Did Hofstadter believe that these astute “founding fathers” mistakenly threw in the Second Amendment to a Bill of Rights that was about individual rights? Hofstadter does note, without discussion, that the first draft of the Virginia Constitution of 1776—Thomas Jefferson’s work, which preceded the writing of the U.S. Constitution by nine years—included the individual right to bear arms, stating: “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” Did Jefferson make a mistake in Virginia, and then contribute to another mistake, making the right to bear arms an individual right in the U.S. Constitution? Hofstadter attributes these “flaws” in Jefferson and the other founders to “reverting to one of the genial fictions . . . the ancient Saxon militia.”
Killing, looting, burning, raping, and terrorizing Indians were traditions in each of the colonies long before the Constitutional Convention. “Militias,” as in government-controlled units, were institutionalized by Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the U.S. Constitution, and were used to officially invade and occupy Native land. But the Second Amendment (like the other ten amendments) enshrined an individual right. The Second Amendment’s language specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land.
Asserting this scattershot guess about the origin of the Second Amendment, Hofstadter offers no tie-in between this genealogy and the astronomical number of guns possessed in this country. So he settles on the National Rifle Association: “American legislators have been inordinately responsive to the tremendous lobby maintained by the National Rifle Association, in tandem with gunmakers and importers, military sympathizers, and far-right organizations. A nation that could not devise a system of gun control after its experiences of the 1960s [referring to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy], and at a moment of profound popular revulsion against guns, is not likely to get such a system in the calculable future. One must wonder how grave a domestic gun catastrophe would have to be in order to persuade us. How far must things go?”
Hofstadter’s argument is important, not just because he was an influential liberal historian of the United States who penned the classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” but because his arguments about guns in 1970 have been used and repeated, like a mantra, ever since. Then, as now, gun-rights advocates and gun-control advocates have little basis for communicating. The great divide reflects, rather remarkably, the persistence of pro-gun narratives that have morphed as times changed over two centuries, from westward expansion, industrialization, and urbanization, to the advent of movies, television, and the Internet. Gun ownership appears irrational if not insane to gun-control advocates, while gun lovers rely on the Second Amendment, because they have no other argument and don’t wish to admit, perhaps even to themselves, what the Second Amendment signifies. Neither party seems to have any idea what the Second Amendment was originally about, although many who “cling to their guns”5 intuit why.
This blind spot, as well as the racism and erasure of history, can be seen in the following example. After retiring, the late Warren E. Burger, who served as the fifteenth chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986, wrote a long and impassioned plea for gun control, arguing that the Second Amendment was dated and no longer valid. Significantly, he published his commentary in Parade magazine, not a law journal. “Let’s look at the history,” Burger wrote. “First, many of the 3.5 million people living in the 13 original Colonies depended on wild game for food, and a good many of them required firearms for their defense from marauding Indians.”6
There is no doubt that the United States is exceptional among wealthy nations—and even many poorer nations—in legal permissiveness about gun ownership, as well as in gun deaths per capita. By 2016, nearly all the states allowed open carry for firearms with various limitations regarding licensing, loaded or unloaded, weapons training or not, gun types, and so on. The holdouts not allowing open carry were California, Illinois, Florida, and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey allow open carry for handguns but prohibit open carry of long guns, while New York and South Carolina allow open carry for long guns but prohibit open carry for handguns.7
Total gun deaths in the United States average around 37,000 a year, with two-thirds of those deaths being suicides, leaving approximately 12,000 homicides, a thousand of those at the hands of the police.8 Mass shootings—ones that leave four or more people wounded or dead—now occur in the United States, on average, at the pace of one or more per day.9 Disturbing as that fact is, mass shootings currently account for only 2 percent of gun killings annually.10 The number of gun deaths—37,000—is roughly equal to death-by-vehicle incidents in the United States per year. To lawfully drive a vehicle, a person must acquire and maintain a driver’s license and drive a car that is registered and insured. A car owner may be fined for driving with a visible safety flaw on the vehicle, such as a taillight out, and a driver may be stopped at any time by authorities and can easily lose the right to drive, among other restrictions. The high rate of traffic fatalities begs the question of how effective gun restrictions would be. Heavy drinking while driving causes nearly three times as many deaths as guns each year in the United States, despite restrictions on the buying, selling, and public use of alcohol. It is necessary to look elsewhere for what causes firearms proliferation and gun deaths; it is necessary to seek out the historical roots.
With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Democratic Party platform for the first time included gun control, while the Republican Party platform opposed gun control, proclaiming: “We note that those who seek to disarm citizens in their homes are the same liberals who tried to disarm our Nation during the Cold War and are today seeking to cut our national defense below safe levels.”11 In the previous three presidential elections, neither the Republican Party nor Democratic Party platforms had mentioned guns at all.
With the Democrats in control of the White House and Congress in 1993, there was no trouble passing a gun-control bill requiring background checks, commonly called the “Brady Bill” after Jim Brady, who was wounded and permanently disabled during the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Brady’s wife, Sarah, had campaigned tirelessly for background checks, which did result in a bill that was introduced in Congress in 1987, but the measure lingered without action until it was signed into law in 1993. The following year, Congress passed a ban on assault weapons but in 2004, when the statute was up for renewal, it was allowed to lapse, as it had proved largely ineffectual and unenforceable. Georgetown University law professor David Cole writes: “It is remarkably difficult to define an ‘assault weapon.’ They are semiautomatic, which means they fire a new bullet with each trigger pull, while automatically reloading. But most guns made today are semiautomatic, so the ban on assault weapons focused on the cosmetic military appearance of certain guns, and was easily evaded by alterations in design. Moreover, while gun-rights proponents are hard-pressed to offer a legitimate reason for civilians to own assault weapons, they are used in a very small proportion of gun crimes. Most crimes involve ordinary handguns.”12
Professor Cole finds a common thread of arguments condemning the National Rifle Association and does not question the organization’s powerful role, which relies on a strong electoral base throughout the country, but issues this caution:
Gun control advocates will not make progress until they recognize that the NRA’s power lies in the appeal of its ideas, its political engagement and acumen, and the intense commitments of its members. Until gun control advocates can match these features, they are unlikely to make much progress. That the gun industry may have helped construct modern gun culture does not negate the very real power that culture holds today.13
Indeed, the N.R.A. has around 5 million dues-paying members, and many millions more who support N.R.A. calls for legislative action. The N.R.A. annual budget is $300 million, only 10 percent of which goes to direct lobbying. The N.R.A. does little lobbying, but rather follows and grades every political candidate on gun rights and calls for supporting or campaigning against the candidate accordingly; it focuses on state legislators, who make most gun laws; gun-rights activists tend to focus on Congress. The N.R.A. has active affiliates in many communities