this book is to reframe the debate on guns in America. The stalemate is too stuck, with each side entrenched believing that the other is incapable of compromise. If anything, we need to start over, examine our goals and question our cherished beliefs, if we hope to break the stalemate and achieve any progress. If you agree that we are in a violent crisis, and solving this problem will save lives, read Replace #2 and decide for yourself how we can, as a people, move forward.

# Chapter 1: Guns and Liberty

The generation of leaders that founded our country firmly believed that the fight for liberty demanded sacrifices, and that life and liberty had to be protected with violence when necessary. Successful men of the colonial era had come through the period leading up to the Revolution convinced that the British Crown and Parliament would not give them the rights of Englishmen without a fight. This conflict hardened their conviction that building a free society depended on the willingness by citizens to defend the country with their lives and their muskets when need be.

So there can be little doubt that the Founding Fathers equated guns with power. Yes, many of them, especially the lawyers, thought strong written laws and political frameworks would guarantee the rights of citizens, but the violent struggle for independence meant that force had to back up written words. Thus, America was born out of violence, with a strong tradition of using force to protect, promote, and expand the liberty of its citizens.

This dependence on force resulted from habits in all the English colonies. Families depended on hunting for food in many areas. Colonists had long struggled with Indian tribes in conflicts over expanding settlements on the frontier. Planters with slaves relied on force and the threat of force to both intimidate the slaves and bring back runaways. Additionally, the British control of the colonies began to rely more and more on armed soldiers in the decades leading up to the Revolution. The Governor's Palace in the largest colony, Virginia, at Williamsburg had weapons lining every inch of the entry hall and the grand staircase to remind every visitor of who had the power.

A major source of friction with the occupying Redcoats became the Crown's push to disarm the colonists as the opposition to royal power became more widespread. The fighting finally broke out when the British went out to seize militia weapons stored outside of Boston. The long campaigns of the Revolution and the bitterness over the brutal nature of the fighting with the British soldiers, mercenaries, and the Loyalists left the young nation certain that their liberty had been earned with blood.

These leaders did make sure as they wrote state constitutions and then hammered out the plan for the federal government that the citizenry and their militias could have arms to defend this hard won liberty. I accept the argument made by gun rights advocates and much of the legal community over the past decades that the Second Amendment did mean what it said, even if the final language has some ambiguity. Citizens can bear arms, even as individuals, so that they can assemble militias to defend the state. This right ended up second in the list of rights we know as the Bill of Rights. Case closed. The founders thought it imperative that enough citizens knew how to shoot, possessed weapons, and fulfilled militia duty in their various home states.

What I want to focus on here is not whether the Second Amendment contained a general or individual right to bear arms, or the intention of the founders when they included it in the Bill of Rights. Rather, I want to discuss the important question: If they meant it as an individual right, then who would have it in their eyes?

In other words, could anybody have a gun? White men? White men with property? White women? Recent immigrants? Immigrant men? Immigrant women? Foreigners visiting the new country? Children? Servants? Slaves? Indians? Ex-convicts? No attention has been paid to this question.

Why not? Politicians, activists, and historians have debated since the Revolution who was enfranchised to vote in America. You can trace the right to vote on a timeline as the franchise expanded. White men with property, next white men with no property, freed male slaves (sort of), then women, next younger adults, and many states are arguing over ex-convicts regaining the vote today. Yet we do not discuss owning guns in this way.

Clearly, the founding generation had reservations over who got the right to bear arms. The answer is all white males could have guns and were expected to know how to use them. If a white man wished to teach his wife, sons and daughters how to shoot this weapon, then so be it. White women seemed proud to be able to protect the farmstead and their family or to hunt game when their men were away. Obviously, white men were expected to teach their sons how to shoot and maintain the family's weapons, so that they could take over responsibilities as they matured.

Yet the list of who could bear arms had strict exceptions, and these are pivotal to understanding our tradition of guns and liberty. As we have noted, guns meant power. African slaves had no liberty, and the white slave-owners, indeed all whites in America, were in agreement that slaves could not have guns. I will discuss how this became more pivotal as slavery grew in importance in the young nation later. Here, the key point is that all white Americans involved in slavery made the assumption that the right to bear arms was for white people.

This gun debate today routinely leaves this fact out. Gun ownership in America, just like the right to vote, began as the exclusive privilege of white Americans. Guns and race have been intertwined since the earliest days of the nation. Guns meant power, whites had that power, and fully intended to keep power by using guns, force and violence, either outright or through its threat. The white males that founded our country saw owning a gun as a right and a necessity to hold power. The slaves owned by many whites, and the Indian tribes, all knew that the whites would keep power by shooting their guns at them whenever necessary. For the first century of America's experience as a nation, whites killing Indians with guns is a common theme as the country expanded. Not many slaves would be killed with all these guns, but defending the ownership of slaves would cause the Civil War, which reconfirmed to whites even more strongly that power came from guns, and that liberty had to be bought with blood.

So America, almost uniquely in world history, grew as a nation of one group depending on weapons for their economic and political power. Nowhere else did a society develop this notion that every able bodied white person had to be armed and ready to shoot and kill almost anything that got in the way of their society's growth. White males grew up seeing almost all wild game as food or dangers that needed to be shot, almost all Indians as good only when dead after shooting when necessary, and black slaves as potential flight risks or rebels who had to be shot as examples. Even white Europeans, be they French, British, or Spanish, needed shooting when they stood in the way of American expansion or as threats to American liberty, and Mexicans also would feel 'hot American lead' as the country realized its destiny.

This last mention of manifest destiny leads to one more conclusion about Americans viewing guns as a linchpin to their liberty. In the first generations after the Revolution, young Americans along the expanding frontier depended on their guns to such an extent, that the belief that the God that gave them the continent to fill to the western ocean, also gave them their guns to do the job. The reverence expressed for firearms on the frontier which is our next topic and among later gun enthusiasts takes on a mystical and spiritual quality that imbues the gun culture of America with a passion and zealotry found nowhere else on Earth. The reliance on guns to ensure liberty is an American tradition that goes back to the founding.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, so does the limitation of liberty to white men. White men built America with guns as the primary tools. These racist whites built a nation that would of course change tremendously over the next two centuries. Yet this legacy of liberty depending on guns is almost unquestioned today, even in the gun debate. Most Americans accept the Second Amendment as sacred like the other parts of the Bill of Rights. Let's examine a few assumptions about that acceptance.

Did the Founding Fathers accept slavery? Yes. Did the Founding Fathers see whites as superior and in charge? Yes. Did the Founding Fathers see children as laborers? Yes. Did the Founding Fathers see men without property and women as having no vote and no power? Yes. Did the Founding Fathers see the Indians as savages who had to be pushed out of the way when troublesome? Yes.

Do we agree with any of the Founding Fathers on these fundamental beliefs? No, and Americans have amended, reinterpreted, fought over, and passed new laws to undo the effects of these beliefs on our society.

Then why do we still accept the Founding Fathers' belief that guns guarantee our liberty? I would suggest that this assumption has been proven wrong again and again throughout our history, and we need to wake up to that fact. Guns are not the source of American liberty; written laws are the source of our freedom. It is not our willingness to kill with guns that keep the Bill of Rights safe, but our willingness to obey the law and respect the rights of other Americans.

If you can accept my argument that the very equation _guns=power=liberty_ came out of the belief system of white racists, then perhaps you can begin to imagine that there is a way to move beyond this belief, change the Second Amendment, and begin to restrain the damage that our gun culture inflicts on our society every day.

As we proceed to look at how our gun culture developed, ask yourself if these traditions have any meaning in today's world. We used to allow child labor, now we do not. We used to have slaves picking cotton and doing all forms of labor for no pay and under the threat of the lash or the gun, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died to uproot that tradition. We used to have segregation of the races as a fact of life in America, now it is gone, changed by laws and amendments.

So much of what is now viewed as barbaric, inhumane, and uncivilized today has been a tradition that we have changed by a shift in culture, then enshrined in written law to banish it for good. Why can we not envision a more peaceful America with less guns, less gun violence, and no reliance on guns for our liberty?

# Chapter 2: Guns and the Frontier

America's love affair with guns has its roots in the soil beyond the mountains that had penned in the colonies for almost two centuries. Young Americans -- and America was both young and youthful after the Revolution like never again -- poured over the mountains in a wave of exhilarating migration to a raw and rough frontier. This arduous push into the wilderness would give the American character a masculinity and crudeness unlike anything familiar to Europeans before. This frontier ruffian is almost always holding a weapon in every description.

Men on the frontier were soon judged by their marksmanship, with good cause. The routine and frequent hunting of game was essential in the earliest period of settlement, before rocky fields to be cleared brought reliable crops and pastured livestock. Protecting your family and your livestock required vigilance against both large and small critters such as snakes and bears. Most males kept their rifles close at hand, used them daily, and maintained them constantly. Powder, shot, and other necessities for hunting counted among the most vital provisions when a trip to a trading post or new town was made.

While American males on the frontier learned to shoot game for food and protection from dangerous creatures, the more occasional threat from outlaws and Indians required their skill at arms as well. There was little organized law in the remote communities in the mountains and then beyond in the great river valleys. Hospitality to strangers was always tempered with a guardedness that any trouble would be met with force. When Indians would raid isolated settlements or farmsteads, every armed male that was able had a duty to join up with whatever militia mustered out, forming very rough and ready units short on discipline but accurate with their rifles and tough with their knives in close quarter combat.

To say that racist white settlers pushed out the Indians and constantly used violence to steal their lands vastly oversimplifies a much more complicated and lengthy drama. Before the settlement of the far western frontier after the Civil War, there was rarely a U.S. Army or Cavalry to call in to these ongoing spasms of violence between whites and Indians. While today we look back with horror at the Trail of Tears, many Americans hailed Andrew Jackson as the hero who not only defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815 but helped to bring peace by years of decisive campaigning against the Indians as the head of Tennessee Volunteer militiamen.

So looking back at the days of the young Republic, it seems easy to trace the early development of America's gun culture. In the Old Northwest of the Ohio Valley, the Tennessee Valley beyond the Cumberland Gap, and down into the fertile lands of the Deep South, the young farmers that crossed the mountains counted their skill with a rifle equal to how they swung an axe or plowed a field. The legends of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett offer telling insight into what the settlers and mountain men valued, just as the brutal career of the "Indian Killer" Andrew Jackson made him the most popular American leader of his day.

The relationship to guns on the frontier was primal in many ways. A good shot meant you ate meat that day or week, or in the worst times, your family would not lose their scalps to the Indians. The rifles and pistols available after the Revolution were very heavy, hard to operate, not mass produced, and seemingly irreplaceable the further you got from civilization. The powder and shot required great skill to keep dry and to produce. When men set out on any long trek, they took little food, which is bulky, but plenty of powder and shot, which was both precious and heavy. But it meant they could kill game to eat. This constant struggle to kill in order to survive made guns much more important to the generation that went over the mountains than the colonists along the coast before the Revolution. All of this violence, this primal struggle with nature, to settle and clear land on the frontier, gave Americans a respect for guns and those handy with them like never before.

As the frontier settlements pushed westward to the Mississippi, it became obvious that this process would keep rolling onward for a long time to come. In the next chapter we will look at the slave system that came to divide America, but the push west united the country strongly after the Revolution. The great continental aspirations of Thomas Jefferson when he sat on the floor of his office in the new White House, excited as a school child by the charts, journals, and curiosities brought back by Lewis and Clark were coming to fruition. The new territories and then states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and so on, brought the growth, population, and power scarcely imagined by General Washington who had sparked a global fight when his Virginia militiamen attacked the French in the Pennsylvania wilderness long before.

This new American valued experience over book learning, force over talk, and rifles over Bibles when you had to pack light. Yet America's growing economy, power and wealth would lead to change in the gun culture as well as the rest of society. Just as the improved plows and reapers, the cotton gin and the steam engine all impacted agriculture and the movement of goods to market, mechanical innovation such as interchangeable parts transformed the guns available to Americans. More guns could be produced, they were of greatly improved quality and reliability, and they were more affordable and widely available.

As the Industrial Revolution transformed the gun industry, Americans had more guns and a greater variety of weapons to choose from as the country continued to surge westward. The early period of settlement on the frontier had instilled a gun culture that almost all Americans shared by the middle of the 19th century. The experiences of the War of 1812, the fight for Texas, and the Mexican War, along with the repeated campaigns against the Indians up and down the frontier for decades, had also meant the needs for organized military forces had changed considerably.

When the deeply rooted gun culture combined with increased gun production and larger military needs, a lethal and brutal capacity resulted. Millions of young American males had been raised to shoot well, own weapons, and see force and violence as a fact of American life. When the recurring crises over slavery reached a final impasse with the presidential election of 1860, a naive, arrogant, and violent young America found out at great cost just how good with guns they could be, killing each other.

# Chapter 3: Guns and Slavery

Slavery in the Americas stains the New World with the sweat and blood of dark skinned peoples. No matter how you view the Age of Exploration and the Columbian Exchange in global history as benefitting all humans eventually with improved diets, changing political systems, and technological innovations spurring the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the injustice and cruelty of enslaving millions of Africans and their descendants taints the legacy. White Europeans and their descendants enriched themselves by shackling black Africans to provide a giant portion of the labor that produced wealth.

Slave owners in the American South claimed that they had developed a more civilized form of slave labor that mitigated the worst aspects as seen in the Caribbean islands and South America. These masters were correct in the sense that the closing of the slave trade actually saw American slaves boom in numbers because of better food and less tropical disease, but their claims masked the truth. The repeated crashes in the tobacco market led Virginia and the Carolinas to turn to slave production to feed the appetite of King Cotton as the cotton gin led to land speculation down in Georgia and beyond. Fortunes were made by the planters as they imported slaves from the coastal areas that had too many and new cotton lands were settled.

Yet the brutal reality of slavery in America permeated every facet of life in the South. An institution depending on the forced labor of one group under the control of another group can only be maintained through force and terror. Here is where guns became crucial to the control of slaves. White slave owners used the power of guns to keep slaves under control at every turn. Records and recollections show that whippings and beatings were employed by owners to keep discipline day to day at large and small operations. Slaves were property and very valuable property, worth more steadily after the ban of their importation in 1808. If one would not work or stole meat from the smokehouse, then there was punishment to be sure. But you would not shoot a slave to punish a slave. You might whip them, cut their food provisions, or split up a family by selling off the troublemaker to the slave traders constantly looking for more hands to sell further in the Deep South.

So how did guns prop up the slave system? Guns gave the ultimate power to the planters and slave owners large and small. Only whites could have weapons. Runaways were hunted like animals and where they banded together with Indians on the remotest part of the frontier, such as in Florida, militias would brutally destroy their camps, killing all runaways that fought against recapture. Bounty hunters roamed remote areas for fugitive slaves and eventually prowled the northern states rounding them up with force.

More than outright use of guns as a way to control slaves, just imagine the psychological power of guns. From the earliest days in the colonies to the frontier and in the Deep South, weapons were carefully kept out of black hands. Any mutinies or slave revolts led to more rounds of stiff penalties for whites that aided or armed slaves. The white men in the mountains had few slaves, but were armed heavily and did not want runaways coming their way. The white famers and townspeople with a few slaves in their household kept their guns close and what law that there was developed to serve the needs of white land owners and slave owners. Large plantations kept a tight eye on every rifle and pistol, and all white men were quick to join any hunt for a runaway slave, armed to the teeth to send the right message to the other slaves that death would await those who refused to stay and work.

Slaves in the South had little education, but were by no means ignorant of their situation. They lived in what were essentially armed camps, where the whites had leg irons, shackles, iron collars, chains, whips, clubs, knives, and guns to keep them from escaping, fighting back or even just from refusing to work. In addition, the entire white community stood ready to fight the slaves with guns when necessary, and all of the white man's laws were written to keep slaves under control as chattel property. The great Constitution the whites bragged about only mentioned the slaves as property and forbade the topic from consideration for at least twenty years.

The slaves had come wave after wave before the Revolution, most by way of the Caribbean sugar islands. By the 1820's the great era of the slave trade was ending, the cruelty of the Middle Passage was just a distant memory. The slaves in America tried to piece together some remnants of the many West African cultures that they had been ripped out of, but these were descendants several generations removed from Africa. They only knew the whites as owner, master, overseer, boss, trader, or mistress of the house. And the slaves knew whites only as violent people who had all the power, all the guns, and were quick to prove the slaves had no power at the slightest provocation to keep order. The power of the slave system was so complete and absolute that whites in many areas of the south were only a quarter or a third of the population of the plantation, town or county as counted by the federal census every ten years.

White power rested on guns, violence, and the threat of violence. Is it any wonder that the brash Southerners were itching to fight the North? They were masters of their world, confident in their ability to outshoot the Yankees. For anyone who doubts how the slaves were kept under control, just look at the violence unleashed by the Southerners in the Civil War against white men they disagreed with over the nature of the Union. How could slaves dare to take on this gun loving white South that had them enslaved?

The white man's guns kept the blacks in chains. It is that simple. For over two centuries, slavery rested on violence and guns. A terrible legacy from this equation _white guns = white power_ is that the freed slaves, still oppressed with violence by the former masters and their descendents, learned that guns meant power. When you hear today a white complaining about the violent lyrics of rappers, glorifying gangster violence and threatening to kill the police, ask yourself, where did young black men learn that power comes from a loaded gun? From the white owners that pointed guns at their ancestors for generations.

# Chapter 4 : Guns and War

America's experience in wartime has always tightened our grip on our guns, especially the tragic and bloody upheaval of the Civil War. This breakdown of American law, government, and society led to such a violent blood-letting that it turned upside down most of America's fundamental assumptions.

First, it reordered the power structure of government. President Abraham Lincoln successfully changed the struggle from putting down a rebellion into a transformation of the Union into an inviolable bond between the people and the federal government. Bitter southerners claimed that the historians have it all wrong, that they had fought not to keep slavery, but to keep the sovereignty of their states. They are correct in some measure, but Lincoln beat them at their own constitutional gamesmanship. Most Americans have accepted Lincoln's definition of Union made at Gettysburg that as long as the people say there is a Union, then no state can violate that compact between the larger people and the federal government.

Lincoln also brilliantly took the main issue of disagreement between the states over slavery, and elevated it to a moral crusade that justified the Union's brutal persecution of the war until the defeat of the rebellion was absolute. No compromise peace could be countenanced as long as the slaves remained property, or with any states leaving the Union. This double edged sword had to be driven through the South's very heart to settle the question permanently, no matter the cost.

The Civil War confirmed and transformed the relationship between Americans and guns. The wars against the British and the campaigns against the Indians and the Mexicans certainly had given rise to tremendous respect for the martial virtues of marksmanship, skill at arms, and courage under fire. Yet the Civil War taught Americans lessons in warfare that would be vital for military strength on into the future. Ironically, the main lesson of the Civil War was that good shooting skills were not as important as the continued ability to make more guns and ammunition combined with the transportation network to get weapons and new recruits to the fight.

