Looking through some old memorabilia the other day, I came across an orange bumpersticker that read “Sportsmen for Taylor.” It was from the 1992 re-election campaign of the United States Congressman I served then, Gene Taylor, a very conservative Democrat from Mississippi. The bumper sticker was designed to look like the orange vest of a deer hunter, and it was produced by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The bumper stickers were soon everywhere. When we saw that orange bumper sticker on the back of pickup trucks in Stone County, we knew the message was out: Congressman Taylor wasn’t going to let anyone take your guns away.
Growing up in south Mississippi, I never met a real, live proponent of gun control until I went north, back and forth, for a time to work in Washington DC. Virtually every man I ever knew as a child (and some women) owned a gun, either for hunting or for the protection of the home against intruders. In the nation’s capital, I walked about in one of the most gun-controlled cities in America. I talked with friends from around the country, most of whom were strongly in favor of heavy gun regulation. They assured me that the pro-gun rights stance of the congressman I served was result of a violent southern gun culture. I remember wondering why, then, I never worried about gun violence in a place where every third truck had a gun rack while I nervously looked around every street corner in the murder capital of the world?
Of course, the gun control debate is much bigger than mere pragmatism. It is, first of all, a constitutional issue. That’s the reason Sarah Brady of Gun Control Inc. and Charlton Heston of the NRA can debate endlessly this question, with such emotion. Does the second amendment to the Constitution grant an individual right to bear arms or only a collective right to the states?
A new book by Ohio State University historian Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America, argues that both Charlton Heston and Sarah Brady are wrong. As Cornell puts it:
“The original understanding of the Second Amendment was neither an individual right of self-defense nor a collective right of the states, but rather a civic right that guaranteed that citizens would be able to keep and bear those arms needed to meet their legal obligation to participate in a well-regulated militia. Nothing better captured this constitutional ideal than the minuteman. Citizens had a legal obligation to outfit themselves with a musket at their own expense and were expected to turn out at a minute’s notice to defend their community, their state, and eventually their nation. The minuteman ideal was far less individualistic than most gun rights people assume, and far more martial in spirit than most gun control advocates realize.”
Cornell goes on to show how the militia concept worked in the founding era. It wasn’t the equivalent of the National Guard, as gun control proponents assume, but an informal community of citizens. But this doesn’t put him in line with the NRA. He argues that an “authorial intent” view of the second amendment would mean more government regulation, not less. Cornell contends that a civic right view of gun ownership would mean a national firearms tax and mandatory gun insurance, for instance.
While I am mostly convinced by the “minuteman” context of the militia language of the Constitution, I don’t think this translates into the kind of definition of “well regulated” Cornell proposes. After all, the minutemen were not “regulated” via federal legislation. The regulation came at the community level, as citizens voluntarily cooperated with one another for the preservation of communities. It seems to me this “regulation” looks more like a heavily-armed Neighborhood Watch group than like the policies of the Food and Drug Administration. The NRA, I suspect, may be closer to the Founders constitutionally and legislatively than Cornell wishes to admit.
But are gun rights advocates as close rhetorically and culturally to the Founders as they should be? In the most important argument of the book, Cornell turns to the language of the debate. He contends that the discourse of the contemporary gun control debate obscures the second amendment itself and actually erodes the basis for civic dialogue:
“Gun rights ideology has fostered an anti-civic vision, not a vision of civic-mindedness. In this ideology guns are primarily viewed as a means of repulsing government or other citizens, not a means for creating a common civic culture. Modern gun control ideology has failed to create a positive constitutional vision in which the Second Amendment is more than a vestigial part of our legal culture. Indeed, to achieve the goal of sensible gun regulation, proponents of gun control have abandoned the language of constitutionalism entirely and adopted an epidemiological discourse, warning Americans of the very real dangers guns pose to American society.”
Cornell may well be right about the individualism of some of the rhetoric of national gun rights organizations. Bumper stickers that read, “They’ll take my gun when they pry my cold, dead hands off of it”, do seem to center on the freedom of the individual. But that freedom seems to be a freedom of the individual against an overly intrusive state, not of the individual against the community.
Why do people put “Sportsmen for Taylor” bumper stickers on their trucks? Often because they’ll be in those trucks on the way to hunt quail or dove or deer or turkey with other men from the community. In the most heavily armed areas of the country, neighbors can be called from all around, guns in tow, when a member of the community hears someone breaking into the house. Whatever the bumper stickers say, that’s a lot closer to the minutemen than to Ayn Rand.
That’s also why, I suspect, the gun control issue is so divisive in the so-called “culture wars.” The parts of the country that are still most like the context of revolutionary America, that is rural and agrarian, are also the parts of the country most resistant to gun control legislation. That’s why the NRA is not a product of a “southern gun culture.” Metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle support rigorous gun control. But rural Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Washington State are almost as pro-gun rights as rural Alabama. Even socialist U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders is supported by the NRA and opposes gun control legislation, because his rural Vermont constituency wouldn’t have it any other way.
These rural communities may not think often about the authorial intent of the second amendment. But they live in a world much more like the world in which it was birthed. They don’t fear guns. And it’s not just because the crime rates are lower. I think the crime rates are lower because they don’t fear guns. They live in communities where they know one another, they trust one another, and they can call on a neighbor (armed, if necessary) when needed. The gun culture in these places has everything to do with the community.
This is sharply different from the gun-controlled but crime-rattled urban streets, where isolated individuals carry guns to protect their drug enterprise interests and isolated individuals fear these guns, but have no one but the government to which to turn for protection.
Cornell’s scholarship is flawed at points, but it ought to focus Christians on the importance of what otherwise might seem to be a completely secular argument. There is no biblical position on gun control. A church shouldn’t discipline a quail hunter or a lobbyist for Citizens Against Handguns. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about this issue as it relates to the mission of the church. We ought to be concerned with how our nation interprets the second amendment, of course. The same courts that interpret the second amendment interpret the first amendment. A state that can ignore one set of freedoms can ignore another.
But, more importantly, we ought to hear the rhetoric behind the rhetoric of the gun control debate. Both sides are scared. They are scared of violence. The gun control advocate wants the government to protect him from gun-wielding criminals. The gun rights supporter wants his gun to protect him from gun-wielding criminals.
Furthermore, we must recognize that both sides of this debate are longing for a civic community that is slipping away in a globalizing, urbanizing America. There are some things states and communities can do to stem this tide, but not much. It is driven more by cultural and economic factors than political ones. Into this void must step churches that foster and build real communities built on real love and real trust. Churches that seek to create not just individual disciples, but an alternative civic order in which the citizens of heaven know one another, trust one another, and are able to call on one another when they hear a strange sound at the window.
These kinds of churches can flourish in rural Oregon and urban Atlanta. They can point to a kingdom in which there is no firearms registration, and no gun violence. And maybe, just maybe, in such a counter-cultural church parking lot one will see a Volvo with a “Moms Against Guns” bumper-sticker right next to a pickup truck with a “If Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns” bumper-sticker, side by side.
