David French Is Wrong about Gun Culture

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, June 06, 2022

At the Dispatch, David French, who four years ago penned a defense of American “gun culture” for the Atlantic, writes that now

the threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself. The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy. And it’s become so prevalent that I would not — I could not — write the same piece for The Atlantic again.

As evidence for this contention, David points to . . . well, that’s the problem. Nothing he points to is new. “What is a gun fetish?” he asks. “It’s a concept that’s tough to define, but easy to observe”:

When a leading candidate for Senate runs on a platform that’s “pro-God, pro-Gun, and pro-Trump,” then guns (and Trump) are elevated far above their proper place in American life. The same goes for popular t-shirts and signs that declare a person “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun.”

We see the gun fetish when a member of Congress appears on television with crossed AR-15s behind her head. Or when another member of Congress raffles off a .50 caliber sniper rifle. You definitely see it when a third member of Congress posts a Christmas message that looks like this.

[Photo of Thomas Massie and family.]

The gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes “machine-gun bacon” to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment.

None of this post-dates David’s Atlantic piece.

All the way back in 2010, NPR published a long piece cataloguing some of the elected officials who were running hard on their “pro-gun” bona fides:

Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona, is wielding an assault rifle in his political ads. Russ Carnahan, a Democratic congressman from Missouri, is pictured in a home state newspaper pointing a pistol at a target. Lou Ann Zelenik, a Republican congressional hopeful from Tennessee, posted on Facebook a photo of her smiling as she gets in “a little bit of practicing” at a target range.

So far, 2010 “has been a big year for guns in political ads,” says Darrell West, director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

As NPR’s story confirms, there is nothing new about the inclusion of the AR-15 or other so-called “assault weapons” in such ads:

In a new twist, many of this year’s weapon-wielding female candidates are shown with assault rifles. In her YouTube clip, Christina Jeffrey is standing in front of a lovely front door cradling an AK-47. A college professor — as well as a grandmother, Jeffrey delivers a video mini-lecture on the Second Amendment. “We are a sovereign people,” she says, smiling. “A sovereign people is an armed people.”

This approach, NPR noted, had even been widespread 16 years earlier, in 1994:

This year’s widespread gushing over guns reminds Darrell West of another watershed moment in contemporary American politics. “The last time that happened was 1994, when Republicans used the gun issue to portray the Clinton administration as too liberal and out of touch with ordinary Americans,” he says. “President Clinton later blamed his passage of the assault rifle ban as the reason for the GOP regaining control of Congress.”

Examples of this habit abound across time. In 2010, the same year as NPR’s piece and eight years before David’s Atlantic column, a “leading candidate for Senate” named Joe Manchin filmed a commercial in which he shot a “cap and trade” bill with a hunting rifle. In 2012, six years before David’s Atlantic piece, Joe Wurzelbacher, a candidate for the House of Representatives, made an ad in which he shot a bunch of fruit and warned that gun control had led to the Holocaust. In 2014, four years before David’s Atlantic piece, a “leading candidate for Senate,” Joni Ernst, cut a whole ad about her proficiency with firearms — Tagline: “Mom, farmgirl, and a lieutenant colonel who carries more than just lipstick in her purse” — while Greg Abbott handed out material at the launch of his first gubernatorial campaign that extolled the virtues of “Fast Cars, Firearms, and Freedom.” In 2016, two years before David’s Atlantic piece, an Eric Greitens ad depicted the candidate firing a machine gun. In his parade of horribles, David mentions an incident in which “a powerful senator” made “‘machine-gun bacon’ to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment.” But that senator was Ted Cruz, and he made his machine-gun bacon in 2015, three years before David wrote his piece in the Atlantic. As for that “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun” slogan? It’s been around for more than a decade, as this Psychology Today post from 2011 shows.

What about politicians raffling off guns — especially AR-15s? That has been happening for 30 years. It was happening in 2018, at exactly the same time David wrote his piece; it was happening in 2017; it was happening in 2016; it was happening in 2014 and in 2013 and in 2011 and in 2000 (that one was a .50 caliber sniper rifle of exactly the sort David complains about) and in 1994. During the 2014 cycle, the last time Republicans were expected to enjoy a red wave, it happened so often that the New York Times reported:

Online gun sweepstakes have become one of the most useful tools for campaign outreach in the 2014 Republican primaries. Across the country, from a race for sheriff in California to the United States Senate primary in South Carolina, candidates are using high-powered pistols and rifles as a lure to build up their donor lists and expand their base of support.

Returning to the broader culture, David complains:

Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the “tactical” or “black gun” lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the “daily gunfight.” It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real.

But this isn’t new, either. Indeed, it’s one reason there was such a panic over “assault weapons” in 1993. And it certainly hasn’t changed since 2018. Aware of the charge that they were a little ridiculous, gun enthusiasts have been making fun of themselves for their “tacticool” inclinations since at least 2011.

David’s conclusion is that “there are still millions of deeply-responsible gun-owners who focus on their responsibilities even more than their rights, but the idolatrous fringe is [a] fringe no longer”; that the members of that “fringe” tend to “bear arms with religious intensity, and in their zeal for their weapons, they send the message that their identity and their power are defined by the guns they love”; and that there has been a recent “transition” in the motivations of Second Amendment activists, “from defense to defiance.”

Again: Where is the evidence for any of this? None of the specific examples that David cites demonstrate a shift in the culture. The related idea that “something has changed in the streets” is unpersuasive to me, given that (a) gun-owners were accused of using their weapons “to menace and intimidate” as early as the Tea Party protests of 2010, eight years before David’s Atlantic piece; and (b) the people David is talking about aren’t the ones responsible for any of the crimes about which he seems to be worried. And the defense/defiance distinction he eventually invokes strikes me as somewhat ridiculous, too. For decades, the rallying cry of the gun-rights movement has been molṑn labé, which is Ancient Greek for “Come and Take It.” This slogan was first used during the American Revolutionary War, it was adopted during the Texas Revolution in 1835, and it was picked up by opponents of gun control during the 1990s. A variation on it — “from my cold dead hands” — dates back to the 1970s, and became an extremely popular bumper sticker after it was invoked by Charlton Heston at the NRA’s annual convention in the weeks following the 1999 Columbine massacre:

So, as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: “From my cold, dead hands!”

Perhaps it’s not “gun culture” that has changed, but David?