8/14/2023 0 Comments Lone wolf gunsThe very notion of hunting for food and survival was co-opted by the elite governing classes as a sport and hobby, distancing themselves from one of the key and seemingly pragmatic reasons for a right to bear arms in today's context. These stories “were surely instrumental in sanitizing accountability for the atrocities related to genocide, and set the narrative pattern for future U.S. Show business and other media production erased evidence of the white-supremacist violence that created the America as we know it and instead reconfigured it into epic hero narratives such as those that grew around figures like John Filson’s Daniel Boone and which James Fenimore Cooper detailed in his frontier novels. So, these negative narratives needed to be divorced from reality. “Democracy, equality, and equal rights do not fit well with genocide, settler colonialism, slavery, and empire,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. Ghosts of those battle lines can be detected in contemporary divisions on gun rights and gun control.” Not surprisingly, many of the gunfights of the late-nineteenth century in the West were between Union and Confederate veterans or supporters. … The normalization of violence included the racial terrorism of the KKK and other armed groups, as well as the outlaw violence carried out by individuals and crime gangs. “In the mid-20th century, with real and fictional Western heroes in decline, fetishization of guns and the Second Amendment accelerated, along with mass shootings, nearly all carried out by white men. Popular culture began the perpetuation of the lone white male with a gun as a hero figure here to save the day, an image that has persisted hundreds of years evidenced each time a white man opens fire on a crowd and is called a "lone wolf" instead of a "terrorist." From Young Guns to Godless and Westworld, we see these iterations over and over again.ĭunbar-Ortiz posits that the first side-effect of pop culture’s whitewashing of American history-mainly through book and song, but eventually films as well- was in codifying extreme gun violence against non-white populations and reframing it into a battle for the (white) soul of America corrupted by (brown and black) interlopers. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, this myth of the hunter through popular culture began gaining traction around the 1820s, after the publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and has shaped many of the misconceptions of the roots of gun culture in America. In rewriting these men not just through song, but through books and later cinema - former Confederate soldiers who eventually became guerrilla fighters against the abolition of slavery - as heroes and beloved antiheroes, thus began the romanticization of some of America’s first white-supremacist terrorists. Even liberal and progressive culture, such as antiwar activist singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, bought the misleading narrative, beginning the process of turning ex-Confederate soldiers and their cohorts into aspirational folk heroes. From song to book to visual media, problematic and violent figures like these had their stories rewritten to embody the frontier spirit of American entrepreneurship and expansionism that created the country we find ourselves in today. Unpacking the history of the modern lone wolf, white, male shooter requires deconstructing the stories of many of America’s beloved Wild West figures, like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, whose gangs and lives of gun crime have now become the stuff of legend. And as gun culture became normalized, so were the stories of these early white male settler-colonists who braved hostile territories armed to the teeth ostensibly to cleanse the soil of native and black people, leading to the lone-wolf archetype we fear today. From civilian militias in guerrilla warfare to slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan, and much later rifle clubs and associations like the NRA, the Second Amendment’s provision for Americans to bear arms has been one of the main driving forces of the bloody foundation of this country. Dunbar-Ortiz’s thesis is a close reading of the language of the Second Amendment in the historical context it is rarely placed in: She claims that the original purpose of militias was the extermination of indigenous populations and next the terrorizing and murder of freed black slaves.
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