Shadowing Practice: Why America (Still) Loves Guns - Learn English Speaking with Video

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T. Compared to similar countries, America is a violent place.

In America, people die violent deaths at a much higher rate than in other rich capitalist countries.

This violence has expressed itself in a number of ways throughout history.

But guns are currently and have always been part of the American language of violence.

This video is not intended to prescribe some solution for American gun violence.

I will not advocate for gun rights or for gun control in this essay.

Instead, this video will identify in an objective way why America seems to have a genetic,

unending, and unstoppable fondness for firearms.

The first thing we should determine is simple.

Do Americans actually love guns?

The answer here is complicated.

According to the Pew Research Center, only 32% of Americans say they actually own a gun.

This stat alone would indicate that perhaps Americans don't actually love guns as much as we may believe.

But when we dig further into these statistics, we get a more comprehensive version of the truth.

Despite a statistical ambivalence about gun ownership, Americans have more guns per capita than any other country in the world, by a large margin.

Per 100 residents, America has about 120 guns.

The next highest country is Yemen, with about 53.

So within the context of the globe, yes, we can say that Americans relatively do love guns.

The majority of Americans do believe that gun ownership is a right.

Depending on whose statistics you look to, this support ranges from just over 50% to over 70%.

Loving guns isn't inherently bad, but among high-income countries, America has the seventh highest rate of gun homicides.

The countries that are ahead of America, though, are small nations with whom America probably can't be compared.

Panama, the Bahamas, Trinidad, and Tobago, to name a few.

Notably, two of the countries that America trails are American territories, Puerto Rico and the U.S.

Virgin Islands.

When we compare American homicide by gun rates with our global peers, America is an outlier.

Among high-income countries with populations over 10 million, America is first with 4.52 gun homicides per 100,000 people.

Saudi Arabia is a distant second.

Canada has 0.62.

The UK has .01.

All of this put together can lead to a reasonable and objective conclusion.

America leads the world by some margin in gun violence.

But still, Americans love guns.

So here we arrive at the core of this video.

Why?

Data can provide us with a contemporary but perhaps shallow answer to this question.

Statistics show that 67% of gun owners have a gun for protection, 38% for hunting, 30% for sports shooting,

13% as part of a gun collection, and 8% for their job.

On an individual level, these are reasonable justifications.

But this data doesn't really tell us how or why guns have become so ingrained in American culture.

The French have wine, Canadians have hockey, in much the same way, Americans have guns.

Why is this?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, America's affinity for guns started a long, long time ago.

When early colonists arrived in North America, they found Native Americans who were no strangers to violent conflict.

However, these colonists brought with them a technology that would make conquering the New World fairly straightforward.

That technology was, of course, the rifle.

The colonists realized their rifles gave them an immense advantage over the native people, so colonial leaders mandated gun ownership.

In 1658, Virginia required that,

quote, Around this time, Plymouth County also instated a similar law requiring every male to own a gun.

This law would shortly thereafter be extended to the entirety of Massachusetts.

At the time, these weapons were primarily intended to attack and defend against Native Americans.

In his book, The Barbarous Years, historian Bernard Bailyn notes that there was one group,

Europeans, using violence to assert its will over another group, Native Americans.

This basically set the precedent that violence, specifically gun violence, was a legitimate method of settling disputes and enacting one's own will in America.

And sure enough, colonists began settling their own disputes with violence.

Rates of European-on-European violence rose during this period.

So perhaps it could even be an understatement to say that America was founded on violence.

America was from its very beginning steeped in gun violence.

Certainly conquering land is different than shooting up a school, but the point remains.

Since Europeans arrived, America has had violence through the use of firearms.

As America moved into the Revolutionary War, we see the evolution of America's gun culture.

We shouldn't go so far as to say the Revolutionary War happened over the right to own guns.

The British made some haphazard attempts at confiscating American guns, but this was not the driving force of the Revolution.

In reality, the Revolution came from issues over taxes and representation in British government.

But in any case, we won the Revolutionary War by using guns without firearms today there would likely be no United States of America.

This is an important thing to remember as we discuss the country's ongoing cultural love for guns.

Following the war, early colonists still had fresh memories of British troops and their treatment of American citizens.

With this in mind, America and its leaders were not too keen on the idea of a standing American army.

Quite the opposite, the idea of a national army was seen as antithetical to American liberty.

However, the Founding Fathers did recognize that some type of military might would be necessary to keep the peace.

So, they set out to protect the private citizens' rights to organizing militias.

Gun ownership is pointedly discussed within America's Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment reads, 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.

Both gun rights and gun control activists often claim that the Second Amendment is written in clear language.

Both sides will proclaim that this amendment clearly supports their own argument.

Indeed, when we examine this amendment, things can become confusing quite quickly.

