Richard Slotkin on Guns and Violence. Dec 13, 2013.
https://billmoyers.com/segment/richard-slotkin-on-guns-and-violence/
Slotkin is most known for his trilogy on the Mythology of guns in the history of America.
- Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973)
- Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985)
- Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)
American progress is primarily defined by violence, whether it be against the Other - other humans who are understood as being less than human (savage, barbarian), or against Nature. In our spiritual quest for expansion, power, land, resources, we are still emotionally fighting Native Americans, though they are in other geographic locations, and they’re called Viet Cong, Afghans, Black and Brown people, etc.
And the Mass Shooter – something very unique to America – is produced by our mythology, which includes the necessity of the individual freedom to privately use gun violence as a means of protecting one’s values. The primary factor in becoming the most powerful entity in Earth’s history is the persistent use and unquestioned sanctioning of military-like violent force in otherwise unmilitary-like contexts.
3:30 – The role of video games in training young people to become disembodied from the consequences of violence. Video games taking the same role as myth and ritual traditionally has in human society. “People will model their behavior based on what they consider to be heroic.” This of course, applies to movies [see top movies during the time of the Uvalde shooting - (1) Top Gun: Maverick, where we are mesmerized by the capabilities of multi-billion dollar military war planes/machines; (2) Doctor Strange 2, where sorcerers travel “multiverses” to kill each other; and (3) The Batman, where a serial killer torments Gotham. ie mass violence is normalized, is a preferred from entertainment, and is a preferred and accepted form of dealing with various kinds of social and private tension].
5:40 – Appeal of Transgression. Purposefully doing something that will get attention because it is so outrageous. Violating the norms (because the norms are so boring, shallow, dullardistic).
9:05 – “We produce the lone killer. That is to say the lone killer is trying to validate himself or herself in terms of the, I would call the historical mythology, of our society, wants to place himself in relation to meaningful events in the past that lead up to the present.”
9:45 – Why young men tend to be the perpetrators. “I've always felt that it has something to do, in many cases, with a sense of lost privilege, that men and white men in the society feel their position to be imperiled and their status called into question. And one way to deal with an attack on your status in our society is to strike out violently.”
11:45 – “We have the gun as a symbol of productive violence in our history. It has magical properties for a lot of people.”
19:45 – “The thing that's different, that's exceptional about American gun culture, so called, is the license that we grant for the private use of deadly force. Other countries have similar levels of guns in the home
…what we have in this country is we have a history in which certain kinds of violence are associated for us with the growth of the republic, with the definition of what it is to be an American. And because we are also devoted to the notion of democratic individualism, we take that glorification of social violence, historical violence, political violence, and we grant the individual a kind of parallel right to exercise it, not only to protect life and property but to protect one's honor and to protect one's social or racial status. In the past that has been a legitimate grounds.
…I'm thinking of the Jim Crow era in the south where if a black man is walking on the sidewalk and towards a white man and the black man refuses to give the sidewalk he can be-- any sort of violence can be safely visited upon him because no jury will convict. Cases where-- another book that I wrote about in which a successful black farmer refused to sell his crop, this was in South Carolina, for the stated price. And events escalated from a personal attack to ultimately lynching. So we’ve granted to private citizens the right to police the racial boundary and the social boundary.”
21:30 – “The founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather they were those who … tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness."
21:55 – “The United States is a settler state. And this begins with colonial outposts in the wilderness. And our origin has a story then, has to be how did we go from being these small outposts to being the mightiest nation on planet earth? Well, we did it by pushing the boundaries of the settlement out into Indian country. We did it by ultimately fighting wars against Native Americans, driving them out, displacing them, exterminating them in some cases.
And in the process of pushing our boundaries out, we acquired certain heroic virtues-- an ability to fight cleverly both as individuals and cooperatively, and a connection with nature which is particularly critical. As a country really develops you get a kind of American exceptionalist notion of progress, which is that American progress is achieved not by man exploiting man, but it's achieved by conquering nature, by taking resources from nature, farmland originally, timber resources, ultimately gold, minerals, oil and so on. In the American model, in order for it to work, you have to say that Native Americans, Indians, are not quite human. And therefore they, like trees in the forest, are legitimate objects of creative destruction. And similarly blacks, African Americans, are legitimate objects of exploitation because they are considered to be not fully human.