The gun culture of the South made it a bloody fight, but the accuracy of the Southerners meant less as the war ground on than the ability to make guns, move materials, and replenish everything needed to keep fighting month after month. Indeed, the superior fighting ability and leadership of the South, begrudgingly acknowledged by the North from Lincoln down, is what kept the war going on and on, even after the South knew it was doomed to fail.

The Union side simply churned out more guns, cannons, cartridges, cannon balls, shoes, uniforms, foodstuffs, rail cars, railways, ships, barges, etc. Americans learned that war after the Industrial Revolution meant out-producing the enemy and then out-lasting the enemy on the battlefield to exhaust his resources. We have used this strategy to fight every war since the Civil War, and emerged victorious most of the time. The natural geographic advantage of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans allowed us to triumph in the two world wars precisely by relying on our strength at industrial production. What made the Civil War so bloody is the obvious fact that it was on this side of the ocean. The war ground on for four long horrible years until the South simply had no more will to fight, its ability to field armies exhausted.

This strategy that Lincoln adopted of pursuing absolute victory while fighting throughout the whole South forced him to find commanders who relentlessly attacked. Generals Grant and Sherman waged war so brutally that their own troops dreaded them as much as the enemy feared them. Union soldiers expected to die in Virginia because repeated assaults against fortified rebel positions led to massive casualty counts. Sherman's troops fared slightly better, but created greater opposition as they moved forward in the Deep South, because of their destructiveness and perceived attacks on civilians.

As the smoke cleared and the dust settled, a transformed country took stock of the war's toll and took heed of it lessons. On a political and legal level, the war solved the vexing question of slavery in the United States once and for all. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution made these changes permanent. Humans could not own other humans to profit from their labor. The freed slaves would become citizens and get the vote. The states had to submit to the federal Constitution, laws and courts. While the freed slaves would ultimately be frustrated in their efforts for equality, political power, and prosperity soon enough after the occupying troops left the South, legal slavery was gone.

The military benefitted enormously from the Civil War, emerging victorious, acting as a uniting force for several generations afterward. Northerners viewed the U.S. Army as heroic and a force for good, a perception that led to its role on the frontier in the westward expansion as the tool to fight the Indians and help build the country. Industry also benefitted because it helped win the war for the Union. Full steam ahead led industry to build the rails across the continent, forge the new iron and steel for bridges and then buildings, and to barb wire the entire range as the west filled up.

The production of weapons had been transformed by the demands of combat in the Civil War. The basic lesson of the Civil War has never been lost on the U.S. military. You can never have too many guns, too big a guns, or too many types of guns. Fire power became the overwhelming determinant of victory for American tactics and strategy. You needed massive cannon bombardment before an assault to weaken and daze the enemy. You needed guns of all types to be more reliable, easier to reload, capable of holding more rounds, quicker to fire repeatedly, and operable by recruits with little skill or even familiarity with guns, like the Irish immigrants forced right off the ships into the Union Army, or the slave men streaming toward Union lines to enlist.

If the Civil War taught the military that industrial production of weapons of more advanced design led to victory on the battlefield, how did it transform the relationship of individual Americans to guns? Ironically, the war reinforced the belief that being good with a gun, and having a good gun was essential to survival in war or in peace. Most Americans believed the soldiers who spoke of unspeakable horrors being survived only because they could shoot straighter, keep their weapon fit to fire in terrible conditions, and had guns that were easier to operate and quicker to reload than what they had started the war with. American men and their sons clearly believed that the Civil War meant you had to depend on your gun more than ever.

This was a universal lesson, whether you were a victorious Northerner or defeated Southerner, stayed back East or headed out West. The pull of the frontier grew even stronger after the war, and its dangers required Americans to be armed with the better guns developed during the war. The six shooters, the Winchesters, the repeating rifles of the Civil War, all helped settlers fight off Indians, rustlers, outlaws, coyotes and other threats on the frontier.

In another way, the violence of the Civil War hardened Americans to another part of their character. Even though Lincoln had elevated the fight against the slave states to a moral crusade, and even though the Radical Republicans won the political fights after Lincoln's assassination, the freed slaves continued to face an even more hostile racism after the war. Hundreds of thousands of black troops had served in blue, providing an infusion of manpower that most historians see as shortening the war. Many freed slaves would go west and ride the range as cowboys or serve in the Indian Wars. Yet none of that mattered to most whites. Racism prevailed toward the newly adrift slaves. What to do with the ex-slaves during Reconstruction became seen as a Southern problem as the hostility toward the Freedmen's Bureau stymied any change in the social order. Whites reasserted control with violence through the Night Riders that evolved into the Ku Klux Klan, mostly former Confederate troops and officers intent on reasserting white control over the black population. As the North's attention wandered out West, many Americans sighed in relief as Reconstruction ended quietly in the Great Compromise, letting the Southern whites begin building a segregated, backward looking society, consoling each other over the Lost Cause, and ruling it with the law, the gun, and the noose.

So the brutal horrors of Americans killing Americans on American soil passed into memory, honored on both sides in parades of the veterans who survived, then the marble monuments as they dwindled and died. The horrific violence unleashed at the bloody battles of Shiloh and Antietam, the heroism of both Chamberlain's stand and Pickett's futile charge at Gettysburg, or the senseless sacrifice in the burning swamp of the Wilderness or the assaults at Cold Harbor, both purified America, casting out its original sin of slavery, yet hardened and tempered its violent racism, and seemingly solidified its absolute dependence on the power that flowed from the barrel of its more and more powerful guns.

# Chapter 5: Guns and Indians

Expanding across a continent, racist whites depended on guns to uproot and remove by violence the native tribes that stood in the way. This should comes as no surprise that European settlers who brought millions of African slaves as laborers in chains across the Atlantic would not be able to simply leave the Indians in peace. However, the struggle against the Indians would take almost three centuries to completely dispossess and almost eradicate them. Guns played a tremendous role in this process, in strikingly different ways than you might first think.

The tribes found by the English settlers on the Eastern coast were shells of their former selves. Disease brought by the different earlier Spanish, French and English explorers to the south had decimated the entire native population of the continent. Down in numbers, the more settled tribes in the East were somewhat able to deal with the English who were few in number and woefully unprepared for the hardships of the New World. But cycles of violence and periods of accommodation developed, setting patterns of English colonial relations with the Indians for over a century.

The English colonists would trade, make treaties, and try to cooperate with the Indians. Yet the great obstacle to this relationship would be the English tradition of strictly defining property ownership. Who the crown, company, or proprietor gave legal claim to land was vital in the colonies, and the increase in colonists meant a steady push inland to divide up the property. Whether it be for tobacco plantations in Virginia, rice plantations in the Carolinas, or farmsteads in New England, this gradual quest to own more lands constantly led to disputes with Indians.

The Indians did not own the land in the European sense, but would fight if the English seemed to encroach on their villages, their fisheries, their hunting grounds, or even their trading routes. Over and over again, the two would go to war, usually with the Indians giving more and more land and privileges to the burgeoning colonial settlements. Over time the disputes worsened as land became more crowded on the seaboard. When the colonists and the British saw that the French traders were happy to arm the Indians, just to profit since the French did not generally try to take property individually, trouble over the mountains would lead to even more large scale fighting with the Indians.

Here we need to stop and examine a striking fact of the frequent struggles with the Indians. The Indians were not nomad savages fighting with flint tipped arrows. The Indians adopted and adapted everything they found useful from the Europeans. The tribes who were settled often learned English farming techniques with English tools. The tribes who hunted, especially on the plains beyond the Mississippi, quickly adopted horses from the Spanish, and guns from whomever would trade guns with them. Indian skill with horses and guns became legendary. However, the Indians never developed the manufacture of guns. This leads us to an obvious discussion of why would whites give or sell guns to the Indians.

With the English colonists, every effort was made to stop the trading of guns to the Indians. But for greed or for sake of alliance, guns frequently ended up in Indian hands. The Indians would seize guns in raids, or keep them if one group sided with the English in a fight with another group. Unscrupulous traders could always get more for a gun from an Indian trader, than from a white settler. This pattern would be repeated over and over after the Revolution.

The French actively traded guns with the Indians. They wanted furs to sell in Europe and the Indians could trade more furs hunting with guns. The French also began to arm the Indians as allies against the English, especially after the French and Indian War.

There also developed a pattern of letting guns go to the Indians as a way of provoking a fight with the Indians. This involves the most base motives by some whites of using guns to further their greed and destruction of the Indians as a race. Indians raided white settlements along every frontier, or attacked pioneers as they rolled west, for many different reasons. They did scalp whites as they scalped their Indian enemies, to terrify the settlers, and the whites often scalped the Indians in return. Yet, some whites, be it traders, merchants, or officials would frequently see guns going to the Indians as a sure way, just as whiskey was, to cause them to go on the war path. Indians attacking whites with guns would draw a far more organized response, usually leading to a wider war that profited traders and made more land available for settlement as property.

The British tried to stop all of this by drawing the line down the mountains to keep the colonists from drawing the Crown into another conflict with the French. Once Independence created the United States, the new federal government replaced the Crown as the power sucked into these flare ups along the frontier. The federal government became the sole landholder to the Mississippi to settle the war debts of the colonies, and by every subsequent war or land purchase extended this role all the way to the Pacific. The new territories and then states acted as the colonies had before, clamoring for federal troops to put down Indian wars, often started by trading guns to the Indians, or actions by the militias to push the Indians out of the latest frontier area.

Andrew Jackson's fame largely grew as an effective leader against the Indians. His campaigns were brutal, meting out massive retaliation for even small raids on settlers. Then his policies as President demonstrated that the Indian problem could only be solved in his eyes by removal. The tribes that he uprooted in the East, especially the Cherokee were by then settled and held property. This troubled Jackson little. They were in the way of white settlement, and paid on the Trail of Tears.

This pattern would be repeated again and again on a small and large scale across the continent. White settlers came first in small numbers. As settlements grew, clashes with Indian tribes followed. As Indians fought in bigger and bigger wars, with more and more guns, the state militias would repeatedly call in the federal government to finish the war and pacify the frontier. After the Civil War, the U.S. Army had to move quickly into conflicts, since all of the land was under federal control as the territories only slowly filled up. The resulting Indian Wars against the quick moving mounted tribes of the Plains and the Southwest led the federal government to turn to the same solution of Jackson fifty years earlier: removal. The reservation system, effectively herding the Indians into smaller and smaller sections of land, broke the Indians that realized that the whites would exterminate them completely if they kept fighting.

Although a much different story over time, the relationship of white to Indian and white to black shared a striking similarity. The hand on the gun that was in power and protected the property was white. Because they fought back against white power repeatedly, often with guns provided by the whites, the Indians paid a terrible price. They were not completely exterminated like the buffalo, slaughtered by white men with guns. But they were broken, herded into reservations, wards dependent on the corrupt federal agency that sought to further humiliate and debase them.

# Chapter 6: Guns and the Wild West

Pushing westward after the Civil War, Americans of several generations filled in the rest of the map and added much to what we now call the American character. From the time of Lewis and Clark's expedition, many Americans openly discussed how it was 'manifest' that it was our destiny to fill the continent. Geographically and politically speaking, everything fell into place by the end of the Civil War, with the boundaries of the United States firmly etched from sea to sea. The purchase of Alaska, although derided as 'Seward's Folly' by critics, seemed to point to an endless frontier.

The settlement of the West quickly seized hold of the American imagination. Everything seemed bigger out west. The stunning vistas, the breathtaking scenery, the abundant natural resources, the immense distances, all lent a mythical quality to descriptions brought back by explorers. The cultural impact of this boundless frontier seemed to be so different from any experience that Europeans had before in the world, or what the English colonists had dealt with on the Atlantic seaboard, that much of what happened out west seemed unbelievable or the stuff of legend. The English colonies had taken over a century and a half to spread to the lowly Appalachian Mountains, and then almost a century to spread beyond to the Mississippi. The West beyond was largely settled in a span of two generations, roughly in the four decades after the Civil War. Everything was bigger, events unfolded at breakneck speed, and the tales of what happened just seemed wild. This wildness of the West captured the hearts of the Americans who were eager to forget the hellish days of civil conflict just ended.

The experience of settling and claiming Texas and California from Mexico foreshadowed what would unfold in the rest of the West and how it would be different than back East. A raw greed ruled the day, the rancher and his cowboys marking his spread or the prospector staking his claim becoming the model for later pioneers simply wanting their homestead. No one owned anything until the government land office recognized your claim, and wave after wave of adventurers and hardy families kept finding new lands to move into. Fortunes could be made and lost quickly, and the law was often slow to catch up with developments on the ground. Military outposts, then settlements, then towns, then territorial offices, and finally state governments slowly spread over the frontier. Until there was a sheriff, a jail, a marshal, a judge, a court, the only law and justice in the Wild West depended on guns.

The constant struggle with nature and the Indians for survival made guns indispensible as they always were on the frontier. Yet the quick speed of the rush to the West, meant that protection from outlaws, bandits, rustlers, and others trying to claim the same stake or even the few watering holes often came from your guns and your skill with them. So part of the wildness of the Wild West came not from its exotic scenery and big game, but from its constant gunfire. Here we are not simply talking of shootouts over cheating in the saloon and gunplay by drunken cow hands fresh in from the trail. No, the West was settled in a hail of gunfire for many purposes.

Guns had stopped firing after Appomattox, and the country seemed to return to relative peace, albeit with the military occupation of the South during Reconstruction for over a decade. Yet out West, gunfire continued for decades. Soldiers and settlers had near constant fighting against the Indians somewhere in the West for nearly three decades. This is why they are called the Indian Wars. Occasionally, Indian tribes won this or that battle, most famously destroying Custer at his Last Stand. Yet this was the exception. The Indians mostly engaged in raiding, requiring long and arduous campaigning by the U.S. Army over great distances to defeat the tribes responsible for the attacks. Railroads helped moved supplies and weapons for the Army, but the Indians moved on horseback. The Cavalry had to devise tactics for surrounding and cutting off the Indians to force them into pitched battles, which they almost always lost when outnumbered. This is where the idea of penning in the Indians on smaller and smaller reservations became seen as reasonable, even humane, to stop the endless fighting. Yet the gunfire between whites and Indians continued for decades.

The taming of the Wild West became what can only be called a war on nature, when viewed from today's vantage point. Guns were not the only weapons, as axes, saws, steam engines, traps, and explosives proved useful in subduing the wild animals and terrain that faced hunters, ranchers, farmers, miners, and railroad builders. Take for example the hunting to near extinction of the buffalo and bison on the frontier. Millions of these animals fell to the famous buffalo guns in a short span of time. Ranchers and railroad companies saw the clearance of the buffalo from the plains almost as essential as the clearance and pacification of the Indian tribes. You could not sign treaties with these massive beasts, nor pen their herds into reservations. So, huge organized hunts, with hunters recruited at great expense, spent years mowing down the buffalo, shooting each one individually. The lore of these buffalo hunters grew with the massive piles of their bones at the railheads. In their place came the domesticated breeds of cattle and sheep that the ranchers built their fortunes on.

At first the cattle barons of Texas needed to get meat to the railheads all further north. Thus, the era of the cattle drive with the Anglo cowboys, the Mexican vaqueros, and the young former slave hands eager to taste freedom on the open range. These cattle drives into places like Dodge City gave much of the Wild West its mythology of lawless cowboys settling every dispute with their six shooters. Much of the legend is exaggerated, but the Wild West influenced America's character through both myth and fact. As the rail lines spread and linked the far West to back East, ranchers began to fence in the plains, and cowboys were needed to protect the herds on the range instead of driving them to markets. The constant fight against rustlers, wolves, and coyotes required men good with rifles. Gunfire was a constant in the work and play of a cowboy's life.

As fortunes were made, as trade and businesses grew, as more gold and silver came out of the mines and miners' camps, there was of course much wealth on the move, often between towns, bigger banks, or back to the East. The lack of communication, transportation, and often justice away from the rail lines, always meant great temptation to the outlaws and desperados in search of their own fortunes. The robbing of banks, stage coaches, money, gold and silver shipments, kept guns firing between the good guys and the bad guys for decades. The spread of justice, the long arm of the law, usually meant lawmen willing to shoot the outlaws who refused to come back to the towns where the jails and courts were built. Decades of gunfire were necessary before every corner of the Wild West had justice prevail over lawlessness. The need to be armed and ready to ride out in a posse was more a reality for most men in western towns than the need to muster out into a militia. The legends surrounding Judge Roy Bean, the Texas Rangers, the Pinkerton men, the U.S. Marshals, and the sheriffs making a stand like Wyatt Earp grew while they still lived thanks to telegraphs strung along the railroads bringing news back to the growing cities of the East. The outlaws became almost more famous then the lawmen.

That leads us to the cultural impact of the Wild West on America's character. Newspapers with quick reports over telegraph gave a booming market of readers much of their perception of the Wild West. Certainly the popularity of Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and their like had created heroes before the Civil War and their skill with their guns or their leadership played into their mystique. Texans rallied to win independence from Mexico to the cry of "Remember the Alamo", although no one survived to be sure how its gallant defenders including Crockett perished. The Civil War needed little help from the newspapers to make its heroes larger than life. The survivors of the battles passed the word of the exploits of Stonewall Jackson, Sherman, Lee, Sheridan as commanders, or individual soldiers in certain battles.

Legends of the Wild West differed in a key way, the marketing of their fame while they even still lived. Custer, Earp, Buffalo Bill, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid, and many Wild West legends grew famous over night. There were Wild West shows put together even by the 1880's to tour cities, and we know Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill, and even Sitting Bull more from these touring performances than from their lives before they went on tour. Thus separating fact from fiction, actual events from legend and lore, is most difficult when dealing with the Wild West. We will discuss how Hollywood built an industry by reshaping the Wild West in moving pictures in a later chapter. So the impact of the Wild West, while significant, can only be described in subjective terms.

The Wild West in its violent heyday, had an outsized influence on the development of what it meant to be an American from then forward. The harsh conditions made men that were tough, and they used violence to tame that wilderness as never before. Men had to hunt and kill huge animals that attacked people and livestock. Buffalo, wolves, coyotes, snakes, bears, were all threats to be killed to settle the frontier. Indians could always kill, and men had to be ready to kill Indians either one on one, or in bigger fights. The saying that "the only good Indian was a dead Indian" conveyed more than racism; Americans came to see the Indians as a threat to their survival that had to be exterminated. Outlaws and rustlers, desperados and bank robbers all were threats, and Americans believed that they should be killed or brought to justice, swinging in a noose from the gallows in front of the whole town.