First of all, we have simple grammatical syntax.

The English language has changed since this was written.

Today, the sentence is difficult to parse.

If we examine it only in form, as purely a grammatical exercise, the Second Amendment is difficult to understand.

What do all of these commas mean?

What exactly shouldn't be infringed?

The militia or the guns themselves?

To the modern reader, the Second Amendment is not written very clearly.

After all, if it was, there certainly wouldn't be so much debate about it.

The meanings of words have also changed in ways that can enhance arguments for either side of the issue.

Take the word regulated.

Pulitzer Prize-winning constitutional scholar Jack Rakove says that in the 18th century,

regulated did not mean subjected to laws or government restrictions.

Rather, it meant that the militia would be armed, organized, and properly effective.

So we could take this interpretation to mean the Second Amendment does not endorse government regulation of firearms.

But then there's the phrase bear arms.

Saul Cornell is another leading constitutional scholar who is considered one of the foremost authorities on revolutionary era legal thinking.

Cornell has indicated that the right to bear arms had almost nothing to do with personal self-defense in revolutionary America.

At the time, firearms were not considered tools for self-defense, they were military objects.

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Edged weapons and blunt objects were more in line with the idea of self-defense.

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To use a gun for defending oneself would have been like using a hatchet to cut vegetables.

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It would work, but the idea was just kind of outlandish.

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So this interpretation seems to indicate that the Second Amendment doesn't protect the right to gun ownership.

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Rakove and Cornell are both equally esteemed and qualified constitutional scholars, and each of them can lead us down different paths with the Second Amendment.

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These are just two examples, but there are endless more.

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Modern America has not been able to reach a conclusion on the Second Amendment because a lot of intelligent,

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qualified individuals have wildly differing interpretations of the text.

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Even the federal interpretation of the Second Amendment has swung wildly throughout time,

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For decades and decades, courts agreed that the Second Amendment did not protect individual rights to gun ownership.

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Rather, early Americans read the Second Amendment as protecting the existence of militias.

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However, in 2008, Supreme Court justices declared that the Second Amendment does in fact protect the right to individual gun ownership.

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Even still, this decision came with its fair share of conditions.

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Antonin Scalia, noted that firearms were subject to restrictions and regulations.

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The point of all of this is not to come to a conclusion on constitutional law.

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There are a lot of other Second Amendment stones I have left unturned here, and that is intentional.

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It is not my desire to advocate for any particular reading of the amendment, but rather we can take all of this to understand two things.

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First, the founding fathers believed that people should be allowed to keep rifles at home.

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This is included in the Bill of Rights.

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Second, America has never really known what to do about this.

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The Second Amendment has continuously been interpreted and reinterpreted as the basis for wildly divergent opinions and pieces of legislation.

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As we move forward past the 18th century, America's gun culture truly begins to take shape.

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In the mid-19th century, guns were still not seen as instruments of violence.

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Instead, they were tools.

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They were more shovel than sword.

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This was perhaps in part because they just didn't work very well.

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These guns were clunky, unreliable, inaccurate, and generally troublesome tools.

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But then a young man named Samuel Colt got to work.

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Around this time, Texans were fighting against the Comanche tribe.

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More accurately, they were trying to kill off the Comanches entirely.

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After hearing a remarkable battle story from a Texan named Sam Walker, Colt realized that firearms could have some romance about them.

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They could be more than tools.

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Guns could have some emotional meaning.

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So Samuel Colt began a massive marketing campaign.

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He associated his guns with the so perceived bravery of defending America against foreigners and Native Americans alike.

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Just as early colonists had, Colt framed violence as a premier strategy for settling disputes.

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Samuel Colt sent free merchandise to politicians, he circulated pamphlets, he hired a famous painter to depict scenes of Colt guns saving American lives.

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Other firearms manufacturers soon followed suit.

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They all focused their efforts on handguns, which could be produced quite cheaply in America.

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For a long time, guns had been prohibitively expensive.

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That was no longer the case.

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Manufacturers like Colt made cheaper and cheaper handguns.

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In 1850, a Colt revolver was $12.

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By the year 1900, a .22 caliber Colt could be had for 18 cents.

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The country also had fewer restrictions on firearms than Europe, which alone incentivized gun ownership.

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People could, so they would.

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These newer, smaller guns were also quite convenient.

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They were more reliable than past firearms and could be neatly tucked away into the beltline.

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Combine all of this with an effective marketing campaign, and firearms like the new Colts were immensely successful.

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These guns made it easier to kill people.

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Strangling or beating a person to death brought an immense amount of risk.

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You could get hit There's also a lot of thought that had to occur before, during, and after such an act.

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Rifles were too cumbersome and bulky to carry around on one's person.

