See other Editorial Articles
Title: White Men and Their Guns
Source:
History News Network
URL Source: http://hnn.us/article/154225
Published: Dec 16, 2013
Author: Leonard Steinhorn
Post Date: 2013-12-16 18:00:49 by X-15
Keywords: None
Views: 244
Comments: 8
Leonard Steinhorn is a professor of communication and affiliate professor of history at American University, where he teaches politics, strategic communication, and courses on the presidency and recent American history. He is the author of the much discussed book on baby boomers, The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy, and co-author of the critically acclaimed By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and The Reality of Race. - Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions in our national gun control debate. The issue is not whether we should have gun control laws in this country -- or what they should be. The issue, really, is why so many white middle-American men view any effort to regulate firearms as an assault on their very identity -- and thus fight sane and rational laws as if their lives and liberties were at stake. And the answer may have less to do with guns themselves than with the diminishing status of white men in America over the last few decades. According to data from both the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey, while the percentage of Americans who own guns has declined in recent years, our nation remains awash in firearms, and the reason is that middle-aged white men are buying more and more guns, and gun ownership has become increasingly concentrated among them. A study published in 2007 by The Injury Prevention Journal found that 13 percent of Americans -- mostly men -- own four or more guns, and the 20 percent of gun owners with the most guns possess about two-thirds of our nation’s stockpile. The likelihood that these men will own a gun increases the farther they live from a city, yet it's not because they are hunting more. When the General Social Survey asked men if they hunted in 2012, only a quarter said yes, compared to about 40 percent in 1977. So guns are no longer merely functional hardware for the enjoyment of outdoor sports and hunting. Increasingly they have become something else: totems of manhood and symbols of identity for a cohort of white, middle-American, rural and exurban men. Consider the ads that gun manufacturers run to lure their buyers. Glock guns give men "confidence to live your life." The Walther PPX handgun is "Tough. Very Tough." The Tavor Semi-Automatic Rifle, gripped menacingly by a faceless man wearing a sniper's jacket and shooting gloves, will restore the "balance of power" to anyone holding the gun. Ads often invite men to imagine themselves as warriors in camouflage taking on a hostile world. Buying a Bushmaster semi-automatic "confirms that you are a Man's Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded." In other words, guns give these men strength, status, power, and respect -- exactly what many white men feel they have been hemorrhaging ever since the 1960s. The late historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal Pulitzer Prize winning book The Age of Reform, describes how men who are "losing in status and respect" in society -- who feel "bypassed and humiliated" by a changing economic and social order -- typically cling to an idealized past, lash out against the perceived usurpers who have taken away their Eden, and fight to regain the "power and status" they feel is "due them." Hofstadter was attempting to explain the rise of the late-nineteenth century Populist Movement, but his status anxiety model applies to the white male gun culture today. Bearing arms has become, in essence, an emblem of defiance and strength. It wasn't long ago when broad-shouldered white men dominated our culture, and their very status as breadwinners gave them power and pride. We applauded their physical might and hard work, which made our factories hum and economy grow. They were the pillars of our community, unrivaled as heads of families and icons of the "real America." In the decades following World War II, a lunch pail and hard hat were unquestioned symbols of a robust and respected middle-class. These men may have benefited from the racial and gender discrimination that gave them a monopoly over manufacturing jobs and the construction trades, but from their perspective, they played by the rules and earned their piece of the American Dream. But in the decades since, the American Dream hasn't been so kind to them. Manufacturing, which during the post-war years buoyed the white middle-class with stable work and decent wages, has declined precipitously from nearly 30 percent of all jobs in 1960 to about 10 percent today. Despite a near doubling of our population since then, we currently have 4 million fewer manufacturing jobs. Median income has flatlined as well even though productivity has soared and the country overall has grown wealthier. White men 45 to 54, in their prime working years, made $50,195 in inflation adjusted dollars in 1970 and $49,041 in 2012, according to the Census Bureau. It's even worse, as the National Journal points out, for men with only a high school diploma, whose income has declined by a fourth. So they all run hard but still lose ground. Nor are jobs and income the only measures of their declining status. Muscle and brawn equaled respect in the post-war years, and it was hard to avoid the Charles Atlas ads in which the musclebound guy got the girl and humiliated the nerd by kicking sand in his face. But now, in our knowledge economy, we admire and awe the brainy elite and erstwhile geek whereas the musclebound working man has become déclassé. Adding insult is that liberal intellectuals that used to venerate blue-collar virtues have now embraced and acclaimed the exact group that yesteryear’s working class rejected as unmanly and effeminate, gay men, thus turning the masculinity power structure of old upside-down. The American racial tableau has changed as well, with sturdy white men no longer occupying their hitherto role as "real