Throughout the settlement of the Wild West, guns kept firing for all these reasons. Americans saw the rifle and the six-shooter revolver as the most essential key to survival through this violent phase. The glorification of that brutality, that background music of gunfire, attracted America's attention as it happened, and ever since. The ruggedness of the American cowboy continues to dominate American culture when discussions of our identity or character begin.

Never mind that most settlers and towns folk rarely experienced much of this violence. Never mind that the whole story of the Wild West was about subduing its vastness, its wildness, its lawlessness. By the turn of the century, America would begin to realize that the wounds of the Civil War had begun to heal, the cities back East were bursting at the seams, and the real power lay not in the hands of the rifle men, but in the gloved hands of the Robber Barons who had built the railways, the shipping lines, the steel mills, and the banks to pile up their millions. The Wild West would begin to recede into the past, just as Americans began to notice that the Frontier seemed to be disappearing as well.

How would this society, this culture, this nation built on the Frontier with all its guns, adjust to life in more and more crowded cities, working in factories?

# Chapter 7 : Bulls Eye

Now we take a break for a moment. Quick. Close your eyes. Think of all the expressions you can that come from guns, shooting, etc. Then, compare them with my list.

"He's a straight-shooter."

"He has a dead aim."

"I just winged it."

"He couldn't hit the broad side of a barn."

"That was a cheap shot."

"That's nothing but a pot shot."

"She hit the target that time."

"I've got you in my crosshairs."

"We scoped it out."

"It was a rapid fire assault."

"Take cover."

"Keep your powder dry."

"That was a powder keg waiting to blow."

"Use both barrels on 'em."

"Nice shot."

"Time to bring in the big guns."

"Direct hit."

"He's just a little gun-shy."

"It's time to pull the trigger and get going."

"Faster than a speeding bullet."

"We mowed them down"

"Nice kill-shot, dude."

"Save your ammunition."

"Lock and load, baby."

"Like shooting fish in a barrel."

"Make every shot count."

"Hold your fire."

"Shoot first. Ask questions later."

"They rode in with pistols blazing."

So what? Guns are such a part of our culture that they are ingrained in the way we speak and even think. Even Americans who have never been around guns hear such phrases every day and say them often. We see guns in pictures, read about them in books, view them repeatedly in movies and on television, and are aware of their presence with the many armed police all around us. The gun culture is so pervasive that we have a serious problem with all of the toy guns that kids play with when they are mistaken for real threats. Toy guns are not just small colorful plastic or wood pretend guns, but include BB guns, pellet guns, air guns, water guns, paint ball guns, and so forth. Guns are everywhere in American culture, not just in rural areas where hunting is widespread, but everywhere. This is very noticeable when people visit from other cultures.

Is this a problem? That is certainly a topic for debate. Here I simply want to use the common and constant familiarity with guns as a stepping off point to discuss what this saturation has done to our perception of their role in society. Let's compare the discussion of guns with the discussion of race.

When I call America racist in the opening of this book, how did you react? Most readers probably wince and expect this to be one-sided with such generalizations. This is because our experience with race in America has made us very attuned to the grey areas of racial attitudes. Most Americans see racism as a moral spectrum with the violence of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan at one end and people for absolute equality at the other end. White Americans have long been comfortable somewhere in the middle, not violently anti-black, but living in a white area of town, just wanting all race problems to be somewhere else. Many white Americans have never openly discriminated against a non-white, even while they clearly enjoyed advantages in their career because of where they grew up, family or social connections, where they went to school, that were only open to whites.

Most Americans have grown accustomed to being in a society that was unfair, even after open segregation ended. So when I speak of America being racist, most people would admit this has been the reality, if you explain you do not mean every single individual had to be racist, for a society to be racist overall. Most readers can accept that the white residents of Selma, Alabama did not all beat people who marched for voting rights. Yet most readers would agree that Selma clearly represented a deeply racist society. What the Civil Rights Movement attempted to do, and largely succeeded, was to show whites watching such beatings on television that if you allow the police in a Alabama to do that, then you were guilty of acquiescing in such racist violence. This confrontation with the truth, the ugly truth, persuaded many Americans that it was time to move on the spectrum away from the violent Ku Klux Klan and force institutions to move toward open support of legal equality.

Are we a society without racism a half century after the violence at that Selma bridge? Certainly not, but we have moved on the spectrum. Again, Americans are often sophisticated in both their understanding of race, their acceptance of racism, and the need to keep moving on the spectrum toward equality and away from violence.

Do Americans show a similar sophistication when it comes to thinking about guns and gun violence? Not so much, I believe, and I will explain why not in the second part of this book as we see how America changes from rural into urban while keeping its gun culture. Americans have for the most part accepted without question that _guns = power_ equation with little modification.

America had developed as I have described very differently than any other society anywhere else. So as the country moved to the city, Americans simply took this tradition of the gun culture with them. As America got more crowded and different pressures of urban living developed, guns seemed the answer for everyone: the police, the criminals, and citizens caught in the middle.

Yet, try to bear in mind the spectrum of racism on which most Americans interpret their attitude toward race. No such effort at figuring out America's obsession with guns seems to have taken place. What if we try to conceive such a spectrum? At one end would be criminals and anarchists wanting all the firepower they can get and using it with no limits, a chaos of violence like the Wild West with automatic weapons. At the other end would be an America without guns, with no gun violence. If you can imagine such a spectrum, where do we fall on it today? You might answer somewhere in the middle. Yet we can't really ask such a question. Our gun culture, and the obsession with the Second Amendment prevents us from conceiving of such an America. Most Americans, if asked, would want a peaceful, violence-free society, but at the same time they would say that Americans should be free to get whatever guns they wish.

Our logic is flawed. You cannot have a society free of gun violence if you constantly have more guns, can you? Even if you only have good guys with guns, gun accidents and gun suicides would still kill thousands every year. Shouldn't those deaths be counted as gun violence?

We Americans were able to change race relations without a second civil war because Dr. King and the civil rights movement shamed white America into moving on the spectrum. Most Americans could see movement on the spectrum as possible and so we moved. On guns we cannot make any progress until we realize that our cultural heritage of guns bringing power is mistaken and that the Second Amendment makes the problem of gun violence worse, not better.

As we look at how guns fit into twentieth century America, ask yourself, did guns make the problems of urbanizing America better or worse? How would our cities look today, if you take out racism and gun violence from their development?

Think about this spectrum I am suggesting for guns. Is there some way to move away from the heavily armed and violent America that we live in? I would argue there is, if you can convince Americans that power comes not from guns, but other sources, and that the Second Amendment needs to be changed. We need to persuade Americans or shame them if necessary into moving on such a spectrum.

Many Americans today do not own guns, or simply have an old heirloom gun, do not shoot and are shocked by gun violence. Yet they do not or feel they cannot do anything about the situation. If we can understand that America has been racist even if individuals were not, can we agree that, not shooting a gun does not mean that you do not live in a gun crazy society? Some people, including many gun owners, feel helpless to change the fact that tens of thousands of Americans die and are wounded each year by gun violence in accidents, suicides, homicides, police shootings and mass shootings. What needs to change?

First, Americans need to realize that our true power comes from our willingness to agree on rules and play by them. In other words, our respect for written law that is fair, gives true power, not holding a gun to back it up.

Second, Americans need to realize the flaws of the Second Amendment have encouraged our violent gun culture. We need to correct these flaws to move toward a more peaceful, less armed, and less violent America. We will address how the Second Amendment can be changed in the third section.

Now we look at how our gun culture developed over the last century alongside of the racism that so defined the American experience.

# Chapter 8: Guns and Cities

Race and guns helped to shape American cities as they grew. The great push westward, the filling in of the frontier lasted for a century from the 1790's roughly until the 1890's. The urbanization made possible and necessary by the Industrial Revolution would be quicker, lasting roughly from the 1900's until the 1950's. Americans, both immigrants from abroad and migrants from the farms and small towns, streamed into the cities, creating urban and then suburban landscapes very different than the small towns that dominated 19th century life. Race often played a large factor in the shape of growing cities by determining who lived where. Then gun violence and fear of crime played into the sprawl of the cities. Urban decay, urban renewal, and white flight, all molded by race and guns, dramatically expanded the geography of American cities from the 1950's onward. Racism, both overt and indirect, continued to shape the contours of metropolitan areas even after the civil rights victories of the 1960's and 1970's played out in politics and in the courts. Guns also became central as gun violence and fear of crime put endless pressure to expand into exurban areas.

If cities offer the hope of humans sharing less space and getting along, then America's experience thus far seems to disappoint on this score. Generation after generation, city life has been marked by racial hostility and disrupted by gun violence. Here, we will look at how American attitudes toward race and guns have been so pivotal in this frustration with urban life. Even as we seemed to become ready to try to begin getting along as different races sharing urban spaces, the gun violence plunged urban areas into near chaos by the 1990's. Why? The answer again lies in America's gun culture and obsession with guns as part of our identity.

Human beings have more or less been accustomed to group with their own kind, their own clan, when they find themselves in new surroundings. We are tribal by nature. This is not necessarily racist, just human nature, that is easily converted into racism by racists. We tend to be comfortable with people we see as similar to ourselves. So when immigrants disembarked at America's ports, they tended to stick together with who they came with, and they sought out communities of their own kind. So the early Germans and then Irish tended to group together. Later the Italians, Poles, Jews, Russians, and so on found the communities that spoke, ate, dressed, and labored in similar type occupations as they did. Religious groups tended to settle together to build their own congregations and worship freely as the First Amendment allowed. Even certain jobs would attract migrants from the Old World to very specific places in the New World. For instance, Welsh miners would go to the coal areas of southern Ohio and settle in small villages, while German tradesmen went right to Cincinnati, building the machine tool industry there into the world's finest. Poles went to Chicago often, and German Lutherans went to the upper plains, as did Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. The German and East European Jews came late, spurred by the Tsar's pogroms, and they tended to head to certain parts of New York, mere streets separating them from Italians, Germans, Irish, with later waves of Chinese and Puerto Ricans carving out their own enclaves. Wave after wave of immigrants have moved through many American cities and continue to do so.

Most of the newcomers before the curtailing of immigration in the 1920's were white Europeans, although they were generally Catholic, where the earlier white English and Scots had been Protestant, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants. The cities attracting the immigrants were also in the North, in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and in the Old Midwest. The great push by the Progressive movement to educate and assimilate the children of these immigrants, to Americanize them, to make them speakers of English, really fueled the growth of public schools. The crowded cities of the North were bursting at the seams with immigrants by 1910. Yet many more Americans had begun to move to the cities from the countryside, from farms and small towns. All of these sources of new city dwellers, and their offspring, led to a population surge that would transform America from a rural into an urban nation over the span of several decades. Cities struggled through similar experiences of corrupt governments, unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and inadequate transportation. As steel let cities expand upward, with the help of electric elevators, new trolleys, subways, and then cars on roads let them expand outward from the downtown core.

Digesting this growth successfully would have been quite a feat for any society. Now we throw race and guns into this mix. As Jim Crow segregation and the sharecropping system put down legal roots in the South, many blacks saw little chance for a better life if they stayed put. The dislocations and booms of the two world wars would create a demand for labor in Northern cities that would be their ticket out. Thus you had huge numbers of blacks moving to cities that had largely developed along ethnic dividing lines, with all previous groups being white. This infusion of non-whites for the first time into America's growing cities disrupted the pattern of the melting pot filling, then assimilating each new wave of immigrants.

How America dealt with the issue of cities having more than just whites unfortunately played out in spasms of violence, racist laws, and intimidation. Race riots took place in many areas as the economy crashed after World War I. The Ku Klux Klan surged to millions of members and marched all over the country. While many white men saw joining the Klan as a protest against immigrants who were Catholic and did not speak English, the message to blacks everywhere was the same as ever, that they had to keep to their "place" in the South or the North or the West or anywhere they had moved to. Blacks were allowed only the lowest rung on the social ladder, the worse parts of towns and cities, the oldest slums that many previous generations of immigrants had moved out of long before. Segregation was both **de jure** , by law, and **de facto** , in fact. "Sundown laws" made sure that black servants and laborers cleared out of certain parts of towns at night. Housing and employment discrimination made sure that only the lowest paying, dirtiest, and most dangerous jobs were open to blacks. Long before the term "environmental racism" was coined, blacks lived in the areas where factories polluted the worse and anything unseemly or unsightly could be built without any complaints from black residents who had no voice in municipal government. The Great Depression of the 1930's hit all of America hard. The blacks at the bottom of society took the worst hit. When reformers spoke to leaders like President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor about the plight of black Americans, they used phrases such as urban renewal as needed for the black slums, ghettoes, and blight that grew in American cities, where they had fought to clean up the immigrant tenements a generation earlier.

All of this developed, and we have not even mentioned crime or guns yet. Crime became a thriving business in American cities, and just as immigrants scratched their way to controlling city governments and legitimate businesses, many applied their ambition to dominate the underworld of urban areas. Drugs, prostitution, and gambling fueled the growth of criminal overlords, with the Italians seeming to take pride in their success as mafia dons leading large organizations. Their emergence in American cities largely responded to a Progressive effort to clean up American life with Prohibition ending all production and sale of alcoholic beverages.

Progressive efforts before World War I had reduced corruption in city government and part of this push was to reduce crime in the poorer immigrant areas. Teddy Roosevelt attracted early national attention as the hard charging Commissioner of Police in New York City. Yet Prohibition backfired terribly for the Progressives. The sinful alcohol associated with the saloons of the Wild West and the overindulgence of the Catholic immigrants became illegal after World War I. As the economy recovered, then boomed in the Roaring Twenties, the illegal supply of spirits gave rise to gangsters that fought with each other and the police to protect their profits.

Now guns come into the story of American cities. As the days of dueling between gentlemen had faded in the early 1800s, guns were not widely available in cities. Many immigrants came from European societies where few people owned guns. The image of an Irish policeman in New York is a burly guy using a night stick or billy club on the head of a swarthy drunk who pulled a knife. After Prohibition, the gangland wars in many cities led to guns becoming widespread in American cities, both in the hands of criminals and the police fighting them. There was an arms race as criminals used sawed-off shotguns and machine guns, with police seeking more firepower in response. As the Great Depression forced so many men into dire straits, even the ending of Prohibition could not slow the perceived rise in lawlessness. Notorious mobsters like Al Capone defied the rule of law, as did a new wave of bank robbing desperadoes like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde.

The first serious efforts to control guns come in reaction to crime of the 1930's. At the local, state, and federal level, a wave of new anti-crime and gun laws passed. We will consider some of this effort later when we look at the debate over gun control and the Second Amendment. For now, we can state that just as the government tried to fight the Great Depression, it also struggled to respond to the perceived rise in crime and gun violence. The huge challenges of fighting World War II would distract all Americans from the dark days of the Great Depression and the problems of the growing cities.

Yet American cities mushroomed with the industrial demands of the most massive war in human history. America's role as undamaged arsenal of democracy meant that the war effort at ramping up production at home was just as crucial to victory as the fighting in Europe and the Pacific. A whole new wave of fresh migrants streamed into Northern cities, blacks from the South and young men and even more women from small towns and farms. Cities became even more crowded, racial tensions worsened as not only blacks, but Mexican migrants competed for jobs and housing.

As the cities filled up once again with newcomers, strains on government, services, and the police created new challenges. How would all of these ethnic and racial groups sort through their problems as peace came? The dividing line of race and the ever present impact of guns would loom large in urban America after World War II.

As we look at modern America, note what seemed important as America moved to the cities. Did we leave guns behind on the frontier? No. Guns fueled the gang wars and the crime of the 1930's, and guns seemed to be the only way to fight the crooks. Did whites welcome the huge waves of black migrants during both world wars into the cities? No. The racism of Northern cities was enforced by white police forces with a growing number of guns. Did the great world wars change America's gun culture? Absolutely not. Americans believed that American forces turned the tide in the First World War, and that American weaponry of all types including atomic bombs had stopped the Nazis and the Japanese from trying to take over the world. By 1945, America was completely convinced that the _Guns=Power_ equation had brought them complete victory.

# Chapter 9: Guns and Police

If you ask a cop which is worse, the very few times he had to use his gun, or the daily stress of potentially being in a situation where he had to use his gun, most cops would say the later is the worse by far. Many cops never have to shoot anyone, draw their service weapon in a dangerous situation, and even fewer have been shot at or killed or wounded. But for cops, it is the constant awareness that danger can threaten their lives on any shift, on any call, during any routine situation, that makes their job so much different than almost every other occupation. Why? Because being a cop in America means any bad guy may have a weapon, or multiple weapons, and you must constantly be armed.

America's gun culture has made serving in law enforcement usually much more dangerous than in most countries. There are simply so many guns in America, and bad guys have easy access to guns. While the probability is low of an armed confrontation happening on any given shift, cops have to be ready for any contingency. While many police complain that criminals seem to have superior weapons or more lethal ammunition, generally speaking police in America are well armed and can always call in more police for more firepower.

Who are the police? America has always had multiple layers of jurisdiction because of the local/state/federal system of government sharing or handling distinct powers throughout a large and growing nation. If you simply list the different types of police in the United States, you begin to get the picture that layers of law enforcement have developed over the past two centuries. A telling fact is that at almost every level, the police are authorized to carry weapons, trained to do so, and consider guns a required tool of their profession. In particular, as urban growth overwhelmed the county or town form of government and law enforcement, large police forces developed on a whole new scale. Here is a brief list of some of the many law enforcement agencies often called 'police' by citizens.

Local:

Town Sheriff, with Deputies

County Sheriff, with Deputies

County Marshalls

City Police Department

County Police Department

State:

State Police

State Bureau of Investigation

Federal:

U.S. Marshalls

Federal Bureau of Investigation

U.S. Treasury Agency

U.S. Secret Service

U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms Agency

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency

U.S. Border Patrol

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency

U.S. Capitol Police

U.S. Park Police

This listing is just a quick attempt to demonstrate how many levels of law enforcement can generally be called "police" or "cops". This does not include the thousands of military police and investigators serving the different branches of the armed forces, the thousands of corrections officers at prison facilities at every level of the justice systems, or the thousands of protective officers, often employed by contractors, providing security to the thousands of government facilities across the country. Nor does it include the thousands of armed and unarmed security guards hired by private companies, shopping centers, retail stores, office complexes, industrial and utility plants, universities, school systems, apartment complexes, and so forth.

There are literally millions of people who put on a uniform and strap on a gun holster or gun belt in some capacity in law enforcement every single day and night in the United States. When you add in the fact that any reasonable size police agency has special units, known as Special Weapons and Tactical Teams (SWAT) that have arsenals, armor, and training to handle the worst situations, then it is fair to have the impression that law enforcement has millions of guns to fight the bad guys.

