Listener Calls

ED: This is BackStory, the show that turns to history to explain the America of today. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: Today on the show, we’re looking at the history of guns in America. Who’s had access to them, and who’s wanted access. As we do for each of our shows, for the past couple of weeks we’ve been inviting listeners to send us their questions via Facebook, or Twitter, and our website backstoryradio.org.

PETER: Hey guys, gather around. We’ve got a call from Baltimore, Maryland. It’s Brian. Brian, welcome the BackStory.

CALLER BRIAN: Hello. How are you guys?

BRIAN: We’re pretty good.

CALLER BRIAN: My question is, in American history, has a well-armed citizenry actually served as a check on government power?

PETER: No. Nope. No it hasn’t.

BRIAN: Moving on.

CALLER BRIAN: All right. Well, thanks for your time.

ED: Really good call.

BRIAN: Brian, I am going to venture that what a lot of Civil Rights workers learned in the South, as they went into Mississippi in the early 1960s to try to sign up African Americans to vote, which really could cost to your life, what they learned was a lot of those African American families were well-armed. And why were they well-armed?

They were well-armed to protect themselves against a well-armed citizenry. So if you’re looking for examples of protection against the state, I can’t really give you one that protected well-armed citizens from the state. But I do think that this protected well-armed citizens from other well-armed citizens.

CALLER BRIAN: I guess, really, what I’m interested in is thinking about the kind of standard tropes that you hear in the whole debate. And one of them is this whole–

BRIAN: You’re thinking about Ruby Ridge. You’re thinking about people who ostensibly are going to arm themselves to ward off the big bad government.

CALLER BRIAN: Yeah, and in just this terms, it’s almost like, the argument is almost like a public policy argument. If you want peace, if the citizens want peace, and to have a government that respects their rights, then they need to keep themselves well-armed so the government is afraid of them.

BRIAN: Peace through strength, as Ronald Reagan would have said about foreign policy. So you’re applying that to the domestic scene.

CALLER BRIAN: Yeah. I mean, certainly, I find that absurd. But I hear that argument, regularly. And it just seems like, and I was wondering if that really is really part of a strong tradition?

BRIAN: If there is a tradition of successfully doing that, all three Backstory hosts have failed to think of an example of it. Ed, would you agree?

ED: I’d agree. You know, it’s such a great question, because as caller Brian says, it’s a fundamental premise that we have.

PETER: I’d like to explain it if I can. And I think we’re deeply schizophrenic about what the state is, and who the state is. And a lot of the mythology about mobilizing the people against the state, comes out of revolutionary mobilization against the British state.

But who enables that mobilization? It’s the new Republican states, who are desperate to achieve legitimacy. And they need to get arms into the hands of the people in order to meet the threat of the counter-revolution and British army.

And so at one in the same time, we have state mobilization, state driven mobilization of militias– largely inadequate, but as part of the larger war effort– against the great fiscal military state of the 18th century, the dominant power on the face of the earth, Britain, with it standing armies. This is the context. A standing army versus a mobilized and armed populace of citizen soldiers.

BRIAN: And ironically, to cite recent history, some of the modern resurgence of the need to arm ourselves, to protect ourselves from the state, is not to protect ourselves from the big bad United States government, which is what it has become with the resurgence of militias in the ’90s, and in the last decade, it’s to protect ourselves against the modern version of that British empire. And that would be the Soviet Union.

And so as the Cold War revived during the 1980s, you get films like one of my favorite bad films of all time history, Red Dawn. Right? And they Cubans come in as surrogates for the Soviets. They invade the United States. And why can’t we fight back?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because liberals and their gun control have identified all the owners of guns in America, so the Cubans go right to the police office, they know everybody who has a gun, and they take those guns away. They de-fang our defense against that big, bad, external state, which goes back to Peter’s point about the British empire.

ED: And it’s interesting how often the gun advocacy trope, as you say, coincides with survivalist and, sort of, post apocalyptic visions. What we need these guns for is when we don’t have the Federal State.

BRIAN: That’s a great point, Ed.

ED: You’re right, the jack-booted thugs, and the black helicopters, and all that are a threat. But we are even more threatened when they go away. When disease, or the bomb, or something, then we’d better be armed.

PETER: That’s why I said we are schizophrenic, because, hey, the state are us. And, when we start to making war against the state, hey, we’re committing suicide. That is a non-political, non-ideological message. Thank you.

BRIAN: OK.

CALLER BRIAN: hosts, thanks, so much.

PETER: Hey, Brian, thank you for calling.

ED: Great question.

BRIAN: Thank you, Brian.

CALLER BRIAN: OK. Bye.

