Getting Ready for Whatever Comes Next
More on Firearms Ownership
Next semester I am teaching for the second time a course called, Firearms: Technology, History, and Politics. In order to be competent to teach this course, I have taken, and continue to take, firearms training courses. I also regularly go to a gun range in New Jersey to practice.
Last weekend, my wife and I went to the range together. We rented a lane, and I started setting everything up when I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder. (That's how you get someone's attention on the firing line so that you don't startle them, potentially leading to an accident.) I turned around and my wife said, "I'm going out."
Now, my wife was born in the Bronx, but she has relatives back in Northern Ireland, and has vivid memories of visiting them as a child. One of those memories is watching as a car of her relatives was pursued by a British military helicopter. The relatives were only returned after "enhanced interrogation." As a result of the atmosphere she experienced during the visit, she is sometimes shy around firearms. Consequently, I initially assumed that she left the range because it was busy that day and the sound of all the shooting was getting to her.
A few minutes later, though, my wife — who is a remarkably good judge of character — texted me a different explanation for why she was uncomfortable on the range that day: "The guy next to you is f***ing scary." She went on to note that the man in the lane next to ours was shooting a magazine from his AR-15, then drawing multiple pistols from concealment as each magazine was emptied. "He's prepping" for something, she concluded.
Prepping for what? Well, a letter entitled "Brown Round-up Part 1" has circulated in Oregon, calling on people to record the license plates of "brown people" and submit them to Homeland Security after Donald Trump's inauguration. (I had initially planned to link to a New York Times article about this, but the NYT article — curiously — did NOT include mention the title of the letter.) In addition, the Nassau County Executive, Bruce Blakeman, who is a vocal Trump supporter, recently created an armed militia, separate from the police force and answerable only to him. What will the militia be used for? Blakeman explained that he would call it up "in an emergency” — and he would decide what an emergency is.
After my wife texted me, I discreetly stepped back from the firing line and looked over the guy in the next lane. I got the same tingly sense of menace that my wife had. Of course, maybe our reads of this guy are off. Maybe my wife and I are just being paranoid. However, as I confess to my students during my Firearms course, this is why I am ambivalent about civilian firearms ownership. I have gone on record saying that there is no Constitutional right to private ownership of semiautomatic firearms. In addition, the empirical evidence is overwhelming that private firearms ownership causes more innocent deaths, not fewer. (See also this collection of graphs.)
My experiences of firearms growing up were ambivalent. I was raised in Deer Hunter country, a part of Pennsylvania where almost everybody owns firearms and knows how to shoot. I remember at a certain time of every year in high school there was an announcement over the PA system: "Teacher are reminded that 'first day of deer hunting season' is not a valid excuse for missing class, even if the note is signed by a parent or guardian." I was fascinated by firearms, and I sometimes shot friends' guns; however, I never owned a rifle, pistol, or shotgun growing up. My parents certainly would have bought me one if I had asked, so why didn’t I? My family was a little chaotic when I was a teenager, with lots of angry, drunken fights between my parents. I think I knew that introducing a firearm into this situation was a recipe for disaster.
After I completed college and graduate school, a further experience made me reluctant to pursue my interest in firearms. I got a letter from one of my friends who was still living in our home town. He told me that a mutual friend had killed his wife and himself in a murder-suicide. His wife, who was his high-school sweetheart and another friend of ours, was apparently about to leave him, so he shot her multiple times in the back, wrote an apology note, and shot himself in their front yard.
Fast forward to 2020. While walking my dog around the block, I noticed one of my neighbors was flying a variant of the US flag, with the Roman numeral III in the blue canton, surrounded by 13 stars. I looked it up, and discovered that it is a symbol of the "Three Percenters," a militant far-right ideology.
Once you learn to recognize their symbol, you'll see it all around: tattoos, bumper stickers...and occasionally on police uniforms. Are police allowed to wear partisan political symbols on their uniforms? No, but who are you going to call to enforce that rule?
The same year was also when Trump told the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” I started to wonder whether I might want to own a firearm.
If I feel this way, who am I to tell people of color, women, Jews, Muslims, and the LGBTQ+ community that they should disarm and trust the police to protect them from violence? (The range I go to in New Jersey has an impressively diverse clientele.) The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his home was firebombed in 1956. His request was denied by the local authorities, and King later decided that he didn’t want to own any firearms, calling for nonviolent protest in his seminal “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In contrast, Malcolm X did not rule out the use of violence in the civil rights struggle, and offered Americans a stark choice between “The Ballot or the Bullet.” (I teach both essays in my Firearms course.) Malcolm X was an inspiration for the Black Panther Party, which successfully used armed civilian patrols to respond to police brutality (until then-governor Ronald Reagan cracked down on them with the Mulford Act of 1967).
More recently, when admitted white supremacist (and Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes posted on Twitter/X after the election, "Your body, my choice. Forever,” there were dozens of responses from women showing their firearms or their targets. One of my favorite responses to Fuentes was an Instagram reel — apparently since deleted — by a female scientist and science educator, who posted a video of her face smiling enigmatically, while you hear (off camera) what are unmistakably the sounds of a semiautomatic pistol being loaded with a magazine, charged, and slipped into a holster.
Incidentally, there is a fun coda to the Fuentes story. Fuentes was doxed soon after his post, and a woman named Marla Rose decided to ring his doorbell to see if it really was his address. Fuentes was (allegedly) so terrified when a petite, vegan woman in her 50s rang his doorbell that he body slammed and pepper-sprayed her. Geez, if this is the "master race," I'd hate to see the qualifying heat! (Not my joke, but I forget where I first heard it.) In a since-deleted Facebook post, Rose added a detail I have not been able to find elsewhere. When the police showed up, she asked about pressing assault charges against Fuentes, and the police discouraged her, saying, "Well, you DID knock on his door."
Back to my wife and me at the range on Saturday. I texted her, "Do you want to try to come back to the firing line and shoot?"
"Yes, I want to shoot."
My wife took my place on the firing line and neatly placed all her rounds right in the center of the paper target's body mass.
Turning back to me, she smiled and said, "Now I'm ready for whatever comes next."
Bryan W. Van Norden is a professor at a liberal arts college. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of his employer or his colleagues.
Thanks for this.
The link supposed the lead to a story about Bruce Blakeman instead leads to your Facebook page.
I grew up in rural Minnesota, where most people had guns. I knew their names: 4-10, 12 gauge, 16 gauge, 22, deer rifle (probably 30 caliber, I never asked). Very few pistols and no automatic weapons. I only remember anyone talking about using guns against people twice. One was aHS guy just back from Texas, and the other was a well-known local creepy jerk.
My father was an MD with training in WWII military medicine, and he didn't own a gun. He only went hunting once in my memory and came back angry. My guess is that he saw some drunk guy carelessly waving a gun around.