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There were essentially barriers to entry as far as violence was concerned, but handheld revolvers and handguns broke these down entirely.

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Now within a second or two you could kill a man without a whole lot of effort, psychological or physical.

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During In the 14 years when these changes were happening, firearms ownership ballooned to 10 times what it had been at the turn of the century.

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This reality was occurring against an increasingly violent backdrop.

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As the country hurled itself towards a civil war, America was becoming more and more homicidal.

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With the proliferation of slavery, there arose a new group which Americans desired to control.

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Taking cues from their forefathers, slave owners and other Americans used widely available firearms to control African slaves.

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Homicide rates skyrocketed across the nation in a time that is often called the Riot Era.

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Alongside this, increasing industrialization was making American cities more bountiful and more populated.

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This surge in productivity required more labor.

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So immigrants began to pour into America's largest cities.

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They were met with rampant xenophobia, which often translated to violence.

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Some American political parties declared that these immigrants, Scottish, Irish, and German, would bring with them violence,

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and that increased immigration meant increased danger for Americans.

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All of this, the violence and the proliferation of firearms, just spread and spread.

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The American West became the Wild West as prospectors clashed with Native Americans.

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So across the entire country in the late 1800s, American violence was again in its ascendancy.

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Gun violence had worked for the colonists, it had worked for the revolutionaries, so now it was working for post-Civil War Western prospectors,

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Southern Americans, and xenophobic urbanites.

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These conflicts all reflect an idea that guns should be used to settle disputes.

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It is this idea which is perhaps at the core of America's gun culture.

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So for decades that was exactly what happened.

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In the 1900s, America just got more and more homicidal.

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In 1900, the homicide rate was roughly 1 per 100,000 people.

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By 1930, it was almost 10 per 100,000 people.

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Much of this was due to gun violence surrounding prohibition and organized crime.

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America was in a sort of Tommy Gun era, and its impacts were devastating.

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And so, we come to the next major force in America's gun culture.

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The NRA.

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By the 20s, the NRA had already been around for some 50 odd years.

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The group was originally founded to increase marksmanship abilities.

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For decades, they mostly organized shooting competitions.

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But after the Great Depression, the NRA began to drift into the political sphere.

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Their goal, though, was not the loosening of restrictions.

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Often, the opposite was true.

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In the early 20s, the NRA successfully pushed for increased firearms regulation, hoping to ensure that only respectable, serious individuals could own guns.

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President Roosevelt signed two pieces of legislation which regulated commercial firearms sales,

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the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act.

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These two acts imposed paid registration on some weapons and federal registration for gun dealers.

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They also prohibited felons from purchasing guns at all.

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The NRA convinced Congress to exclude handguns from this new legislation, but broadly supported the bills.

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In 1934, the NRA president said in a testimony to Congress, I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns.

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I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.

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The NRA began to change, though, when a new wave of violence came to America.

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After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of riots spread across Baltimore.

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There emerged an increasing level of anxiety and violence around the civil rights movement.

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Richard Nixon was elected president as a law and order candidate.

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One of his first moves was to militarize urban police forces with heavier weaponry.

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And so Nixon continued these traditions of guns

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and violence being used to control a disobedient group and to settle conflict in America.

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Gun violence went again on the upswing.

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Gun homicides increased sharply by 51%.

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Assaults using firearms rose even more by an astounding 84%.

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Guns were also becoming cheaper.

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Inexpensive handguns were being imported from overseas like never before.

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In 1955, 67,000 handguns were imported to the US.

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In 1968, that number increased to about a million.

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At this time, the NRA was still firmly on the side of gun control.

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In 1968, NRA president Harold Glasson said in a lecture,

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Does the right to keep and bear arms mean that every individual has a right to carry a gun at all times, concealed or openly?

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Obviously not.

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This same year, the U.S government passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy.

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However, the conservative movement in America was beginning to change dramatically.

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Increasingly, conservatives saw any and all government regulation as inherently problematic.

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Conservatives placed more and more value on personal freedoms.

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People like Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, and Howard Jarvis pushed legislation under this new anti-government sentiment.

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The NRA was a conservative organization, and so they too underwent a seismic shift almost overnight.

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In the 1970s, a man named Harlan Carter was an increasingly vocal member of the NRA.

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He took a hard-line stance, believing that no amount of firearms legislation was acceptable.

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When asked if violent criminals and the mentally ill should be allowed to own guns, Harlan replied that it was the, quote, price we pay for freedom.

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Harlan wrote a letter to NRA leadership imploring them to take his position, declaring that we can win it on a simple concept.

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No compromise.

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No gun legislation.

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In the mid-70s, Carter would go on to essentially lead a coup against NRA leadership.

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This resulted in him winning the position of executive vice president.