Historically, all of this firepower has been necessary because the criminals have been well armed. This is not just a public perception or a police claim to inflate their budgets for more officers, weapons and training. Again and again in every era, in almost every corner of the country, there have been routine crimes daily involving guns, occasional acts of horrific violence, or outright warfare between different criminal groups. The police in America have evolved into almost military style organizations because the threat of violence is ever present.

So there are a lot of police with a lot of guns, and there are a lot of criminals with their own guns. Is this a problem or could it have happened differently? The answer is yes on both counts. No other society has developed a tradition of relying on millions of armed police to keep the peace. In fact, almost the entirety of the rest of the world is known for less armed police, fewer criminals who use guns, and generally less violence. Of course, you can find exceptions and situations change over time. But there is no question that all of the other industrialized democracies that Americans always compare their country to, have less guns, less crime, less armed police and so forth. In addition, people from other parts of the world have pointed this out for decades to Americans. Many visitors from overseas feel that the United States has the atmosphere of an armed camp because so many law enforcement officers carry so many weapons everywhere.

Could the United States have developed differently in this regard? Obviously. Of course. There can be no real argument with this statement of fact. If there were less guns in America, the police would need less guns to keep the peace. Ask any police officer. If he expected to never meet a criminal with a gun during a shift, would he need to be armed to the teeth every shift? Police leaders constantly argue this point very passionately. There would be less accidental, unjust, or mistaken use of deadly force by their officers if there was less reason to be quick to draw and discharge their weapons. In other words, if police did not live with the constant fear of being shot, they would not be so dependent on guns themselves.

The next issue that makes law enforcement so controversial in America is race. For almost two centuries, law enforcement officers in the United States were white, exclusively white. And for centuries, part of their job routinely was to enforce slavery and then segregation. Many of the people arrested by police were not white. Criminals by and large come from the lowest economic rungs of society, and since most non-whites lived on those rungs, then many criminals were not white.

We will look at crime and race in the next chapter. In terms of the police in America, the impact of race was always there. Among white Americans, police were the good guys, bravely protecting life and property. Among black Americans, police were armed whites protecting white lives and white property and oppressing all black people. The perception of police could not be more opposite. Blacks who did commit crimes or were accused of crimes faced brutality from the police, no mercy from the courts, and more brutality from their jailers. All prison guards were white as well. For decades, lynching blacks, with no trial, simply bypassed the system altogether. Vigilante justice was rarely aimed at whites. Usually a white mob had their own way with a black criminal, or a suspected black criminal.

After slavery ended, after the frontier was settled, as modern American became more urban and more populous, the armed white police still maintained white power at the expense of black victims. Blacks traditionally viewed the white police as a threat to their safety, certainly not as protectors of their safety. If you did choose a life of crime, choosing to be armed against the heavily armed racist police seemed very much a necessity.

Guns and race in modern America fed a seemingly endless cycle of violence. The worse crime got, the more heavily armed the police felt that they needed to be. The more numerous, the more armed, and the more racist the white police became in reaction to the criminals who they saw as primarily black and dangerous, the worse the violence got. Ironically, and tragically, the push by blacks for civil rights, had disintegrated into violent rioting, causing whites to flee the cities, leaving a bleak and smoldering battleground between angry poor blacks and armed white police forces by the late 1960s.

As white America felt their country was slipping into chaos, the answer for many was the same as always, more guns, more police, more laws, more force, more prisons, longer sentences. Who bore the brunt of this white fear? As always, blacks, and then Latinos. How did young, angry blacks and Latinos respond to the chaos and the police brutality all around them? By joining gangs and arming themselves to the teeth, often with more and better weapons than the white police.

If you believe in the equation _Guns=Power_ , then the answer is always more guns, whether you are the white police, or the black criminals, right?

# Chapter 10: Guns and Crime

For most of human history, great cities developed next to water: springs, oases, streams, rivers, harbors, bays, oceans, deep water ports, etc. Fresh water kept alive people and their livestock, grew their crops, flooded the rice paddies. Moving water helped grind their grain, then ship cargos to other markets, and bring back more goods and wealth. Kids learn that our recorded history began in one of the great river civilizations on the Nile, Tiger, Euphrates, Ganges, Yellow, and so on. New forms of locomotion such as steam allowed some American cities to spring up around the railroad lines such as Atlanta (originally Terminus), but most grew close to rivers for shipping. Then the advent of steel beam construction, made possible with cranes and then elevators, allowed cities to scrape the sky, getting denser and holding huge populations.

At this point in history books, we read that the coming of new transportation modes such as the electric trolley, the subway, the bus and the automobile then allowed urban areas to sprawl, creating first suburban and then exurban areas further and further out the spokes from the hub of the city core. The census counters, sociologists and economists describe these huge urban areas now as major metropolitan areas, with massive road and rail networks tying together practically whole regions to the core.

Yet, in the case of American cities especially, I would argue that transportation only allowed great outward growth, but did not cause it. I believe that guns and race caused Americans to choose to live further and further from where they worked or shopped, dragging the cities where no practical reason to spread otherwise existed. Many experts have described and documented "white flight" as a cause of quick outward pressure in the middle of the turbulent 1960's. However, whites had fled downtown areas for decades, simply at a slower pace. Why? A variety of reasons usually are given, but to me they all boil down to two factors, guns and race.

If you asked people who chose to move further out the trolley line in 1910, or the commuter train line to a new Levittown in 1950, or many miles and exits out the interstate highway to new developments in 1990 why they were moving, you would get similar answers. More housing choices. Newer houses. Bigger yards. Fresher air. Better schools. Quieter neighborhoods. Cleaner streets. Better shopping. Bigger grocery stores. More playgrounds. Good church communities. New hospitals. Safer communities. Less crime. Less noise. Less light at night to see the stars.

What a survey taker or demographer or economist would not hear are the real reasons behind these statements that Americans say at the dinner table, at the bar, with friends, to family elsewhere, and often to their new neighbors. Things like "we had to get further out from those people". Or perhaps "we wanted to be near our own". And frequently "back there it was becoming unsafe, with all the murders". As civil rights and fair housing laws led to integrated neighborhoods, you began to hear "the property values were just collapsing, we wanted to stay, but our home is supposed to be our nest egg". The issue of schools usually is given primary consideration for children and property values, leading to statements such as "once those people were let in, the schools just went to hell, and we had no choice but to leave". In the South, the massive resistance efforts that closed schools to prevent or stall integration after the Brown decision led to wholesale creation of new areas of development around white private or religious schools, even in small towns that were not growing otherwise.

If you would argue that saying guns and race were behind how modern American cities grew is an exaggeration or oversimplification, consider the following points. Were blacks moving further and further out for the same reasons, even after the 1960's? With a few exceptions of affluent blacks building some communities where most of the white population had left, the answer is that most outward growth of all American cities in the last century has been almost exclusively a migration of whites. If you consider safety, security, and fear of crime as primary motivation to keep moving further out of the cities, what causes this obsession with crime? Not simple breaking and entering, not fist fights or even knife fights outside drinking establishments that always took place in ports or near military posts. No, the fear of crime is rooted in two factors for Americans traditionally: the fear of gun violence and the fear of black criminals with guns.

Guns have always given Americans good reason to fear crime and to fear for their lives and property. The gun culture means that criminals are often armed and that encounters of any type during any crime can result in death. This sounds obvious, but the presence of crime in other parts of the world does not always bring with it a fear of deadly violence. In places with few guns, burglary is usually not a violent crime. Yet in America, the potential of armed homeowners, armed store and bank employees, armed security guards, and quick response by heavily armed police generally persuades criminals to "pack heat", because a knife or brass knuckles is not going to protect you. The justice system at every level has two types of charges for crimes, those committed with a gun being much more serious than those without. The need for charges such as armed robbery, felony with a gun, assault with a deadly weapon have arisen because of the prevalence of armed criminals.

So if Americans feared armed criminals and moved to safer areas further out, that fundamental factor shaped the urban landscape of America. Again, people act on perceptions, even if they are not victims of crime themselves. The other perception they acted upon was that the armed criminal was perceived overwhelmingly as a black man.

If we examine statistics on crime in twentieth century America that break down by race the patterns of arrests, convictions, and incarceration, we can get bogged down quickly in the phenomenon of crime in America being entangled in race and racism. I don't do statistics. Whites ask "why do black men commit so much crime?". Experts respond "statistically blacks do not commit more crimes, but they are arrested and jailed at much higher rates" or "black men without opportunity or hope for advancement turn to crime and then a white society jails them for longer terms than whites, leading to much higher recidivism rates when they return to a society still with little opportunity for black criminals with no skills." There may be no real definitive answers to racial disparities in America's troubled legal system, but facts stand out that cause perceptions that we are considering here.

Throughout modern American history, black men have been arrested and locked up in huge numbers. The perception of most American whites and even among American blacks has been that crime in America wore a black face. Newspaper coverage of crime and then television news has constantly flashed up mug shots of black suspects so routinely that Americans are numb to the endless association of crime with black males. Criminologists, defense attorneys, and psychologists have repeatedly argued that overt or implicit racism of assuming a black man is a guilty criminal has corrupted the jury system. This is true for all types of crime, but especially so for murder, and the racial disparity in imposition of death sentences has led most experts to argue that it is an unworkable relic of the racist past.

The issue of race's connection to crime in America has led to deep divides over the use of racial profiling. To search for suspects, police departments began to routinely round up young black men, a recipe for unjust or mistaken prosecutions. To clean up communities of drugs and crime, urban police forces have clamped down on the very movement of all black males with anti-loitering pushes, curfews, warrantless searches of persons, property, and vehicles. Law abiding blacks caution each other to be ready to be pulled over for "driving while black".

Again, the sociological statistics and attempted explanations by experts are not our main concern here. What most readers would agree is that throughout most American cities in the 1900's, the perception of black criminals played a major part in causing insecure whites to move to suburban and then exurban areas. Fear of black people, fear of black men with guns, and fear of being shot motivated millions of white Americans to move out of city cores, regardless if most said "we liked the bigger yards" or "the schools just seemed better".

Before we leave the questions of guns and crime and race, we need to examine an uncomfortable topic often seen as "conspiracy theory". Follow this argument with me. If most police say that cheap and widely available guns make crime worse, and if most politicians listen to the police, if gun companies make little off the sale of small cheap handguns, and if gun companies make nothing off illegal gun sales, and most murders in the United States happen in cities with cheap illegal handguns, then why in over a century haven't the police, the politicians, and the gun companies come up with a solution that would stop the production and distribution of cheap handguns that find their way into the hands of criminals? This would certainly lead to less murders and perhaps less crime overall.

Many critics have argued that for reasons of racism, no real effort has ever been made to solve the problem of gun violence in American cities. White people owned the gun companies and worked in the gun factories. Whites owned gun stores that sold cheap handguns to whites that sold them to anyone. White police forces grew to fight crime, not eliminate it. White people feared black criminals. Black criminals often killed each other with the cheap guns. So white people made money off guns, got jobs as policemen, and black criminals got killed. Why stop such a racist racket from simply repeating the pattern over generations? Many people saw the availability of cheap addictive illegal drugs such as heroin and then crack cocaine in the same way. A white crackdown on black drug use and crime locked up black men and employed hundreds of thousands of whites. The same gun companies that made the cheap handguns profited even more greatly off arming law enforcement agencies and selling to more affluent white buyers afraid of black criminals invading their homes.

Concluding that line of thinking, opponents of gun control cloaked themselves in the Second Amendment, arguing that the worsening crime rate demanded more guns everywhere. In effect white men in a large organization dedicated to gun rights loudly protected their right to bear arms against the threat of gun violence and black criminals.

For those readers that think that including such conspiracy theory invalidates any rational or evidence-backed discussion of such controversial issues, I would simply point to the incredible racist brutality of American vigilantism and the justice system itself. Most studies estimate that from the 1880's until the 1930's almost 4,000 blacks were lynched usually by angry mobs. Often the victims were grabbed right out of jails with or without the cooperation of the jailers. There is no record of any lynch mob participants being brought to any sort of justice for taking the law into their own hands. The Ku Klux Klan in the South of the 1950's and 1960's enjoyed widespread popularity there, and even instances of murder went ignored by the justice system. To say that it is far-fetched that there were racists among gun-makers, politicians, law enforcement officers, jury members or even judges is not speculation but accepted fact. Therefore to say that many whites in America would countenance continued high rates of gun violence in black areas out of racist motives because they either did not care about black victims or actually viewed black deaths as positive in reducing the black population is not that unbelievable. Careful analysis of political rhetoric in America over the last century reveals clearly that waging the fight against rampant crime was to keep it from spreading to 'safer' - i.e. white - communities.

Arguing about whether gun violence is an intended goal of racism may be futile, but the impact of gun violence on black people in America remains clear and striking. Generations of blacks grew up believing that black males should expect to witness violence, to be caught up in or turn to a life of crime, to be arrested, to be jailed, to be wounded or to be shot by a criminal or a policeman's gun with shocking regularity and in huge numbers. White Americans feared violence and overwhelmingly felt threatened by violence from black men, but most white Americans did not expect to witness violence, to be caught up in or turn to a life of crime, to be arrested, to be jailed, to be wounded or to be shot by a criminal or a policeman's gun.

# Chapter 11: Guns and Gangsters

America's gun culture from early on produced a strange romance surrounding men who were good with a gun. Many an American hero earned that status because of their ability to shoot or to kill, whether they were a soldier, a hunter, an Indian fighter, a lawman, or a crack shot such as a sniper or an Olympic marksman. Think of Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Alvin York, Elliot Ness, or Chris Kyle. These were real heroes, who were seen as good guys in real life. Now think of actors who built acting careers performing feats with guns in the movies or on television: John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, just to name a few.

Our gun culture has become so intertwined with the entertainment business of the last century, collectively called Hollywood, that it is hard to distinguish reality from its depiction in the movies or from outright fiction. How many readers when thinking of a cowboy recall images from movies or television? An old hand of Hollywood once quipped that more cowboys were extras in Hollywood than ever rode the trail for real. We will examine the impact of Hollywood on America's gun culture and vice versa in the next chapter.

First let's get back to heroes. Americans actually do not tend to recall the good guys when you ask them to think of men who were good with a gun, no, we tend to recall the bad guys much quicker. Americans have had a long standing habit of romanticizing the outlaws, the gun slingers, the desperadoes, the gangsters, the mobsters, the bank robbers, the mass killers, the serial killers, the hit men, the villains, the gang bangers and so on. Now try to think of some bad guys good with their guns. More come to mind now: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Beltway Sniper to name a few. Why the fascination with famous criminals? Perhaps it is more fun to learn about people who break laws in dramatic and violent fashion, than it is to recall the more boring and settled men who kept the peace.

I believe that our gun culture has partly caused our fascination with criminals and violence and contributes to greater levels of violence and crime in our society. Since Americans from an early age are relentlessly exposed to this traditional acceptance that _Guns=Power_ , then the people willing to use that power most dramatically are going to be famous, infamous or notorious, depending on your point of view. A policeman walking a beat, an FBI agent doing mundane investigation, or a soldier on sentry duty seems boring. Add a criminal shooting at a policemen after robbing a store, a murderer with a machine gun fleeing FBI agents in pursuit, or enemy fire pinning soldiers down on patrol, now you have drama. The human imagination is sparked by danger, not dullness. The senses of many people tingle when gun shots crack the silence, explosions shake the ground, and this seems exciting whether it is real gunfire, movie sounds, or fireworks. Americans generally are impressed with technology, gadgets, inventions, and guns are very, very powerful gadgets.

Many people own guns, have owned guns, learned to shoot, or have hunted. Many more have seen people with guns, been around shooting or hunting. We all know guns are powerful weapons, much more than knives or poison when it comes to stopping an immediate threat to your person. Thus, many people hold respect for those who shoot and are fascinated, repulsed, or horrified by a man that can take a gun and shoot it at another human being. We understand the bravery of a policemen that returns fire at a bad guy or soldier that shoots at an enemy soldier, for that is responding to the threat of harm or in self defense. But to pick up a gun and shoot people in cold blood is the ultimate act of violence, and while it repels our sensibilities, it mesmerizes many people as hugely powerful, just as a haunted house rarely can handle the crowds if it is known as the goriest in town at Halloween.

This romanticizing of crime and gangsters in American popular culture varies from the harmless to the outright dangerous. If criminals, thugs, mobsters, hit men are seen as heroic in a notorious way, then some young people will want to emulate their behavior in real life, not just read about it or see it in the movies. If a low level criminal has a gun and decides that going to prison is not his choice, then he will kill innocent victims or police or himself to avoid capture. Only in America do we have popular sayings such as "going out in a blaze of glory" or speak of desperate people getting a gun to commit "suicide by cop" by threatening the police in order to be shot.

There is no other weapon that imparts the power or 'coolness' of a big gun. Very few people think of a knife, an axe, or a sledgehammer as a weapon to go out and threaten people with, or rob a bank with, or become famous with. Quite the opposite. Even kids know the saying, "don't bring a gun to a knife fight". If you do commit a crime, bring the power with you to survive, the power that comes from a loaded gun.

So many, many Americans are accustomed to violence, images of violence, fantastic fictional violence, all committed by glorified gangsters and criminals. We then turn around and blame the entertainment industry, Hollywood, for causing or perpetuating glorification of gun violence. Yet which came first? I believe that Hollywood only caters to a demand that our traditional gun culture had long before encouraged to develop. America was obsessed with guns before any fictional cop named Dirty Harry pointed his gun in the thug's face and barked out "But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?".

# Chapter 12: Guns and Hollywood

American culture has always flowed outward from somewhere, changing over both time and distance. What has changed is how culture flows, how it arrives in the homes and lives of people, how it is transmitted and also how it is produced. The colonists generally looked to the biggest ports on the coast and beyond back to the cities of Europe for news, fashions, styles, literature, education, music, even furniture and luxury goods. Colonists looked to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Williamsburg, Charleston and beyond to London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome for information and the latest taste.

As America grew after the Revolution, families moving westward, endured rough conditions and had little time for finery and even learning, but civilization and culture slowly spread through towns, then along the rivers, then along railroads, and through the telegraph lines strung along them. The image of a cabin with hard work leaving little time for anything but perhaps reading the Good Book held true, but the preachers, teachers, newspaper editors, all pushed reading in even the remotest of settlements. America was founded by lawyers and needed a good supply of lawyers, and the hard scrabble background of Abraham Lincoln is testimony to the power of education luring even the wildest of frontier youth into a broader culture.

The growth of modern American cities demanded more intense preparation of immigrant youth to fit into a different urban culture. The great push by the Progressives for public education helped to meet the demands of industry for workers who could read, of municipal governments who needed responsible citizens and voters, and eventually of a military that needed draftees and recruits who could be trained to wage modern warfare. As technological change brought inventions of all sorts, communication became quicker and its outlets available right in the home, with telephone, then radio, television, and finally home computers hooked to massive networks, wiring almost all households into instantaneous webs of culture.