Americans" in the popular imagination and instead representing a retrograde America that harbors unseemly prejudices unfit for an educated and diverse society. These white working-class men suspect that minority gains in America are not earned through hard work but are ill-gotten through special privilege and dispensation from an all-too eager caste of liberal elites, who according to these white men have turned the merit system in America on its head. Small wonder that the one cohort most opposed to Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012 were white men. "An innocent and victimized populace" is how Hofstadter described the Populist worldview of over a century ago, and that may well apply to the self-image of many white men today. So how do these white men restore the strength and prestige of their idealized past? For many it’s through guns, which instill fear particularly among the urban and educated elites who hold the levers of power and status in society today. "Balance the Power in your hands today!" is how the Tavor Semi-Automatic Rifle ad puts it. Just as an educated suburbanite drives a Prius as a badge of virtue, a man walking with a holstered or open carry gun -- or with the emblem of the politically fearsome National Rifle Association affixed to his pick-up truck or car -- shows his power to all that can see. When these men parade their firearms in a Starbucks, Walmart, or local pub, it’s not to deter crime, which is what they always claim, but to summon our deference. In 1975, the NRA published a Fact Book on Firearms Control that endorsed “reasonable regulation” such as a “waiting period between purchase and delivery,” recordkeeping requirements for “manufacturers, importers, dealers and pawnbrokers,” laws that “control all machine guns and destructive devices,” and the enforcement of “reasonable conditions” for those “wishing to carry a concealed firearm.” But that was before white working-class men began their free fall and the NRA seized on their anxieties. Propose that 1975 agenda today and the NRA will call you an enemy of law-abiding citizens. Power is status. Guns give men power. And that is how white men are able to recapture the glory that was once all theirs in the United States.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: X-15 (#0)
There were white people on Easter Island until one day the non-whites killed all the white people.
The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
Stoppit, jew. It's not our "identity, it's our unalienable right. Moron. “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
It's real funny how 'they' can invoke the specter of Another Holocaust to try and guilt America into nuking Iran while Gentiles are to remain unarmed and helpless in the face of their displacement and slow genocide in America, South Africa, England, etc.
#2. To: X-15 (#0)
...why so many white middle-American men view any effort to regulate firearms as an assault on their very identity...
#3. To: Lod (#2)
>
-Alex Kurtagic
#4. To: X-15 (#0)
Blacks know all too well that Florida passed its first gun law in an attempt to disarm blacks in rural turpentine camps, a racial pattern that can be documented in other states as well. And blacks also know that you can do good things and bad things with guns, but without them you're at best an observer and at worst a victim. Pop culture heroes, anti heroes and villains of any color in films have weapons and solve their problems with them. No young boy or man can identify with the only unarmed males in the film, the meek, string tie wearing shopkeeper. He may as well wear a sign that reads, "DICKLESS!" This article is deliberately tunnel visioned to avoid certain truths, not the least of which is the author's own hoplophobia. And even Freud said that fear of firearms is symptomatic of feelings of sexual inadequacy. And white men are more likely to feel castrated if their lose their jobs, because of the expectation to provide. One can only wonder how the author would characterize an unarmed white man who tells his wife and daughters to cooperate with the gang rapists "so they don't kill me...er, I mean us all!" One pregnant woman offered a motel room rapist oral sex to avoid being penetrated to protect her in utero child but the rapist insisted on poking her. So, despite her husband's encouragement to cooperate she picked up a lamp and brained the would be rapist. Jeff Cooper awarded her one of his prized rings with a Latin inscription for her courage. No one knows if her husband crawled into a hole or ever showed his face again. The author failed to mention that at least one former black Muslim leader encouraged the rape of white women as deserved punishment, and the stats clearly show that little encouragement is necessary for blacks to assault white women. No, my dickless liberal friend, you stay home and think enlightened thoughts and we'll stay home and lovingly oil our guns. And be sure to tell your neighbors about your views so they don't ever come to your rescue. They shouldn't risk exposure to the legal system for your sake, especially since they may draw a civil jury with some of your ilk who will want to give an intruder (or his surviving spouse) everything that the heroic rescuer owns. So how do these white men restore the strength and prestige of their idealized past? For many it’s through guns...
#5. To: X-15 (#0)
That part is true. Now we have blacks,browns, yellow and in between, jews, queers and professional politicians. And grossly stupid white voters love all of them. It wasn't long ago when broad-shouldered white men dominated our culture,
#6. To: X-15 (#3)
They need to leave US alone and go back to zion. Or wherever they choose to go. But, get outta here.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
#7. To: Lod (#2)
Keep it simple. Just tell them to disarm israel first. And then artfully use their own objections against them. It works ! Stoppit, jew
#8. To: X-15 (#0)
I can't name one Jew in the history of the world who made any sense. Leonard Steinhorn
"Have Brain, Will Travel
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest