Firearms and the dominant media culture
<p>A recent flurry of <a href="http://juangato.blogspot.com/?/2002_05_05_juangato_archive.html#76413238"><br />
nearly identical editorials</a> in American newspapers conveys the<br />
degree of fluttering endemic in dovecotes everywhere in the wake of<br />
the Justice Department&#8217;s new statement of position on the Second<br />
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  The <cite>New York Times</cite><br />
and <cite>Washington Post</cite> have viewed with alarm, displaying an<br />
almost pathetic degree of panic at the thought that lawmakers might<br />
once again have to start taking that pesky &#8220;shall not be infringed&#8221;<br />
language seriously.</p>
<p>The dominant culture of the American national media knows what it<br />
believes about guns.  Firearms are evil juju that have the power to<br />
induce murderous violence in otherwise normal human beings. Firearms<br />
owners are all either ghetto drug dealers whose idea of the good life<br />
is a drive-by a day, or else tractor-cap-wearing rural sociopaths jes&#8217;<br />
itchin&#8217; to shoot up a schoolyard.  Firearms-rights advocates are a<br />
tiny nut-fringe of reactionary wackos barely one step from blowing up<br />
a federal building. Gun-control boosters are virtuous crusaders<br />
animated by selfless love of children and small fuzzy things.  There<br />
will come a day when all guns are banned, hallelujah, violent crime<br />
will plummet, and we can stop being embarrassed for being<br />
Americans.</p>
<p>Over the last thirty years this mythology has grown so thick, so<br />
armored with smugness, that the dominant media culture is normally<br />
incapable of noticing mere facts that happen to contradict it.  Gary<br />
Kleck&#8217;s <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/point-blank-summary.html"> Point<br />
Blank: Guns and Violence In America</a> should have put paid the<br />
demonization of gun owners back in 1993. John Lott&#8217;s 1998 book<br />
<cite>More Guns, Less Crime</cite> demonstrated that civilian firearms<br />
dramatically reduce crime and violence.  And Sanford Levinson&#8217;s 1989<br />
study <a href="http://www.shadeslanding.com/firearms/embar.html">The<br />
Embarrassing Second Amendment</a> began a wave of legal scholarship<br />
that established what is now called the `Standard Model&#8217;, that the<br />
Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual citizen&#8217;s right to<br />
bear arms.</p>
<p>That smugness has been shook, badly, by three different<br />
events of which the Justice Department&#8217;s finding is only the most recent.<br />
The media panic we&#8217;re seeing is a cumulative result of all three.</p>
<p>First there was Michael Bellesiles&#8217;s exposure as a fraud.  His book<br />
<cite>Arming America</cite> won the Bancroft prize and gushing encomiums<br />
from the dominant media culture when it purported to show that the<br />
armed and self-reliant American frontiersman was a myth &#8212; that the<br />
gun culture of the U.S. postdates the American Civil War and was alien<br />
to the framers of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Alas for the <em>bien pensants</em> of the world that the book<br />
turned out to be a tissue of lies, invented but nonexistent evidence,<br />
and willful misquotation of existing evidence.  A fabrication, in<br />
fact, so egregious that it has induced the National Endowment for the<br />
Humanities to open its first official fraud investigation in thirty-seven<br />
years. Suddenly the fraud claims gun-rights activists had been making<br />
for years about other anti-gun scholarship (such as the infamous<br />
Kellerman <a href="http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/43_to_1_fallacy.htm">&#8220;43:1&#8243;</a>)<br />
study) were no longer so easily dismissible as paranoid ranting.</p>
<p>But worse was to come, on September 9th 2001.  Because Al-Qaeda&#8217;s<br />
ability to turns airliners into weapons of mass destruction using<br />
nothing but carpet knives illustrated in the most dramatic possible<br />
way the folly of believing that a disarmed world is a safe one.  All<br />
the &#8220;security&#8221; that kept civilian firearms off airplanes did was make<br />
terrorism easier for the determined few who could smuggle weapons on<br />
board.</p>
<p>Many tides turned after 9/11, and not the least result of it was<br />
a huge groundswell in popular support for civilian self-defense and<br />
firearms rights.  The <a href="http://www.pinkpistols.org/"><br />
Pink Pistols</a> and chapters of the <a href="http://www.sas-aim.org/"><br />
Second Amendment Sisters</a> on college campuses previously known<br />
as strongholds of anti-firearms politics became impossible to ignore.<br />
The new wave of popular pro-gun agitation could not be forced into the<br />
&#8220;right-wing kooks&#8221; box so beloved of the dominant media culture.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s no wonder the Justice Department&#8217;s endorsement of a<br />
pro-gun-rights brief in &#8220;Emerson vs. U.S.&#8221; has the mavens of the<br />
dominant media culture feeling faint and panicky.  One of the pillars<br />
of their world-view (up there with the unquestionable sanctity of<br />
environmentalists, say, or the importance of `diversity&#8217;, or the<br />
superior virtue of the putatively oppressed) is creaking.  Those loony<br />
gun nuts night turn out to be (a) right on the facts, (b)<br />
overwhelmingly popular, and (c) backed up by the Bill of Rights, the<br />
Justice Department, and the Supreme Court, after all!</p>
<p>If the Supreme Court grants certiorati on the Emerson case, we can<br />
expect the dominant media culture to get its knickers in a knot so<br />
complicated it would baffle an algebraic topologist.  Because given<br />
the composition of the Court and the tenor of the times, the result<br />
might well be a dramatic rollback in the reach of firearms regulation.<br />
Gun-rights advocates can hope that laws touching the Second Amendment<br />
may in the future have to pass the same strictest level of scrutiny<br />
as laws touching the First.  A wave of lawsuits successfully striking<br />
down state and local gun laws under the doctrine of incorporation<br />
could well follow.</p>
<p>The closest historical precedent for what may be about to happen is<br />
the rediscovery of the First Amendment in the early 20th century.<br />
Before 1919 speech advocating unpopular ideas could be made a<br />
punishable offense.  Oliver Wendell Holmes created the doctrine,<br />
since become sacred to the dominant media culture, that unpopular<br />
ideas demand the <em>most</em> constitutional protection, and that<br />
the press has a broadly privileged role under that shield.</p>
<p>There is irony in the fact that, having benefited from the<br />
reassertion of the first article of the Bill of Rights, the dominant<br />
media culture should so be resisting the second.</p>
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