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Under Harlan's leadership, the NRA entered into an entirely new era.

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The new NRA spread a narrative that the U.S government had a secret plan to disarm all Americans.

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The gun, Carter said, was the sole tool for defeating this government oppression.

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Further, Carter's NRA leveraged rising crime rates and racial anxieties to rally support for gun rights.

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This was all a massive success.

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Membership in the NRA tripled under Carter from 1 million to 3.7 million.

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Carter hired a team of lobbyists and activists who racked up victories across the country.

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Several states under NRA guidance added the right to bear arms into their constitution.

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The NRA repeatedly defeated efforts to increase gun control measures on a federal level.

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Even after Carter left his position in the 80s, the NRA continued to find political success.

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They raised $70 million for Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich, and they spread pro-gun messaging throughout important swing state elections.

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Near the turn of the century, the NRA capitalized on the unpopularity of Bill Clinton, tax increases, and failed government reform policies.

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However, as Senator Chris Murphy points out in his book, the NRA accomplished a lot after the year 2000, despite having very little actual power.

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The NRA did not spend a lot of money compared to other lobbyists and super PACs.

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In 2012, NRA endorsed candidates only won one out of seven elections.

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During this time, there was very little statistical electoral advantage to having the NRA on your side.

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Bizarrely, the NRA had become an effective political force without actually having much in the way of political capability.

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Murphy, a politician himself, notes the phenomenon of the squeaky wheel.

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While a small minority of Americans support everything the NRA advocates for, the NRA encourages that minority to be as loud as possible.

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This, of course, skews public perception, which can result in real legislative and electoral action.

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The NRA also has a remarkably strong brand.

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For a politician, the NRA endorsement broadcasts a lot more than gun rights gun rights.

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It's a conservative badge of honor.

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Whether or not the voting population agrees with the NRA on individual policy issues,

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a candidate earning their endorsement can be an important piece of the electoral puzzle.

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Culturally, the NRA also has a significant impact among citizens.

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The NRA, building on centuries of tradition, continues to tie gun ownership to liberty and personal freedom.

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Whether or not you, personally, the viewer, agrees with this notion, it must be said, this is the angle for the NRA.

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They are carrying the torch of their forefathers.

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Like Samuel Colt, the NRA proclaims that guns are more than just objects.

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They are symbols of freedom.

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For a long time, the NRA was viewed quite favorably among Americans, and so this messaging was very successful.

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In recent years, though, they have begun to lose much of this cultural capital.

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But when we put all of this story into a pot, we get the American gun culture.

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Up to this point, I have omitted one perhaps large part of American gun culture.

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Media.

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America is the land of media.

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Much of this media is very violent, and much of it includes guns.

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Research on the correlation between violent media consumption and violent behavior has produced mixed findings.

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This media is a part of the American gun culture, but if we blame violent video games, movies, and music for this culture,

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I think we are looking at the equation from the wrong end.

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After all, violent media does not just erupt out of nowhere and produce violent behavior en masse en masse.

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Video games, movies, music are all created as reflections of American sensibilities.

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Companies produce violent media because America wants violent media.

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These things are part of the existing gun culture and maybe they even exacerbate that culture.

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But they are not the cause of it.

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They are more symptoms than virus.

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It seems to me that America's affinity for guns comes from three places.

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It is the sum of three parts.

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Tradition, rights, and mythology.

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In this country, we have a long-standing tradition of gun violence.

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The landmass was conquered through gun violence.

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The country itself was founded on gun violence.

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Time and time again, social conflicts have been solved through the means of force, often with a firearm.

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This macro tradition has leaked into the micro.

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For some Americans, guns are now a legitimate way to settle disputes or control groups of people.

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The right to own guns is expressed in the American Bill of Rights rights.

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The country was founded with firearms in mind in one way or the other, but due to aging language, changing times, and increasing polarization,

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there is little agreement on how exactly America should protect this right.

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Guns have a profound mythological meaning in America.

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In the very early days of the country, capitalists began active efforts to galvanize the mythology of guns within American culture.

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They were successful and this is a process which has not stopped.

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Its effects have not abated.

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For hundreds of years American companies and organizations have produced messaging that ties guns directly to American identity.

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All nations around the world have their collective cultural interests.

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Guns are the American incarnation of this phenomenon.

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Gun control activists say that something must give, that gun violence is out of control, and that we simply must act.

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More often than outright removal of firearms, activists often demand a compromise that takes the form of increased gun regulation.

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The other side says that we already have regulations in place, that they already have compromised.

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They point to the thousands and thousands of gun laws which already exist on federal, state, and local levels.

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This debate just It goes on and on and I'm not really sure what the path forward is.

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But I do think that understanding the gun within American history and mythology could be a good place to start.

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