Armed and spoiling for a fight
David French, recalls the unsettling incident when his son received a direct message displaying three Klan hoods. The former Republican, former National Review staff writer says his multiracial family (his adopted daughter is Black) began receiving doxxing and death threats after he rejected Donald Trump and Trumpism:
Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.
No one arrived, but such harrassment had happened before.
French grew up in Alabama, owned guns, etc., etc. But the gun rights movement has morphed into “widespread gun idolatry. ‘Guns’ have joined ‘God’ and ‘Trump’ in the hierarchy of right-wing values.” Worse, more people are walking around armed and spoiling for a fight.
Things seem to have gotten out of hand, maybe:
In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.
French worries(?) about a backlash:
Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion of gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.
People might stop walking into the Subway armed to the teeth. Americans might demand “moral reform” (the horror!). And it will be gun owners’ fault. What does that say about gun fetishism that the right has promoted for decades?
Politico this morning examines the nonsensical right’s belief that gun violence is somehow the outgrowth of liberals running large cities.
“Listen to the southern right talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front.” Colin Woodard is just getting warmed up:
In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.
Gun culture is a phenomenon traceable in part to just who colonized America’s various regions. This analysis is not new. (See “Albion’s Seed,” 1989.) But tying it to gun culture is a twist I’ve not seen. Geography matters, Woodard writes of his research with Nationhood Lab.
“[T]he disparities between the regions are stark, but even I was shocked at just how wide the differences were and also by some unexpected revelations.”
The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between.
But that doesn’t match the right’s preferred narrative of urban (read, Black and brown) areas being left-leaning cesspools of sin. Not that facts ever got in the way of conservative myth-making.
For gun suicides, which is the most common method, the pattern is similar: New Netherland is the safest big region with a rate of just 1.4 deaths per 100,000, which makes it safer in this respect than Canada, Sweden or Switzerland. Yankeedom and Left Coast are also relatively safe, but Greater Appalachia surges to be the most dangerous with a rate nearly seven times higher than the Big Apple. The Far West becomes a danger zone too, with a rate just slightly better than its libertarian-minded Appalachian counterpart.
“Centuries-old settlement patterns” influence gun policies today because they are “downstream from culture,” Woodard argues. But it’s not gun policies alone that account for the variation in death reates.
“New York City is a very diverse place. We see people from different cultural and religious traditions every moment and we just know one another, so it’s harder for people to foment inter-group hatreds,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “Policy has something to do with it, but policy mainly controls the ease to which people can get access to weapons. But after that you have culture, economics, demographics and everything else that influences what they do with those weapons.”
That reflects something my friend, David Castro, said about growing up in the Bronx. Familiarity tamps down hatreds.
“By the age of 10-12 I’d eaten at everyone’s house, stayed over, went to their churches and synagogues for confirmations and bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals, listened to their music,” Castro said. Although the foods and religious iconography changed from house to house, he said, growing up none of that was threatening. They were just your friends’ parents.
“You ain’t from around here, are ya?” is a familiar regionalism in more rural parts. It just wouldn’t have the same edge of threat or even work the same in large, melting-pot metros, would it?
Update: Corrected misspelling of Woodard’s name. (h/t RS)