Modern Americans began to look to different centers for the culture they began to be consumers of. For a century, new settlement areas looked back to the East, still with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and the capitol city Washington. Midwestern and then Western cities gained important roles with Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and San Francisco setting trends for their regions. Yet, the huge sprawling cities with skyscrapers and millions of immigrant and migrant populaces that would dominate modern America became New York City and Los Angeles. And no city would play a greater role than Los Angeles as a center for the new medium of movies and television with the entertainment industry collectively known as Hollywood.

The impact of moving pictures, first without sound, then with talking, on American culture cannot be overestimated. Before Hollywood, it is fair to say that America was an importer of culture from Western Europe. As Hollywood flourished, America instead became an exporter of culture. Today America's top three exports by dollar value are airplanes, higher education, and entertainment productions, with the three swapping places depending on how airplanes, graduate school seats, and movie tickets are selling each year. Hollywood became a unifying force of American culture, going to the movies and then watching the television a common shared experience that exposed Americans to a new and vibrant culture that they consumed voraciously.

So how did Hollywood portray, reflect, mold and shape American culture? Obviously, Hollywood produces what sells tickets and commercial advertisements. Hollywood may allow for some creative experimentation, but generally it repeats success by continuing to churn out more of what has been successful. Broadly speaking, a few genres have worked in both movie theaters and on television. Romance, with both love and some degree of sex, always gets viewers. Dramas, with romance or without, especially focused on the family tend to be good formulas. Comedy of all types has made plenty of stars. And action films, with or without drama and romance, keep the viewers coming back. Many dramas and action films succeed because they include war, the West, or crime. Hollywood seemed in its first few decades to focus on Westerns. Almost all actors before 1960 seemed to pay their dues in Westerns. Criminal dramas or mysteries seem to be American favorites, and these seem to be popular exports of Hollywood both to theaters and TV sets globally.

For our discussion here, Hollywood's portrayal of the West, war and crime involved guns from the very beginning of silent movies right down through last night's latest crime show on TV. If you believe the ratings, Americans see on TV or pay to see at the cinema gun violence routinely and with amazing frequency. Seemingly, a good portion of what is reported on television news also involves war or crime. At least half of American households watch a TV crime drama weekly, with many choices on every single night. Of course, millions choose not to watch violence and do not see guns in the television and movies. Also, Hollywood produces a huge variety of entertainment, ranging from children's programming to cooking shows to musicals to even pornography that never include violence. Yet, a large number of stars make their careers on being action or crime drama characters who routinely use weapons, especially handguns. Each night on TV, and every weekend at the cinema, guns are drawn and people are shot in huge numbers, not to mention the ground shaking explosions and destruction that fill the blockbuster action films that routinely draw the most viewers.

So what? Many Americans see violence in popular culture. Hollywood makes money off it. A lot of it includes gun violence. Did Hollywood invent all of this as pure fiction and fantasy? No, they simply have given Americans what they want to watch, molding and shaping the common culture of America over the decades. The Western genre of movies became an exciting interpretation of an exciting chapter in American history. The crime drama on television incorporates hard, gritty truths from the modern American city with all sorts of people jumbled together in not so ideal conditions.

Compare Hollywood's role in selling violence to the way it sells romance and sex. We can understand that Hollywood invented neither love nor sex, but it sure can make a good movie experience, can't it? Likewise, Hollywood did not invent guns or violence, but watching people shoot at each other captures the attention of viewers like nothing else. Who got shot, who got killed, who shot the bad guy, how did they make that shot, we ask every time we see the good guys shoot it out with the bad guys. All of this is fantasy, it's fiction right, it's not real, no gets hurt, what's the harm?

We cannot decide if violence in movies or on TV really does any harm, with preachers, psychologists, and sociologists debating this until they are blue in the face. Yet we can agree for the sake of our discussion here, there are a lot of guns, terrific amounts of gun violence, in what Hollywood produces year after year. American culture is saturated with fictional violence layering on top of the actual violence that takes place every day. Our culture beats with a staccato burst of gunfire, that is heard on our streets at night in the cities, during the day at gun ranges and hunting in the countryside, and then on our television sets and in our surround sound movieplexes. They often become intertwined to where we cannot distinguish fact from fiction. Movies and TV shows reproduce actual instances of war and crime with great detail and accuracy. Real life bad guys try to reenact in their own way things from movie and television. Sometimes the fact and the fantasy collide in grotesque tragedy as when James Holmes, dressed as an armored soldier, shot into the crowd watching the latest Batman flick premiering at a Colorado theater, wounding and killing dozens in mere seconds.

Indeed, American culture is a huge and unwieldy topic, yet we can all agree that it is filled with guns and violence. Many a movie star fired off many a blank round to earn their fame. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood built themselves into legends by killing bad guys, standing up to criminals, and understanding that Americans wanted their heroes to be tough, to shoot straight, to be powerful and to use a gun whenever the need arose.

Generations of Americans after the 1920's consumed a culture that at the very least reinforced the view that _Guns=Power_ , if not encouraging this view to become even stronger. Indeed, seeing our heroes on the big screen using guns certainly became a feature of how American males defined what it meant to be brave and strong. The American entertainment industry would also carry these themes into the still evolving world of internet entertainment and electronic video games. Without going into these whole new virtual worlds, our basic point seems to apply as well. Video games definitely have massive levels of gun violence without doubt.

Hollywood, to its credit, seemed to proactively transform the view of racism in twentieth century America. On this issue, there seemed to indicate that Hollywood producers and directors began to realize the powerful role they played in not just reflecting but shaping American culture as well. While racial and ethnic stereotypes have plagued Hollywood over the decades, at pivotal moments, some films like _To Kill a Mockingbird_ nudged America toward less racism. Likewise, the huge scheduling challenges of television and cable networks meant that television would eventually begin to reflect the changing American racial mosaic. Strong disagreement continues on how far TV and movies have come on racism, intolerance, diversity, and so forth.

Where Hollywood falls short on race is the intersection of race and crime. Too many times, crime is shown as a white good guy shooting the bad black thug. This continues to cause debate. What is undeniable is that if you tally up the heroes and the villains over the past century, the white guy with the gun has overwhelmingly killed a black, red or brown bad guy with a gun to save the day.

What about people who cannot tell fiction and fantasy from their daily reality? If we are talking about starry eyed dreamers, we call them romantics if they try to be like a movie star and charm their sweetheart. Yet if they are delusional and disturbed individuals who try to act out some violent fantasy involving guns, we call them crazy. Unfortunately, modern America has become all too familiar with these mass shooters, and next we will look at how America's gun culture and popular culture lead to deadly results.

# Chapter 13: Guns and Mass Shootings

Most human beings by their nature are not violent people. Violence seems horrible to most folks because it repulses or frightens most people. Millions of Americans watch fictional violence at the cinema or on television, but recoil with fear if it happens close to home. Certainly warfare or frequent violence can condition violent or survival instincts. Yet, broadly speaking, most humans live peacefully. Some men who become criminals see crime as a business, and violence is just a part of it. A small percentage like to hurt people, and we call them psychopaths. Yet these are murderers who either know the victims, choose them specifically, or commit cruel murders during the commission of other crimes. Then there are a small percentage of people who may hurt or kill themselves when they reach a point of depression or desperation, but still do not commit violence toward others.

If _Guns=Power_ still today in modern America, then logically those who might reach for a gun would be those people with no power. For some who feel powerless in their lives, a gun offers some effort at taking power. While others with no power simply accept their lot in life, turn to other means to cope, or express their frustration in peaceful ways, a few are not satisfied to the point of lashing out at the society that has ignored or insulted them. Our gun culture creates a very dangerous combination of circumstances. First, angry people who resent the society at large tend to be attracted to guns because these weapons symbolize power and control that these people lack in their lives. Second, guns are widely available, even to people who should not be able to get one.

So we have a toxic recipe for tragedy and catastrophe in our gun saturated society. Guns attract angry and resentful disturbed people and they can get guns. The result is a mass shooting. There are patterns to such incidents. The location is chosen by the shooter because that is the place or the type of place where they felt the most powerless, the most insulted, or the least in control, or the least respected. The victims are either particular targets who the shooter holds a grudge toward, or randomly chosen because of past slights from that type of people, or just random innocents who simply enter the crosshairs of a killer trying to inflict the most damage possible. We see a pattern that most locations are chosen because they are public places where individuals have to conform to fit in: schools, churches, workplaces, shopping malls, public plazas, movie theaters, for instance. Generally speaking, such places are comfortable for social humans, but can cause varying degrees of discomfort or even pain to those who struggle to fit into society.

Then the pattern usually follows a similar path. The shooter has prepared his attack for a long time and has enough weapons and ammunition to kill many victims. He may start with people he knows, as if to say goodbye to the people he blames the most for his miserable station in life, then he moves onto one or a few specific targets in the public place. Often from this point he moves into the glory phase of his plan, where he often kills strangers at random in order to maximize his fame by shooting so many people in his moment of glory. Then the incidents usually close with the shooter quickly dispatched by a police officer, or by choosing the coward's death of shooting himself when cornered. Sometimes, brave people can subdue the gunman, and he is arrested and can be prosecuted for his crimes.

Then the pattern continues with massive attention and media coverage of the mass shooting. You often hear people at the location say things such as "our town has never had much crime, I can't believe this happened here" or "the guy seemed strange but we never thought he was dangerous or capable of this". You even hear some people that are surprised. Surprised that someone opened fire at a church or at a school.

Then the usual pattern after such mass shootings continues with calls for some change in laws to prevent these incidents. Then the debate between those for stricter gun control and those favoring gun rights erupts with renewed vigor.

The sad part of all this is that I just described a pattern. In other words, for at least the last five decades, these incidents have happened enough times where you do not need to work for the FBI to be able to describe this pattern as I have above. You simply need to live in modern America, watch a bit of TV news each day, and you too can talk about mass shootings and our reactions to them with a fairly accurate perspective.

The only insight that I have to offer is not really new. These mass shootings again are a predictable outcome of our gun culture. Crazy killers can get guns with great ease in most parts of our country. Crazy killers can go about their preparations, even with the knowledge of other people that they are up to something. Crazy killers buy their guns. Crazy killers buy large amounts of ammunition. Crazy killers rant and rave to others in person or on the internet about their anger at someone or society in general for long periods before they launch their attack.

What strikes me every time is that usually, the people who sell guns and ammunition are so accustomed to selling multiple weapons to gun buyers and large quantities of bullets, that these are not red flags. As many other critics have complained you can buy ammunition in most states with no identification, while buying decongestants for instance requires signature and ID. The shooter buying the gun and ammo usually seems "like a typical guy". Here we may be on to something odd.

The fact that the shooter does not usually stand out in a crowd seems to draw attention, but no real explanation or analysis. Let's think about this. Why do they not stand out? First, because mass shooters are almost exclusively white males that do not attract attention. They may seem a bit odd or impatient or stick out because they are not social at work or school or seem to struggle to their family, friends or acquaintances. Yet when they go to buy guns they seem like normal gun purchasers. How is this possible? Again, because they are white males of average appearance. In other words, most people who buy guns are white males.

For our purposes here, that may be the key ingredient that explains mass shootings. Let's just say that mental illness of some type afflicts at least ten percent of human beings at some point in their lives, a number thrown around in the media quite often. So why is it that only white males use guns in mass shootings? This rarely seems to draw any attention.

Yet to me, this provides the answer to why mass shootings occur. White males are more likely to be a part of the gun culture in America, and their sense of power is the greatest when holding a gun. Yes, criminals of all races brandish their guns as making them equal in power to an armed homeowner or shop keeper or policeman or rival gang banger. Yet they want the power to scare others to achieve their goals as criminals, to rob the house, to rob the shop, to rob the bank, to scare off the other criminals. Only white males who feel absolute powerlessness, complete frustration at their inability to fit into society, their complete lack of control, seem to lash out by killing as many people as possible with a gun.

The logic to me is persuasive. White males have controlled European and then American society for thousands of years. Not only women, but all other races were either subservient or outright enslaved by the dominant white males. In America, as we have seen, white males used guns to keep complete dominance over women and non-whites for several centuries. Now that society seems to be turned upside down from this traditional order, with women and non-whites gaining power in so many different ways, some disturbed white men are trying to regain control the only way they know, with a gun.

Of course they are crazy in thinking that killing people in a few seconds in a mass shooting will make society into what it used to be, but they are crazy, so it makes sense to them. Look at Adam Lanza, the killer at Newtown, Connecticut. How did this mentally ill, shut in psychopath choose to show he was powerful? His mother even helped him get his guns and took him shooting as a way to connect with him. He started his rampage by killing her. Then he went where he had briefly attended school, Sandy Hook Elementary. There he killed the female principal and women in the front office, before killing children, the very youngest in the building, as many as he could before he died.

Yes, he killed white people. Yes, there are black or Asian mass shooters. Yes, there are many different exceptions in any pattern. Yet here we are. Generally speaking, crazy white men easily get guns and then kill people in mass shootings. Can we agree that these white men seem to share some degree of obsession with guns making them powerful? Can we agree that crazy guys should not be able to get guns easily or at all?

Let me restate my theory here. White men have created a violent gun culture in America that equates guns with power. Guns are widely available, to the point that even crazy people can get guns quickly and easily. White men are not as powerful as they once were. Crazy white men who once could beat slaves to feel dominant or abuse their wives or children or harass co-workers, now often feel they are powerless. So they get a gun and come up with a crazy plan to kill people, to become powerful and even notorious.

I also believe that we should not be surprised at all of these incidents. Horrified, disgusted, shocked, saddened, and revolted by these mass shootings. But not surprised. Americans in modern America have only themselves to blame that such shootings continue. We need to help people with mental illness and be aware if they are potentially violent and take steps to prevent their violent attacks. We need to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people. We need to make it more difficult to get guns to use in violent acts, period. We also need to stop the endless and mindless belief in our country that _Guns=Power_. The only sure way to achieve all of these goals is to go to the root of the problem with guns in America, the Second Amendment.

# Chapter 14: Guns and Women

White people depended on guns to keep power in the United States. Or do I mean white men? I have used the typical general nouns for racial groups in America: whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, etc. People of course will argue that I need to use European American for whites, so as not to lump in Hispanic immigrants of later periods. Some will say that blacks need to be called African-Americans. And others will insist that Indians should be called Native Americans, even though most tribes have chosen to be called American Indians, not to be confused with Indian Americans from the sub-continent of Asia that Columbus thought he had "discovered". I cannot resolve all of the different racial distinctions, and will let critics and the experts at the Census Bureau fret over such distinctions. What I do know is that Americans argue over identity because white Americans wanted to make clear who was at the top of the list, and to do that you have to make a list and put people into categories. Being a land of immigrants from the beginning, we are only Americans not by birth or skin color, but because we identify with the Constitution and are citizens forming We the People from which our government takes its power.

I have even said the hand of the gun that kept blacks in subjugation was white. But was the hand male or female or both at different times? How do women fit into the generalization "white America"? If white men were racists as a group, does that mean that white women were racists as well? If men controlled women in European and then American society, can women be said to be in power with white men? Were white women in households with slaves also slave owners if they had no mention in any documents of ownership? If I have argued that white America developed a gun culture that has led to our obsession with guns and our high levels of gun violence, do white women deserve to be lumped into such a generalization?

We need to discuss this question of guns and women because I believe we are at a pivotal moment in our history in regard to our gun culture and I believe that women will probably play a big role in how we can transform this culture. If you accept that women have spent the last century gaining more rights and power within America's society, economy and culture, then it is vital to understand how women relate to the gun culture.

I believe that, generally speaking, white men as a group throughout American history developed our gun culture and participated in varying degrees in its growing dominance and popularity. I am not trying to lay blame on every white man. But white men controlled society firmly until well into America's second century in every way: legally, politically, economically, and socially. Thus the dominant group in society chose to have slavery and rely on guns to keep power over slaves and to take lands from the Indians.

This is not to say that white women of any period were helpless servants or powerless within the household to influence their husbands and sons. Nor can it be said that women were against firearms or were unable to gain skill with weapons when needed, especially in frontier settlements. Neither is it possible to say that women did not own slaves in certain situations or were not racist in their attitudes towards slaves or blacks after slavery's end. Yet white women did not create the society they lived within and they did not make the laws that governed themselves or other groups. So it is possible to say that white men are responsible for America's racism and its gun culture.

Further, it is clearly the case that America's gun culture developed into a hyper-masculine stereotype that equated American manhood with guns: gun ownership, skill with guns, bravery with guns when called on, and willingness to protect their property and their families with guns. This last duty particularly developed into a clear obsession among white men that they had to defend the virtue of all white women against violence by black men by reflexively shooting or lynching suspected black assailants and rapists. This was a tremendous part of the hold that racism had on the mind of white men that they had to stop the savagery of black criminals, all the while often coveting relations with black women.

White men created a gun culture that became magnified by Hollywood into being a key ingredient in American masculinity. You were seen as a citified, sissified (I cannot believe the spell checker knew this adjective, so the white men must control Microsoft as well!) and unmanly if you did not know how to shoot or at least talk knowingly with other men about guns you saw in the movies. Men simply had to be seen as tough, as being willing to shoot, carry a gun, maintain a gun, serve as a soldier with a gun, defend your country, your home, your family, your wife with a gun. The gun culture I have described in this book is almost purely a masculine creation, surging with testosterone and adrenaline.

Okay, here it comes. Incoming fire from empowerment-advocating feminist critics who claim that women can own guns, shoot guns and be as macho as the men in this country. Fine, I agree. Yet we need to discuss the terms involved here and how a culture created within one group can spread to other groups that are even victims of that culture.

One of the great moments of the civil rights movement came when Thurgood Marshall opened his case against separate and unequal education for blacks that led to the Brown decision. He brilliantly showed the results of a psychologist's study showing that even young black girls chose white dolls as prettier dolls to play with because the larger culture believed that white girls with straight hair and delicate features were prettier than black girls. In other words the racist culture at large impacted the beliefs of young children that they were inferior and that separate and inferior schools would further that belief among young blacks.

What Thurgood Marshall argued in those cases applies just as much to considering how racist attitudes and the gun culture had a similar impact among all groups in America, including white women and blacks as well. White women generally went along with racism toward blacks and all non-whites because they were raised in a racist culture and taught these attitudes by white men. Blacks for much of American history believed that they were inferior as well. Not only leaders insisting that blacks were equal and deserved equality were crucial in changing minds, the advances made by black athletes such as Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Arthur Ashe, and Jim Brown persuaded blacks that they were not only equal but could be better than whites at any endeavor.