BRIAN: Bye.

PETER: And another call guys. Herbie from Whitesburg, Kentucky has got a question.

HERBIE: Well, I’m in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, and people have a lot guns here. I mean, the women carry guns in their purses, the men carry guns in their pockets. And we have 24,000 people in the county. And I might be one of 100 who doesn’t own a gun. And I don’t know if there’s some history of us being any different from any other parts of the country? But I don’t know. From here, it seems that people really like their Guns.

PETER: Do the other citizens of Whitesburg know that you’re unarmed?

HERBIE: Uh, I don’t announce it very much.

ED: Well, you just did, you realize?

HERBIE: I would rather they think I was armed.

BRIAN: Do you know how many people listen to us in Whitesburg?

PETER: We’ve got a fan club in Whitesburg. I mean, you are in trouble.

HERBIE: Oh, Lord.

ED: Now, though listen. I’m from Upper East Tennessee, Herbie. This is Ed. So I’m from Kingsport, the greater tri-cities, metropolitan area. So I do understand. I know where Whitesburg is, and I know what you’re talking about. And I think you see a couple of things.

One, the culture really is very proudly around hunting. Is it not? Is there not lots of camouflage, and lots of gun racks? I believe if you asked your neighbors, why do you have guns? Some of them would say, to protect myself. But most some would say, well, I got it because I’m a hunter. And this is a part of my tradition. It’s a part of the culture of the mountains. It’s a part of the culture the South.

You know, we’ve been doing this. My grandfather taught me this. I know gun safety. And it’s just people who don’t know guns who are afraid of them.

HERBIE: Yeah, well, my grandfather set me down at the age of six and he says, OK, let’s go out and learn to shoot. And it was just part of growing up. That was one of the lessons of a young person in the mountains.

ED: Yeah. It’s part of the founding mythology of your part of the country, which is also my part of the country. Picture that painting of Daniel Boone walking down the Cumberland Gap, carrying a big rifle. Right?

PETER: Yeah, you got it.

ED: And he has to have it to feed himself, to defend against the Indians, and to protect his family. I believe that in an unbroken chain, in a way that no other part the country can claim, that Southern Appalachia has an unbroken tradition of guns being necessary to sustain the kind of life, which is a fundamentally rural life in connection with the landscape, which involves hunting, that no other part of the country does.

BRIAN: Let me ask you another question. Because Ed made such an eloquent case for the continuity of male gun ownership in his and your part of the country. I’m just curious to know if you agree with that? Do you think this is just something that has been going on in your neck of the woods, so to speak, in Kentucky for 200 years?

HERBIE: Well, what I believe is, that there’s more of the obsession with guns now, then there was when I was young.

PETER: Yeah.

HERBIE: I really think people– for one thing, Walmart carries them. I mean, it’s easy to get your hands on them. And people like them. People just like to examine them, and show their guns to other people, and talk about them. And it’s like a, I don’t know, like a collector mentality partly.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: Well I think Herbie just made a better point that I did. So I want to build on it, if I can. Even though there is a tradition of loving guns, the supply and the nature of those guns have change continuously over those 200 years. Right? So first, there are these relatively rare flintlocks that a family might have had, really, to have used quite irregularly, in the off-chance that it actually saw a deer, or something.

PETER: As a decoration over the fireplace, basically.

ED: Yeah, exactly. And then you would have seen those guns growing old and decrepit, up until the time of the Civil War. The Civil War, now, suddenly, people have modern guns. They have rifles. Then that the people start coming back for more War I with new guns, and the guns start being mass produced.

And I think are one of the first things that people would have invested in, as mass produced, to get a gun that you could really count on, because you still want to enact this old tradition of hunting for your food. And then, as you say, in the last 30 years, Walmart, K-Mart, building on the old tradition of Sears Roebuck and mail order.

And the result is a profusion of guns. A lot of people who would not have had it before, but you still feel like they’re doing something that’s socially sanctioned.

You don’t have to be embarrassed at church if you have a gun. Right? You don’t have to feel badly if you have a gun in your car, because it’s something that identifies mountain culture.

HERBIE: I remember when I was a child, my dad was taking a gun to work with him every day, because the miner’s strike was on, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. And I remember going in, I was a child, and I was going through the catalog, Sears Roebuck, and it said no guns your minors. And I thought it meant that none of the coal miners could get any guns.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: That’s great!

ED: That’s good.

PETER: Herbie, this is a wonderful call. Thanks, so much.

HERBIE: Hey, great to talk to you all.

BRIAN: Thank you, so much, Herbie.

ED: Bye, Herbie.

HERBIE: Bye.