So women and blacks raised around America's gun culture will naturally be quick to adopt its attitudes and even rush to participate in it. Joining the military and proving their bravery is part of the experience for American blacks and women both. Yet white men always set the terms and laid down serious obstacles for women and blacks to participate in the military and the gun culture. Yet women and blacks overcame all obstacles.

We have already examined how there is a tradition among white men to allow cheap guns to make their way into the hands of black criminals, who tended to kill other black criminals in black communities. Thus we have white men wanting blacks to buy into the gun culture, even today counting on black male gun owners to support the gun culture and gun rights. Black military service traditions and opening opportunities in law enforcement have led to many blacks being serious supporters of gun ownership.

A similar pattern can be said to have developed among white women. Many women grew up around guns and were just as comfortable shooting and hunting as their brothers or husbands. There is even a tradition of Hollywood making legends of women who could kill as well as the men. Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies is the greatest protector of humanity ever, a Rambo of the future, badder than any Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker.

Yet there is a serious point being overlooked. Millions and millions of American women have seen the culture of guns and masculinity as deadly to their sons, brothers, husbands and to civilization in general. Just as many American women led the push for Prohibition to get drunken men out of the saloons and streets, so many women have also pushed for controls on guns and violence. Many American white women participated in the Civil Rights movement because they saw white men as violent Ku Klux Klan thugs that supported segregation and racism.

Many male gun owners who support gun rights and oppose gun control are aggressively pushing the gun culture on women, as the number of American males that hunt and own guns declines as urbanization continues. Many gun companies market smaller weapons and special holsters to women for personal protection. Many women buy guns and train at ranges to learn self defense as sexual assault plagues all areas, even as overall rates of violent crime decrease. Hollywood certainly has many women characters who are cops that are good with guns.

Yet how far is empowerment a benefit to women? Are there parts of American gun and masculine culture that should not be adopted by women to prove they are equal? Do we want women to be empowered enough so that they commit more violent felonies, rob more banks, hold up more convenience stores, shoot more people? Do women want to have more female gang bangers shooting it out with other gangs in the streets? Do we want women to increase the small percentage of the prison population that women comprise, so more violent women are locked as often as men?

On a bigger issue, while women wanting to have equality in the military is admirable, empowering and progressive, do we want women equally involved in all the horrors of direct combat? If you ask many men and women, do you want women to be equal when we fight wars or do we want to avoid fighting wars, what is the correct answer for the average citizen? Similarly, do we want women to be empowered and pick up guns in equal numbers when they suffer mental illness and commit more mass shootings?

Certainly not! I believe that we need to choose our future more carefully, to not empower women with guns but to overturn the male tradition of equating guns with power. White women, black women, Latino women, Asian women, ALL women should stand with white men, black men, Latino men, Asian men, ALL men who believe that the gun culture created by white American men is as deadly and evil as the racist culture created by white American men.

White men used guns to keep power in a racist society. If we realize that guns were the traditional tools of the racists, then why the hell are we perpetuating the gun culture created by those racists? Join with me in envisioning a future in which we shed not only the racism of the past but the guns needed to keep people under the heel of the racists!

# Chapter 15 : Imagine

Just as Americans of courage busted the shackles of slavery, Americans of courage will have to bust the shackles of the gun culture. The last section of this book will deal with what needs to be done to achieve a safer America. This will be a tedious fight involving a moral, political and legal struggle. It may happen in a burst of righteous indignation or it may play out over years. First, we need to envision the future America that will be worth this struggle. With the unabashed idealism of John Lennon's song Imagine we need to picture the America, imagine the America that we would like to see. Agreement on a broad goal of a safer America should draw more people to this cause, so what type of America would we like to see?

Imagine an America where we would not fear to send our kids to school for fear of a madman bursting in with an assault rifle to slaughter our babies.

Imagine an America where we would not worry if an agitated guy at the food court might not be hiding a weapon in his bag, ready to make a killing field in our favorite shopping center.

Imagine an America where a warehouse distribution center manager did not have to wonder if firing the sloppy employee who keeps yelling at co-workers might result in him returning with a handgun to settle the score.

Imagine an America where teachers did not have to interrupt their lessons to conduct 'Code Blue' intruder or 'lock-down' drills, rehearsing with their students how to hide silently in their locked room until the all clear signal is sounded.

Imagine an America where criminals had such a hard time getting guns that cops did not drive around stressed out, ready to defend themselves with guns during every traffic stop, every routine interaction with people on the street, and responding to every call for a breaking and entering.

Imagine an America where the police budget was not eaten up by purchasing more and more expensive military tactical weapons and gear to prepare for every well armed nut in a standoff or gangs possessing massive firepower to fight rival gangs over turf.

Imagine an America where domestic disputes, arguments, and cases of abuse did not so quickly escalate to fatal tragedies involving gun shots.

Imagine an America where women did not fear that behind every corner at night might lie an armed rapist, or a an armed abusive ex-husband or armed stalker.

Imagine an America where we did not spend huge sums within the medical system to care for gunshot wound traumas and could focus on the deadly diseases we know and new threats to come.

Imagine an America in which manhood, masculinity, and machismo were not coupled with guns, where gun violence in movies, on television, and in video games was less pervasive.

Imagine an America where the progress made in race relations suffered less from the scourge of urban gun violence causing a "Fort Apache" mentality among police officers, where officers kept the peace, instead of being feared as oppressors and harassers among the communities that so desperately need serving and protecting.

Imagine an America which the rest of the world saw as honestly confronting its gun violence problem head on, as less hypocritical when we talk about our peace loving values, as believable when we say we do not see armed force as the only solution to conflicts.

Imagine an America in which our incredible technology industry makes it nearly impossible for a mentally ill person that has been diagnosed as potentially violent to purchase a gun or ammunition, where in addition the mentally ill are treated more compassionately instead of doped and discarded under overpasses as society's refuse.

Imagine an America where to buy a gun is a serious privilege like driving that requires training, learner probation, testing, identification, registering, licensing, and tracking with titles of each weapon just as every state has done with cars with great success for over a century.

Imagine an America where gun makers could face legal repercussions if their products find their way into the hands of criminals, gangs, drug dealers, or terrorists, or if they can easily be converted into automatic weapons with kits sold as accessories.

Imagine an America where gun owners have to pay a fee when purchasing weapons and ammunition to cover the cost of weapon tracking and responsible owner databases.

Imagine an America where sportsmen, hunters, and homeowners can get the guns they need for sport or protection, but a gun shop owner can decide that buying military style assault weapons and thousands of rounds of armor piercing high caliber ammo is a sale that sets off red flags and should be questioned, without a fear of being blacklisted by gun owner groups.

Imagine an America in which politicians could speak the truth about gun violence, where the federal government could release statistics on gun deaths and the true costs of gun violence to society.

Imagine an America where people down on their luck, at wit's end, just fired, rejected by a lover, or unable to live any longer with their demons, were less likely to reach for a gun to end their suffering, since less homes had guns, and suicide by most other means is more painful and less quick.

Imagine an America where a leader of the caliber of Abraham Lincoln said that the endless shootings and carnage by gun was a threat to the health of this republic we love, and that he or she was not afraid to stand up to the death merchants of the gun industry and their shameless protectors in the lobbying business who have corrupted our very democracy just as the slave owners did before the Civil War.

Imagine an America that awakens to the fact that racists have always used guns to have their way, have always hid behind laws to exploit others, and have always clung to their guns until the might of right triumphs over the might of power.

Imagine an America where _Guns=Power_ no longer is one of our dearest, if unspoken creeds, where we respect the accomplishments of our ancestors while acknowledging their reliance on guns, force, and violence is no longer needed in modern America.

If this America sounds appealing to you, then the remainder of the book describes and suggests in detail how we can change our country together into a safer place, saving thousands of American lives each year.

# Chapter 16: The Second Amendment

As stated in the Introduction to this book, I think the Second Amendment to the Constitution is America's second biggest mistake, with slavery being the first. Why do I say this? Because the Second Amendment kills people. Most Americans would agree with slavery being the biggest problem our country has faced. First it kept generations of black Africans and then their descendents in forced labor and servitude. Then the political confrontation between the slaveholders and the rest of the union caused the deadliest conflict Americans have ever fought in. Beyond the demise of slavery, racism led to intolerable and unjust conditions for blacks that linger even to this day. Americans see this as a terrible mistake, a mark against our heritage that we are only beginning to overcome completely.

Yet, when I proclaim the Second Amendment to be America's second biggest mistake, I enter a minefield that I know may destroy me, bringing ridicule and questions of my patriotism, my very American-ness. Why would I dare do this? Because, let me repeat, the Second Amendment kills Americans. How? Because as I have tried to describe, this short statement in the Bill of Rights encourages, perpetuates, and sanctifies America's gun culture, which results in tens of thousands of killed and wounded each and every year.

The Second Amendment has become so sacred to gun rights supporters that to question it at all draws immediate vilification of a critic. Anybody who speaks on the issue of gun control or gun rights has to steer clear of the Second Amendment, with gun control advocates clearly trying to not offend the keepers of the sacred gun fires and trigger their angry derision. Politicians always open any remarks on gun violence, even after some mass shooting tragedy, by saying they support the Second Amendment rights of every American. Gun control proposals have to be tailored to respect the court decisions upholding the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Indeed, the court battles of the last half century have been fought over the intent, the wording, the punctuation, the clauses of the Second Amendment. With few exceptions, the interpretation of the right to bear arms has been transformed by scholarship and court decisions from being a collective right related to militia service into an individual right with almost no room for even reasonable restrictions.

Here is where I will invoke my First Amendment right and express my opinion and leave this debate behind. The current debate of gun control versus gun rights is not only stagnant, it reeks of the rotting flesh of the Americans that continue to die while the argument continues to no conclusion. The Second Amendment Protection Racket, also known as the National Rifle Association, has grown rich and powerful, gorging itself on the debate over gun rights. The NRA has turned the intellectual, legal, and political standoff over the Second Amendment into a business model, lining its coffers and helping gun makers profit from its scare tactics.

Let the NRA win the debate, let's all agree that the Second Amendment originally meant to protect individual rights to own guns. Now, let's move the debate beyond the NRA and its league of death merchants. How? By taking the other parts of the Constitution just as seriously, those dealing with how to amend the governing document when the citizens deem it necessary to fix a problem.

The NRA or the Second Amendment Protect Racket is strangling our democracy, my fellow citizens, and quick decisive action is required to restore the balance of power to the people. Our founders may have seen guns as necessary, but they also saw the welfare of the republic and its citizens in much broader terms. Guns kill too many Americans. Our democratic institutions are gummed up by the bribes of the Second Amendment Protection Racket. Therefore, concerned citizens need to act forcefully, indeed they have a duty to act before it is too late.

When a toddler dies by accidentally wrapping a window blind cord around its neck, we all clamor for government action to prevent such future tragedies. Yet thousands of children are wounded or killed in gun accidents each year and no government action can be sought. When drug dealers began to stockpile decongestants to manufacture meta-amphetamines, states passed strict regulations on their distribution and sale. Yet most areas of the United States have few rules concerning the sale of ammunition. When government-mandated air bags in vehicles are found to be defective, companies face government action ordering a fix to the problem, with billions in liability costs at stake. The tobacco industry has lived under the cloud of massive settlements for the harm to the public health of its customers that it both caused and covered up for decades. Yet the gun industry has won a permanent shield thanks to the NRA protecting them from any liability for deaths or injuries from their products. Why the different standards?

Because the Bill of Rights or any other part of the Constitution does not mention window blind cords, cold remedies, vehicle airbags, or cigarettes. Congress and the courts have repeatedly upheld the interpretation of the passages dealing with common welfare, interstate commerce, and necessity to allow for broad regulation of all industry to protect the people who ordained the Constitution in the first place.

However, thanks to the Second Amendment Protection Racket, we now live in an America where the gun industry faces almost no regulation. Every time someone proposes even minor reasonable regulation of gun distribution, retailing, registration and licensing, the Second Amendment is invoked as calling for an unfettered right to bear arms.

Again, let the NRA gloat in its victory, and release its callous prescriptions for gun safety after each new mass shooting: arming and training educators, both administrators and teachers, conceal and carry laws with no limits, all intended to keep the peace by having good people ready everywhere to shoot it out with the bad guys. The NRA's answer to gun violence is more gun violence. The NRA's solution to too many guns is to push for more guns. It would not surprise me to discover that it also receives donations from the casket makers as well.

So if the Second Amendment has now been declared absolute and sacred by those who profit from this gun culture run amok and its scare tactics, then I propose the only real way to change America and save lives is to replace the Second Amendment.

Here, we need to steer clear of the polite legal debate that the NRA has waged with gun control advocates for decades and the attending courtroom fights. We cannot let them pick the venue, since they will bribe academics, experts, politicians, lawyers, and judges to get the result that they seek.

We need an entirely different audience and pool of support to change America, a group too large for the NRA to buy off completely with its blood money: the American people. The only way to engage enough people is to take this fight out of the courtrooms, the Congressional hearings, and the law journals, and into the living rooms of America with a public movement to replace the Second Amendment itself.

If enough Americans choose to change the Constitution by replacing the Second Amendment and bend the political process with the will to do so, then a more peaceful and less violent society may begin to take shape.

First, call the opposition what it is. The NRA is a backward-looking, chauvinistic, racist, anti-democratic group of self-righteous demagogues. They hide behind the folds of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights while showing utter and callous disregard for the lives shattered and lost every year to gun violence in the form of gun accidents, suicides, homicides, and mass shootings. They proclaim that they are some high and holy guardians of liberty, referring to a God-given right to bear arms. What about the liberty, the life, and the happiness of the victims of gun violence? Well those folks are just out of luck, besides they are mostly black, uneducated, poor, and lazy folks anyways, according to NRA logic. The NRA then bullies gun shop owners to toe the company line and never support gun restrictions for fear of being blacklisted. The NRA also silences even the wordiest people in America, our politicians, leading to a complete non reaction after some horrific mass shooting.

Worse yet, the NRA for decades has intentionally enflamed the culture wars, leading militia groups, anti-government groups, and all sorts of libertarian elements to see armed opposition to federal authorities as legitimate. Occasionally, one of these rogue anti-government extremists has gone too far and actually taken to the woods after threatening or killing police officers.

While this Second Amendment Protection Racket is powerful and seemingly unstoppable, the means to challenge their dominance is right under our noses. If we develop a popular push to replace the Second Amendment, then we will deflate their sails very rapidly. The Second Amendment has a historical connection to the Revolution and to the idea of citizens in militias, but it needs drastic revision to tame our violent society and allow for reasonable regulation of firearms in modern America.

If we craft an Amendment carefully, we can neutralize the opposition, begin to rethink our gun culture, restore balance to our democracy, and save thousands of American lives each year. What are we waiting for?

# Chapter 17: Why We Need To Change The Second Amendment

If my criticism of the NRA in the previous chapter seems excessive, it's because I was speaking in their language, that of the bully, trying to intimidate my opponent. Forgive me. Yet, we need to let the NRA know that there is a new sheriff in town, the American people. This radical fringe and extremist leadership of the NRA needs to be put on notice that Americans have had enough of their scare tactics and want to change this country into a safer and less violent place.

To build a better America, we need to change the Second Amendment. In this chapter, we will examine why this has to be done, no matter how complex or overwhelming this task may seem at first glance. Then in the next chapter, I will lay out my suggested replacement for the Second Amendment that will stand the best chance for passage and implementation. Finally, I will detail how this process can be started and how this goal to "Replace #2" can become a reality.

Why do we need to change the Second Amendment? Why not simply pass more restrictive gun control measures at the federal, state and local level? Why not try to persuade social changes that would discourage gun violence and lessen the hold of the traditional gun culture on America? Why not work to out-lobby the NRA and beat it at its own game in Washington and seek to elect enough pro-gun control leaders to effect change through the usual route?

We need to change the Second Amendment because all efforts at piece meal remedies have failed to lessen the gun violence or the influence of the gun culture. The effort to control guns by laws that has been waged since the 1930's has been defeated and overturned in the courts, that have increasingly sided with an individual right interpretation of the Second Amendment. The push to elect pro-gun control politicians that started in the 1990's has also run into trouble, precisely because it is up against a gun rights movement that wraps itself in patriotic appeals that they are defending the Constitution and traditional American values.

Thus the gun control movement that began in the 1960's and has had the support of mayors and most police departments nationwide in their struggle with soaring violent crime has reached a dead end. Gun control laws will be overturned again and again by the courts, especially after the Supreme Court weighed in against the cities of Washington and Chicago in the _Heller_ decision. To write better laws would require a generational shift in political leadership that may never come because the gun rights movement has so much cash to fund anti-gun control candidates and the public has always been receptive to their message of defending the Constitution.

That's why we need to change the Constitution. The founding fathers envisioned the need to change the document and immediately added the Bill of Rights with the first ten amendments. Thus it is not unpatriotic to try to change the document by the amendment process, even if it is difficult. There is precedent as well to changing one amendment by replacing it with another, since the 21st repealed the 18th Amendment and undid the Prohibition of alcohol. Admittedly this was after this social experiment was only on the books for 14 years, but nevertheless it stands as clear evidence you can repeal and replace one amendment with another.

In addition, replacing the Second Amendment will solve the two problems described above. First, it will take the question of guns and their status out of the legislatures and the courts, at least on the overarching question of whether any government statute can regulate the right to bear arms given in the old and now replaced Second Amendment. If we craft the 28th Amendment with great care and foresight it would answer permanently this question that yes Americans can own guns, but yes all levels of government can regulate the ownership of guns, and here's how. This also would sidestep the issue of electing enough pro-gun control lawmakers nationwide, because the new amendment would directly make gun control possible and probable. Argument would mature from can we control guns to how to effectively and fairly do we control guns.

There, I said it! The 28th Amendment. I propose we call it the Newtown Amendment in honor of the twenty children and the educators who perished in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The name also refers to how we will begin to build a New Town in America that is safer for all children on into the future, as we begin to redefine our culture, our democracy, our notion of power. If I may take license and do so, from this point forward I will call my proposed amendment the Newtown Amendment. But I am getting ahead of myself, for you will read the Newtown Amendment shortly in the next chapter.

So proposing, passing, and ratifying this Newtown Amendment will make it possible to build a safer America. Now let's return to the topic of why this is the necessary route to this safer future. Quite simply, people cannot often admit that their cherished leaders, institutions, and values are mistaken. Usually it takes something of a moral crusade to get enough people motivated to effect a great change. The abolitionists had something of a moral fervor raised against slavery, but their cause succeeded largely because the southern states made it a question of union or slavery, and the wily and able Abraham Lincoln stood up to show Americans that Union had to be the answer even at the cost of bloodshed. The push by the suffragettes led to the 19th Amendment because of the moral soundness of their claim of equality. Although Americans in the throes of the Great Depression changed their minds, the crusade of the Prohibitionists temporarily led to their goal of a dry America. Perhaps the most successful moral movement came during the Civil Rights Movement when the country finally acted on the promises of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, when shamed by the televised injustices inflicted on peaceful protestors by the segregationists.

So will an Abraham Lincoln or a Martin Luther King, Jr. step forward to lead a righteous movement for the Newtown Amendment? I do not know. Yet, certainly the need for change on guns in America is a worthy, just and moral cause to rally a push for this change in the Constitution. By my rough estimation, perhaps 2 million Americans have died from gun violence in the past half century. I base this on the often repeated numbers of 30-40 thousand dead each year from all gunshot causes: accidents, suicides, murders, mass shootings. This is more Americans killed by guns in the past fifty years during peacetime at home than in all the wars by death in combat since the Revolution. Where are the memorials, the monuments in marble, the walls engraved with the names of the victims of all this carnage? Where is the moral outrage?

Again, I will repeat my earlier point. We had shock and anguish that Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary and then slaughtered twenty innocent kids two years ago. But the moral outrage fizzled when the cowards in Congress honored their NRA master's bidding and voted against even weak gun control measures. Even the shooting of one of their own, Gabby Giffords, and her courageous efforts with her husband Mark Kelly could not compete with the bribes of the NRA.

So what we need is sustained moral outrage guided in a well thought out popular push to Replace #2 with the Newtown Amendment. If the American people, the sovereign owners of the Constitution, can be persuaded that changing their governing instrument to allow for the adoption of reasonable gun laws, is not only necessary, but appropriate and morally just, then they will do exactly that.

Fear has held us back. Fear of the powerful NRA. Fear of angering rednecks with guns. Fear of failing to make meaningful change. Fear of alienating the public with talk of changing the Constitution or questioning the founding fathers.

We need to summon our courage and get past our fears. The NRA is the bully and Americans always stand up to a bully at home and abroad. Being shot is a real concern, with some very threatening gun nuts egged on by the NRA waiting to take verbal and real potshots at those that question their God-given right to be armed to the teeth. Take heart, because America is a land of laws, and when all the police chiefs and sheriffs make it clear that they support this change, you then have millions of armed law enforcers on the side of change to protect you when you speak out. As far as being afraid of failing, the only way to win in anything is to do it as Americans always have, pedal to the metal, all out, with confidence in a just and righteous cause. Finally, the public in America simply needs to hear the plan and the appeal to their sense of fairness that the time is right to change our approach to guns to save American lives.

As far as stoking the fires of moral outrage for a protracted campaign nationwide to pass the Newtown Amendment, that should not be as difficult as it sounds, less difficult always than overcoming our fears will be. I would appeal to all Americans to consider the victims of the senseless gun violence all around us every single year, month and day. I would ask Americans to picture a relative, loved one, or friend that put a gun their head to end their own life, for we all know someone who has. I would ask folks to pause and think of the kids they know of in their communities who got hurt or killed playing with a gun they found at home. And yes I would flash up on the screen the pictures of the victims of Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Columbine, all the way back to the Tower at Austin, and ask people to think of these lives lost and how we have not honored their memories with meaningful changes that will prevent more tragedies in the future. I would also ask those people in minority areas who have suffered the most grievously from the scourge of gun violence if they would like to replace the amendment set up by the racist founders to keep whites armed and in control. Certainly, much of the current anger over the killings of unarmed black men is infused with the question of lingering racism in police ranks and the over-militarization of police in response to gun violence.

Indeed, I would dedicate the effort to ratify the 28th Amendment, this Newtown Amendment, to all those Americans who have died by gun shot in this gun-saturated and violent nation that we love. I would summon up a moral courage that Americans are quite capable of mustering when need be. These wasted lives demand action now.

So how do we pass the Newtown Amendment? How do we do it quickly? What will it say? How can this effort succeed without causing the violent confrontation that Charlton Heston of the NRA promised, declaring dramatically as only Moses could do, "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

We will do it with fairness, with respect for tradition, with solid legal foundation, and with support of the American people through their Constitutional procedures and elected representatives. First, let's take a look at the wording of the Newtown Amendment.

# Chapter 18: How To Change The Second Amendment

My suggested proposal for an amendment to replace the Second Amendment results from years of not just careful consideration but outright puzzling over how you can do this thing fairly. My wording will not please everyone, even among those who agree with my idea of amending the Constitution to reduce gun violence.

Here is my thinking on how to do it.

To be effective and successful, the new amendment MUST:

\-- Repeal the Second Amendment.

\-- Allow for gun ownership by law abiding citizens.

\-- Permit the regulation of guns, accessories, and ammunition by government.

\-- Allow for regulation with the closest connection to the people possible.

\-- Clearly divide the authority to regulate among the levels of government.

\-- Be much tighter in its language, but broad to handle change in guns.

\-- Still respect the need for armed militias to protect the states in crisis.

\-- Create clear federal responsibility over gun commerce.

\-- Allow Congress to create a body to define guns as technology changes.

To gain wide popular support, the new amendment CANNOT:

\-- Forbid gun ownership to citizens.

\-- Simply repeal the Second Amendment with no other provisions.

\-- Bog down in specific regulations of specific gun types.

\-- Create specific powers to track gun owners in violation of the 4th amendment.

\-- State firm rules that apply to current weapons, ensuring it will be outdated.

\-- Cover anything to hold gun makers liable, leaving that to the tort process.

\-- Specify how to limit gun ownership, just creating regulatory authority.

These thoughts have guided me in wording the Newtown Amendment. Here is the original text of the Second Amendment and then my proposed replacement.

United States Constitution Amendment II

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.

Proposed Amendment to the United States Constitution:

1. The Second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed, and is hereby replaced immediately upon successful ratification described herein.

2. A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, for the purpose of defending the State shall not be infringed.

3. For the public safety of all citizens, the production, distribution, sale, re-sale, marketing, transportation, and storage of all armaments, including ammunition and accessory equipment or modification, can be regulated by each of the states with appropriate legislation, or by any jurisdiction within states they authorize to do also. Any production, distribution, sale, re-sale, marketing, transportation, importation and storage of all armaments, including ammunition and accessory equipment or modification, conducted across state lines or in the airspace or seaways or in United States' territories or possessions shall be regulated by the Congress with appropriate legislation.

4. The Congress shall authorize a body by appropriate legislation to define and maintain standards of what can be considered arms, armaments, and accessory equipment and modification as technology changes, and these agreed definitions and standards will be binding on and preeminent to all such related regulation by the states.

5. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.

If this amendment is ratified before any other, then it would be the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. While many who criticize this book dismiss this effort at amendment as a pipe dream entirely, others will find flaws in my logic or weakness in the wording. Let's then debate how to proceed. But to dismiss this as impossible, that I cannot accept. This may be an uphill fight, but amending the Constitution is doable and necessary in this case.

Consider the push for same sex marriage equality that began seriously only in the last 10-15 years. It has very quickly won the support of the public because it is seen as a question of fairness and equality. Many Americans who express opposition to homosexuality, will then say they support equality for same sex marriage. Why? Because questions on sexuality are mired in religious beliefs, but marriage for gays is seen as a simple matter of fairness. Yet this whole struggle has been made possible by sound constitutional law precedent based on the concept of due process and the broad jurisprudence reading of a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment that means that states have to respect federal rights once granted and that states cannot restrict private liberty that the courts have already permitted as constitutional.

In other words, advocates for same sex marriage already have the legal system primed to accept their argument that this is a right being denied unfairly by the states. The opposite is true for gun control advocates. The legal foundation for gun regulation has now been washed away by the individual right view of the Second Amendment. Thus, we have no choice but to mount a full frontal assault on the citadel of the Second Amendment to allow for any gun regulation by any government.

Why divide the power to regulate guns to federal, state and local governments? Because this is the only fair way to do it. It may seem simpler to make the federal government the sole arbiter of guns, but this goes against two centuries of tradition and plays into the strongest fears of gun owners afraid of losing all rights to own guns in America. American courts and legislatures have followed a bottom up approach to all regulation since colonial days. First, do not regulate something unless necessary. Then let the people and their representatives closest to them regulate what they choose and how they choose to do so, first locally, then statewide. Only bring in the heavy hand of the central government when Congress decides that something in need of regulation crosses state boundaries or affects Americans nationwide or cannot be regulated at the local or state level.

In my plan, cities and counties in states that authorize them can issue gun registrations, hunting permits, gun shop licenses, and so forth just as they do with other types of regulated businesses and products. States will choose how to restrict and regulate guns within their boundaries, just as they do with automobiles. We have had great success with regulating automobiles by dividing the responsibility among the levels of government. Just as how you can drive or park in a city is governed by local and state laws, just as how you can sell cars is governed by the states, the manufacture of cars is regulated by the federal government, since the safety of the public everywhere should have the same standards. We can do the same with guns. If the people of Newtown, Connecticut want to prohibit the firing of guns within their town limits, they should be able to do so. If the people of Cheyenne, Wyoming choose to allow concealed weapons in their town, fine. But if the people of Connecticut feel motivated to say that convicted felons, and mental health patients cannot buy guns, so be it. If the people of Wyoming choose to allow any adult to buy weapons with valid identification, so be it. Yet if Congress mandates an agency to determine if a gun is not appropriate for civilian use or should have a certain locking safety or be outfitted with some smart chip to be sold in the United States, then that should be the law of the land. If we can handle all of these distinctions by level of government with automobile manufacture, sale and operation, certainly we can competently handle guns in a similar manner. Why not?

Right now, we cannot do so, because of the broad and confusing language of the Second Amendment. My proposed Newtown Amendment fixes all of that.

Yet it will not create a safer America overnight. First we need a popular movement to effect this goal to Replace #2 as I have described above. Then we need a frank and open debate over our gun culture. Do we really need hundreds of millions of guns in our homes for protection, target shooting, and hunting? Let's talk about it. How do we begin to undo the belief that _Guns=Power_ and replace it with the belief that power comes from respect for the rule of law and the constant respect for others? I am no Dr. Phil, but at some point in this process we need to discuss how to redefine American masculinity as less violent and less trigger happy. In other words we need to move on the spectrum of what modern America and modern Americans share as values. How can we get along as different races if the dominant white culture is seen as so violent and so dependent on all their guns?

This is the Newtown Amendment that we can work toward passing. How do we do it? We engage America in a conversation on Guns and Our Future.

# Chapter 19: Guns and Our Future

Consider our future in regard to guns. If no major change occurs through any legislative action or court decisions, and the current stranglehold of the NRA on the political process continues, then we can see certain trends playing out over the next several decades.

America will remain the most heavily armed society on earth. Most estimates put the total guns owned in America at 300 million, but I think this number far undercounts the total because of old but operable unregistered 'heirloom' guns in many households. Gun purchases add around 5 million a year, and not that many guns are disposed of annually. I would estimate the total at much higher perhaps in the 400-500 million gun range. Either way the number is staggering and partly why the gun control movement struggles to explain what limiting guns will achieve in certain areas, with no way of knowing how many guns are elsewhere.

Violent crime rates have been headed generally in the right direction, and many factors are given for this decline. Some people point to higher incarceration rates, aging of a violent generation of criminals, or better and more numerous police officers on the street. There are exceptions to the rule. Sexual violence seems to be rising. And gun violence seems to be holding steady. While violent crime has dropped, there are still consistent numbers of murders and gunshot wounds, as well as suicides by gun if you see that as gun violence.

Some experts see a trend similar to car accidents. We have more accidents, but better safety technology and trauma medical techniques mean less fatal accidents each year even with more cars and more drivers on the roads. There are fairly steady rates of gun violence, but more people survive gunshot wounds than even 15 years ago.

Gun ownership overall is tending to go down as fewer households and individuals claim that they own a gun. Yet certain trends continue. More gun owners own more guns each. Gun owners tend to be white, middle-aged, and male by overwhelming percentages.

Hunting continues to decline, a decades-long pattern. Part of this is due to less people living in rural areas, but other factors such as more variety of outdoor recreation may account for the trend. Outdoor adventure sports attract more and more people, and riding ATV's, kayaking, climbing etc. tend to attract suburban youth more than the harsh conditions and waiting often associated with game hunting.

Overall, shooting is becoming a sport you have to go somewhere to do, as more Americans live in closer density of urban, suburban and ex-urban development. While there are less overall restrictions on gun ownership, there have always been wide-scale restrictions on firing guns in densely-populated areas. So owning a gun now means you have it for protection or sport, but you can only use it at a range or hunting reserves or on a property out in the country. Less Americans can simply shoot when they want, where they live.

Some of these trends would lead you to believe that, over time, America may become a less violent place with less guns anyway. You might be right. Yet two factors stand out. First, where will all the hundreds of millions of guns end up over that time? People are slow to sell guns at their rummage sales in the front yard. Again, most gun violence tends to occur in suicide or domestic disputes anyways. So if guns remain in all these homes, why would those numbers go down? Countries with less guns have far fewer suicides and less shootings where the victims knew their attacker, in other words during domestic disputes.

Secondly, the incidence of mass shootings may be on the rise. Crazy people getting guns and shooting multiple victims is perceived as an increasingly common event in America. If you combine the lack of good care for the mentally ill with the easy access to weapons, these shootings will certainly continue. Perhaps a major effort to help people with mental problems might change this situation. Yet, so often, the incident of the mass shooting is when most people would judge a person to become too unstable and too violent to need major help. In addition, most mass shooters get their guns either at home or buy them legally and with surprising ease.

In other words, without a cultural change in American society on how we view guns, guns will still be widely owned, available, and tens of thousands of Americans will still die each year of gun violence.

Consider suicide and mass shootings. People who attempt suicide with a gun almost always succeed. When other forms of killing oneself are considered, the success rate plummets to the point where most experts see some people as crying out for help when they try another less lethal alternative. It's very difficult to reconsider, be discovered, or miss when you point a loaded gun at your temple. Every time you hear about a mass shooting, ask yourself two questions: Could they hurt that many people with a knife before being stopped? Could they hurt that many innocents if they could not get their hands on a powerful gun or so much ammo?

Attempting to pass the Newtown Amendment will not change our gun culture overnight, but it will save lives. If laws can be passed to force serious restrictions on gun or ammunition sales where the residents favor them, then guns will be harder to get at least in those places. Laws can likewise be passed to use technology to track guns better or to prevent certain people from ever getting guns legally. Some mass shooters could have been stopped if our digital technology was applied with full resources to keep track of who can buy weapons and ammo.

More importantly the effort to pass the Newtown Amendment will lead to a national conversation on guns, what gun laws would be effective, the prevalence of our gun culture, and how we identify masculinity with gun violence. All of these debates and searching for solutions should lead to a less gun-saturated America. This will not happen immediately, but it may not happen at all if we continue to let the gun rights lobby dominate the public forum. The American people can sweep aside the NRA, if the public takes away their knee-jerk reaction that they are only protecting the Second Amendment right to bear arms. If we replace the 2nd Amendment with the Newtown Amendment, the NRA will then have to fight the American people in every jurisdiction on every sensible gun regulation proposed. It is a fight they will generally lose. Let the people of each state decide what shape their gun laws should take, not some well-heeled lobbying fat cats.

As we try to change the conversation on guns from how to allow a more fair legal environment by passing the Newtown Amendment toward a more comprehensive discussion of guns and our future, we must not leave out race. I expect a fair number of white readers of this book will dismiss my connection of our gun culture to racism as weak and unproven conjecture, but many black readers will be nodding their heads in agreement that guns have kept them down for too long in so many ways.

A broader conversation on guns and race can only help to reduce tensions as we reshape our gun laws and build a safer society. If the violent eruptions over police brutality in the past few years prove anything, they remind us that a large segment of black America feel that the white dominated police forces across America profile, suspect, accuse, and target young black men almost reflexively, leading to roundups, bogus traffic stops, stop and frisk humiliations, and mistaken arrests, and yes, isolated cases of outright racist brutality. Black Americans also saw the Trayvon Martin case as clear proof that the racist NRA pushed 'stand your ground' laws so that white homeowners and vigilantes could keep young black kids out of their neighborhoods and their homes.

All of the debate over black anger at police brutality can go nowhere if the connection between guns and racism is ignored. Heavily armed white police fear poor blacks, and have a 'Fort Apache' mentality of being at war with the community they are supposed to serve and protect. Young, impoverished black boys and men with little educational or economic opportunity see the police as a daily threat to their own lives. Are many tempted to and do join criminal gangs, get illegal guns, and work in the drug trade? Yes, but even innocent black kids, even black middle class kids feel that they are seen as dangerous thugs simply when walking or driving down the street. For millions of black Americans, gun violence is tied inextricably to the legacy of racism and oppression.

Much of mainstream white America, whether liberal or conservative, believe that race relations are good. They smugly buy the illusion that Dr. King's Dream has been achieved, see blacks advance in some fields, and wonder why some blacks seem ungrateful for all the progress made in the last half century. They rarely question why they live 40-50 miles from the city core of the metro area they call home, or worry with the absence of black faces in their schools and stores. Many whites see clusters of Asian and Latino immigrants around their exurban enclaves and assume America's melting pot is bubbling right along as always. Racism is so over, right?

The effort, the crusade necessary to push through the Newtown Amendment will indeed require a deep and hard look in the mirror for America, and some of what we see will cause us to wince. Yet, out of this ferment, will emerge surprising coalitions that find themselves on common ground. Tough questions will need to be asked, and the realization that our democracy, our society, and our culture can benefit by tackling the issue of gun violence will reinvigorate and unite people from across races, ethnic groups, economic classes, and geographical regions. It is the gun rights fanatics who benefit from sowing division with their scare tactics and false claims of patriotism.

This conversation should start with such questions as:

Why should a small white male extremist group exercise such control over our political institutions?

Why can't localities and states decide on their own gun restrictions to curb gun violence plaguing their streets?

Why is a white male extremist group so against efforts to prevent mass shootings that almost exclusively are the work of white males?

Why are almost all police departments, police chiefs, and sheriffs in favor of gun regulations to reduce gun violence and improve community policing efforts in minority areas, and why does a white male extremist group steadfastly oppose these common sense steps to improve police/minority relations?

Why does a white male extremist group oppose all efforts to keep high powered combat style rifles and super lethal ammunition off of American streets?

Why is this white male extremist group dead set against efforts to employ digital technology to track weapons or ensure use by only the gun owner, effectively preventing the roll out of 'smart guns' by intimidating and blacklisting gun shop owners?

Why does this white male extremist group pay lip service to gun purchase database checking while blocking funding and improvements to include private and gun show sales, so that criminals, abusive spouses under court orders, and mentally ill patients identified as threats cannot purchase weapons nationwide?

How do we lessen our popular culture's saturation with gun violence, especially in the entertainment and video games aimed at young boys?

Similarly, how do we rethink our identification of men and masculinity with shooting and gun ownership?

Likewise, how do we break the cycle of urban black youth identifying success and prosperity with gun-toting thugs and gangsters?

More generally, how can we begin to transform American culture away from its centuries' old obsession with guns, confront our absolute faith in the equation _Guns=Power_ ?

How do we become self-aware enough to realize that the rest of the world that adores Coca-Cola, Disney World, and Hollywood cannot fathom the hypocrisy of America claiming to be peace loving with so much terrible gun violence and carnage on American streets?

Can we possibly comprehend the sad truth that we have exported our gun culture abroad as an arms exporter, as an entertainment exporter, as a trend setter in direct contradiction with our efforts to foster democracy and world peace?

Indeed, would our efforts to lead the world as a democracy that integrates all peoples into our experiment in liberty be strengthened if we showed progress on reducing gun violence at home with a peaceful push to curb our gun obsession?

Looking in the mirror and airing our dirty laundry has never been America's style; perhaps it is time to try humbly to heal old wounds and prevent more death with this analysis of these old flaws within ourselves.

How do we proceed and how can we participate in this great debate?

# Chapter 20: How To Participate In Change

American history is littered with the debris of failed social movements that caught the eye with their flaming brilliance like a sparkler waved on the Fourth of July, then dimmed and burnt out, discarded and forgotten as time's parade marched on by. Several moments stand out like William Jennings Bryan transfixed on his cross of gold in 1896, William Jennings Who did what, while Teddy Roosevelt leads the charge up Mt. Rushmore into immortality.

How do we, if you agree with me, gain America's attention, stir up a groundswell of moral outrage, start a great debate on guns and race, and push the Newtown Amendment to ratification, working toward a safer America? While we need to use the Constitutional amendment process outlined in its Article V, I believe success will come quicker if we try to stay out of the political party system if possible. As I have outlined, the NRA has bribed too many politicians and convinced too many judges of their individual right interpretation of the Second Amendment to achieve meaningful reform through the normal political, legislative or legal systems.

So how do we proceed? We go grassroots, broad based, attracting young people especially through both old and new appeals. We tailor our message to be one of fairness, of popular and local control, of restoring balance on an issue of life and death that affects all Americans. Notice that I am not calling for a specific organization to push the amendment, or some well funded media campaign to force the issue on the political process. The NRA is too strong for a counter lobbying effort. Just ask Mayor Bloomberg how his pro-gun control efforts are doing through the Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Every Town for Gun Safety groups he helped found, or Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords with their Americans for Responsible Solutions, on how national groups trying to fight hyper local battles are faring. I think they are admirably trying to solve the problem by fighting in small arenas on small gun control measures with national based resources. I am calling for the opposite. I advocate a local, grassroots effort to launch a nationwide effort for a national change to the very pinnacle of our system, the Constitution. We need as many people, individuals and groups, to agree that the Newtown Amendment is the best solution, and then their common efforts will blend into a successful push large enough to ram the amendment through the proposal by Congress and ratification by three fourths (38) of the states.

Sound impossible? Is any other effort to reduce gun violence working? Will any thing become possible if you and I do not get up off our couches and out of our recliners, turn the TV off and stand up for what is right? Alone, we will convince no one of the need for action. Together we can wake up the people to OWN the Constitution and bend it as necessary to shape a safer future. The founders, while mostly racist rich guys, established something powerful, almost in spite of its flaws, a system that can adapt over time. But only if We the People take charge when our leaders fail us. So here are suggestions to get the ball rolling and secure the passage of the 28th Amendment, the Newtown Amendment.

Call and e-mail your state and federal representatives and ask them if they support passage of the Newtown Amendment, and tell them you will vote for those who support it.

Publicize the amendment by circulating a copy of it at your church, your book club, your fraternal lodge, your veterans group, your kids' scout troop, your office, your union hall, or your PTA meeting.

Encourage your schools to practice a real life civics lesson and send letters to state and local officials supporting the Newtown Amendment to help prevent another massacre like that at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Fire up kids, talk to school kids who are scared of lock down drills, active shooter response procedures, metal detectors, locker checks and other procedures aimed at stopping gun violence on school campuses, and encourage kids to contact their school boards, local and state officials and ask them how they will support passage of the Newtown Amendment.

Ask your pastor, preacher, or priest if he or she is comfortable with bringing up the Newtown Amendment to your congregation, and would your church like to call for its passage at the state and federal level.

Start a petition in your neighborhood, on your Facebook page, at your shopping mall, or at a playground, park or town square calling on your elected officials to support and pass the Newtown Amendment.

Deluge the White House website with hundreds of thousands of requests for the administration to support the passage and ratification of the Newtown Amendment.

Design and sell tee shirts, ball caps, and bumper stickers with clever messages to support the amendment effort, with the Replace #2 theme for example.

Begin silent vigils after any shootings in your community, holding up signs supporting the Newtown Amendment. If enough people join in, plan larger marches in your state capitols to show support for the ratification of the amendment by your legislature.

Try to identify the NRA as the bully that it is, speaking out when the NRA tries to silence the supporters of the Newtown Amendment.

When asked by pollsters if you support gun control, say yes.

Write letters to the editor of your local and city newspapers, post letters on websites, show your support for the Newtown Amendment and common sense gun legislation.

If you belong to a union, association, trade group, scholarly community, university faculty, or church board, bring up a measure, resolution or declaration of support for the Newtown Amendment.

Consider starting a divesture movement for any stock or pension fund you have directly or through a large group to target gun maker stocks.

If you belong to the NRA, consider resigning your membership and joining a sportsman or hunting organization that is less about lobbying against any gun laws.

If you own an heirloom gun, watch out for any gun collection effort by local law enforcement agencies, and consider turning it in and getting it out of the house if you will never use it.

If you are a law enforcement officer, police chief, or sheriff express your support for the passage of the Newtown Amendment to give legislatures the power to control guns effectively.

If you belong to any type of politically active organization such as the NAACP or the NEA, try to encourage a resolution in support of the Newtown Amendment.

If you work in the arts, entertainment, or video gaming industry, speak up about excessive gun violence portrayed in your business, and speak out in support of the Newtown Amendment.

If you are an elected official who has accepted NRA donations in the past, look in the mirror, take a deep breath, return the money, tell the NRA to kiss your vote goodbye, and then publically support the passage of the Newtown Amendment.

If you have protested in the past few years over police brutality, over Trayvon Martin, consider peaceful protest in favor of the Newtown Amendment.

One and all, join the rising chorus crying out for action to restore sanity to America, to overcome our gun culture, and to save American lives!

# Chapter 21: Changing the Equation

Can we do this thing, America? You bet. We put a man on the moon. We defeated Hitler and the Nazis. We survived the Great Depression. We ended slavery. We overcame, crossed the bridge at Selma, and got to really vote finally. We built a nation from sea to shining sea. We healed after the Civil War. We helped rid the world of smallpox and polio. We contained and outlasted the Communists, helped feed and rebuild Europe, and created a military might still unsurpassed in human history.

We have also reformed and reworked our institutions in many areas. We no longer employ children in factories and mines. We try to educate every young mind. We have tried to prevent child and spouse abuse. We have extended voting rights in the 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments to black men, women, poor people and young people. We have tried to adapt to industrial and technological change while maintaining democratic processes to counter the great concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the elite few.

I believe we can do something as simple as pass the Newtown Amendment. I am confident that most Americans of all races and backgrounds would prefer to live in a safer, more secure society with less gun violence. I am convinced that most Americans today believe that America is awash with too many guns. We can restore a good deal of balance and allow for rational regulation of guns with the Newtown Amendment.

I think that this problem is severe enough and the need for a solution so long overdue, that we can do this in a span of several years. Most change takes a long time. Yet, the majority of Americans do not profit nor feel safer because of gun violence, and thus a well crafted appeal should win broad support quickly. The abolitionists faced the hugely wealthy planters with their fortunes tied to their slaves. Women seeking the vote faced men who had been dominant for thousands of years. Gays and lesbians seeking to marry each other faced religious teachings in every culture for thousands of years.

Americans who seek change with the Newtown Amendment will need resolve to overcome the NRA, but the gun culture is only a few centuries old and almost exclusive just to our country. We created our gun culture for all the reasons described in this book, but it is artificial, unnecessary, and destructive in a modern, urbanized society. Thus it is not a fantasy to think that a quick effort to change perceptions and pass this vital amendment will succeed sooner, rather than later.

Changing our society's identification of American manhood, rugged individualism, and military preparedness with guns and skill with guns, that may take several generations. But we can start with our own kids. Teach your kids that real power comes from respecting the law, respecting others, and respecting everyone's rights. No good, no bravery, no benefit flows from shooting another human, unless it is absolutely necessary in self-defense, in combat in a just war, or as a law enforcement officer in the last resort. Blowing things up or blowing people away does not make you a man.

Getting Hollywood to stop pushing this view of guns, violence, and masculinity will take more patience and time. Lessen the demand for violent entertainment, and perhaps the moguls of death and destruction will change their business models. My respect for the First Amendment (obviously much greater than for the next one) is so strong that I do not think that we can force people to think certain ways or to express their creativity along certain lines. To me it is simple. Do not go see violent movies and they will make less of them. Quit playing sniper games and they will sell less of them. Stop snoozing every evening in front of violent cop shows and perhaps advertisers will pull their commercials from such shoot 'em up stuff.

Finally, let me address a recurring theme of the NRA gun nuts, that if we disarm America, we will become a nation of soft and weak 'pussies'. Almost every cop in the United States favors reasonable gun control and regulation. Are they 'wusses'? Again, I am not advocating disarming America. I propose letting each and every state set their own gun laws, by changing the Constitution to restore local, state, and federal authority to regulate guns. Your group has brought this situation on yourself with your maniacal defense of the sanctity of the Second Amendment, even if it meant protecting the rights of crazy people slaughtering innocent children.

As Joseph Welch finally stood up and countered Senator Joseph McCarthy during his Red Scare witch hunt, asking "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?". The NRA leadership is full of cowards that lust after wealth and power, greedy and shameless and callous in the face of every tragic shooting. Who the hell appointed you the arbiters of what it takes to be a patriot, an American, a man and how you should love and defend your country? You, sirs, have disgraced yourselves and perverted our democracy with your shameless payoffs and bribes. We will no longer let you do so, and we will choose anew what it means to be American, a patriot and a man.

Stand up. Speak out. Fear not. Take heart. We the people can make this right. We can find the strength together to make America safer and maybe, just maybe, what it will take to fix other pressing problems we face with our paralyzed and inept government. Who is with me? Guns no longer equal Power. Spread the word, join the cause, pass the Newtown Amendment. The life you save may just be your own.

# Chapter 22: p.s. I love you

If you have read this book, then you may have found yourself wondering "What is this guy's problem?" . It is a fair question. This postscript is my attempt to explain how I arrived at this topic and why I seem so passionate about it.

First, do I hate guns? Not at all. I have been around guns, had friends or family into guns, own an old gun, hunted once or twice, been target shooting, once subscribed to Guns & Ammo, watched cop dramas, grew up on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, visited Civil War battlefields, studied military history and so forth. Yet I have felt there was too much gun violence, not guns, and especially grew more troubled with each mass shooting. The ongoing debate over the Second Amendment also seemed so futile, as the carnage from guns piled up more dead every decade.

Next, do I hate white people? No, again, not at all. In fact, I would say that I have struggled with my own personal racist attitudes all my life. I grew up in the Deep South, and race lurks as a boogey man around every dark corner. My problem is not with white people, but with racism and injustice. I think that white Americans today want to forget their past racism, which makes confronting current injustice difficult.

Lastly, and most importantly, do I hate America? Emphatically, no, I consider myself a most passionate patriot. Yet I feel that a citizen's duty includes speaking out when they see the country making a mistake or ignoring a glaring injustice. Blind devotion is not patriotism, but is akin to the loyalty preferred by fascist states. My great love for America is what motivates me to suggest this course of action. The Constitution will only remain vibrant and strong if each generation continues to improve the institutions that it sets up. And, yes, occasionally we have to improve the Constitution itself.

So, if I do not hate America, then what do I love about it? I cherish America for her Liberty, her Equality, and her Democracy. We Americans are fortunate to be born in or migrate to a land of freedom with great liberty to do what we choose and live as we please. We have to respect the liberty of those around us, and we may not always achieve what we strive toward, but no country on earth gives humans more freedom to become what they will.

Equality in America is constantly evolving and I prize this effort to treat people equally. Our record as Americans obviously has been a denial of equality to so many for so long. Yet we have struggled to improve and make equality more a reality than some pie in the sky ideal. I applaud that we slowly have broadened our definition of equality, our inclusion of who should be equal, and our means to achieve greater equality.

I celebrate America's Democracy. In spite of so many factors always working against power flowing from the people, Americans in large part have chosen their leaders and their destiny. While the political mechanisms of party and elections can quickly degenerate from crude to corrupt, the control that citizens exercise over the government remains very powerful. While the influence of money and the power of the rich can overshadow our democracy, the ability of the majority to rule through a democratic government at the local, state, and federal levels remains a great and inspiring accomplishment of our country.

Then why do I seem so down on our country, if I love America so much? Well, I do hate the violence and injustice that recurs so often in our history. The violence, which I have touched on in this book, goes beyond just guns and racism. Americans too often claim that we are 'peace-loving'. Yet there has been so much violence in America. And we have acted with great violence abroad. Was all of this destruction always necessary? Was it always to restore peace and promote justice? No, especially the violence here at home. America has had shocking violence that happened neither in pursuit of peace or justice. While much of our record has been on the side of right, many times America has been mistaken. The violence here at home against the Indian tribes and on our city streets certainly is a black stain we cannot and should not whitewash. Gun violence is only a slice of our legacy of violence.

Injustice in America has taken many forms and I am ashamed of much, not just the racism. Our treatment of non-white peoples is only part of the story. We have treated so many immigrants and poor people unjustly that it has always seemed to be their lot in America. America's justice system has always been riddled with intentional injustice that results in the poor, the immigrant, and the non-white losing their freedom even while innocent. Americans seem to be very tolerant of injustice as long as it happens to other groups. Frequently, equality loses out when injustice seems to overwhelm institutions in our country. Too many young black men rot in our prisons, which is clearly a result of injustice. Yet it continues even as we proclaim we are less racist than in the past. Too many legal and illegal immigrants face devastating injustice. While some of this is racism against Latinos or Africans, many times it is injustice mistreating even legal migrants simply because they come from outside. Finally, we too often allow injustice against poor people by denying advancement based on lack of education, when they traditionally have been denied the education required to advance.

What other challenges does America face that may overshadow gun violence and racism? Of course there are threats that can distract Americans, some old and some new. Americans are at war with various non-state terrorist groups that have attacked us at home and abroad. This is a security threat that is proving both costly and deadly. We also can struggle economically when we go into recession or depression. War and natural disaster can certainly become too large a threat and prevent any efforts toward other problems. A new type of threat that causes both great concern and controversy is that of climate change.

Indeed, climate change may develop into such a future calamity on a existential level that it dominates the attention of every human society. To date, it is difficult to agree on its causes, its scale, and any solutions because it is a global threat that seems beyond the scope of how nation states have acted historically. All countries may be at peril, all societies may be to blame, and all peoples will have to act, even in concert to survive this potential catastrophe.

With all of this in mind, why struggle to reduce gun violence in America by replacing the Second Amendment? I believe that America counts in the world and we need to get our own house in order to be a more effective world leader on all these other pressing issues. Gun violence and racism weaken America as it faces these other challenges around the globe. We struggle to lead with so much violence and injustice at home. Fixing the Constitution and beginning to curb our gun violence and gun culture will become a very strong positive in other parts of the world. We undermine our own ideals and goals abroad when we are seen as hypocrites. When we lead by example, working to improve by the democratic process at home, we have greater success fostering democracy abroad.

America still enjoys a tremendous advantage over other societies, because the world still seeks our opportunity. Tens of millions wish to come here to live the American dream. Hundreds of millions still believe that America's democracy and liberty surpasses anything that they will ever know in their society. So our example of dealing with our gun violence will not only help our reputation, it will make our example at offering opportunity that much more attractive.

I do believe that America's unique tradition still offers the best hope for facing the challenges our world faces. These attributes I cherish --Liberty, Equality and Democracy \-- have made America a shining beacon to the world, even if imperfect. With that in mind, America has a duty to improve at home and to lead elsewhere. The world can only benefit from the spread of Liberty. People everywhere can achieve more if free to do so in peace, and they have to have some measure of Equality to enjoy any opportunity to contribute. As well, history has shown that people can only take advantage of Liberty and Equality when Democracy protects them from leaders bent on denying them freedom or serving their own petty ends. People that choose their own representative governments tend to contribute more economically, technologically, and socially to their own country and globally.

If you do not share my optimism or love of America's good characteristics, where do you turn for hope or inspiration? As Churchill said "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Imperialism seems to be a bad choice to solve the world's problems. Fascism is decidedly a dead end, although the appeal of authoritarianism never completely dies. Communism and state socialism seemed to fail as a way to motivate humans. So political ideologies offer no real competitor to Democracy.

Religious fervor may seem to be roiling the world because of fundamentalist Islam resorting to terror as a weapon against secularism. Yet this is not a likely threat long term to America or the West. Almost all religious belief runs counter to modern social progressivism and is hostile to liberty, equality, and democracy. Religious fundamentalism is too backward looking to be popular for long. Most humans agree with the American solution to religious strife -- complete religious tolerance and pluralism.

What about other nations surpassing America and becoming more attractive as a leader in the world? Of course, it is possible and the future is hard to predict. Yet it is unlikely any time soon. China may already be the largest economy. But it only buys social peace by dangling material carrots in front of its restive people. Chinese accept these limited capitalist material improvements but they clamor for liberty, equality, and democracy.

Russia and India may have great futures ahead, but their current struggles are too huge to lead the world. A European Union that is completely united, prosperous and strong may one day share world leadership with America, but it likely will promote America's values. And the developing world seems to yearn for leadership from the richer world that will be fair to them. When the chips are down, that usually means America.

So America will play a great role in world affairs for a long time to come. And I am confident that we can do it well. Yet we need to make good choices and that starts at home. Reducing our gun violence and rethinking our gun culture can only benefit American society. Replacing the Second Amendment to start this process will reinvigorate our democracy, leading to solutions on other issues. We need to reinforce the Good in America -- Liberty, Equality, and Democracy. We must continue our struggle against the Bad in America -- Violence and Injustice. We can do this by looking forward. Let's not worship our ancestors and imitate their mistakes; let's learn from them and improve upon them.

What choice do we really have?