So what you get in this, the evolution of the American national myth, really up through the Civil War is the creation of America as a white man's republic in which, different from Europe, if you're white, you're all right. You don't have to be an aristocrat born to have a place in the society. You don't absolutely even have to be Anglo-Saxon, although it helps.
But so among whites you can have democracy. But the white democracy depends on the murder, the extermination, the driving out of Native Americans and the enslavement of blacks. Both of those boundaries, the western frontier, the Indian frontier, and the slave frontier, are boundaries created and enforced by violence, either literal or latent, potential violence.”
- This violence leads directly to modern police violence and mass shootings.
27:00 – ‘And Colt-- one of Colt's original marketing ploys was to market it to slave owners. Here you are, a lone white man, overseer or slave owner, surrounded by black people. Suppose your slaves should rise up against you. Well, if you've got a pair of Colt's pistols in your pocket, you are equal to twelve slaves. And that's “The Equalizer,” that it's not all men are created equal by their nature. It's that I am more equal than others because I've got extra shots in my gun.”
28:00 – “The equalizer [the privately owned pistol] doesn't produce equality. What it produces is privilege. If I have six shots in my gun and you've got one, I can outvote you by five shots. Any man better armed than his neighbors is a majority of one.
And that's the equalizer fallacy. It goes to this notion that the gun is the guarantor of our liberties. We're a nation of laws, laws are the guarantors of our liberties. If your rights depend on your possession of a firearm, then your rights end when you meet somebody with more bullets or who's a better shot or is meaner than you are.”
29:00 – Two differences in American violence vs historically European violence:
(1) Settler state violence. It’s legitimated when directed against Native Americans, Mexicans, anyone outside the boundaries of civilized society, or against a enslaved class.
(2) Democratic Individualism. We grant to right to kill to individuals in a way that European society never did. European violence tends to be social, class violence.
30:30 – post civil war society “awash” with guns. Therefore, KKK, Goon Squads, Militias, etc. Extreme social violence from Civil War to 1930s.
40:00 – Moyers: ‘You said that central to the myth, the myth of America, the myth of how we came to be is the belief that “violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.” So we invoke violence because we think it not only saves us but nurtures us and that we have some kind of obligation to use it in the service of spreading democratic values?”
Slotkin: “Yes, and it validates our beliefs, it validates our values, the things we stand for if we're willing to fight for them. Nothing validates them like combat, fighting for them. And, you know, and the frontier myth is the oldest myth. We have a couple of others that work with similar kind of power. One of the ones that I was thinking of when I wrote that was what I call the “good war myth” or the “platoon movie myth.”
And that's the-- it's the newest of our myths, it comes really out of the Second World War in which the United States, which had been always a white man's republic, an Anglo-Saxon white man's republic, becomes through the platoon movie, that ethnically and racially mixed unit now becomes a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy united how? Through war against a common enemy, a good war, a justifiable war, a necessary war, a defensive war, a war that liberates Asia and Europe through the force of American arms so that our self-transformation into all men are created equal finally, whatever their color or creed or national origin, is achieved through war and only through war.”
42:00 – Moyers: “As you know so well, President Theodore Roosevelt, back at the turn of the 20th century wrote that quote, "mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct … are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Slotkin: “Yeah, he also said that a savage war, a war against savages, is always a righteous war. And it was certainly what Roosevelt was doing there was taking the American past of Indian fighting and of conquering the west by driving the Indians out, and expanding it to an international stage.”
Moyers: “So this idea of the frontier continues to summon us, to—"
Slotkin: “Yeah. It does, although not often in as literal a way as Teddy Roosevelt would've had it. Two analogies, sort of two examples occur. One is: why is it that for liberals, I'm thinking about Obama particularly, the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity whereas the war in Iraq was a war of choice. They're both wars of choice. But the war in Afghanistan has all of the hallmarks of savage war, a primitive enemy bent on our destruction, can't make a deal with them, can't liberate them, can only destroy-- I'm thinking about the Taliban and I'm thinking about the Al Qaeda.”
- ie, Saddman Hussein wears a suit, he’s civilized. Bin Laden doesn’t, he’s a savage, less than human.
[In response to Charlton Heston at the 2000 NRA convention saying: “So as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take our 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!”
Slotkin: “I think the man's an idiot. If the government was actually the kind of government he somehow fantasizes, they would take the gun from his cold, dead hands [the government, the liberals, etc, are not trying to take his guns, but the enemy has to be exaggerated in order to fume the tribal instinct]…But think of the resentment and the fear that would lead to that kind of posturing on a public stage. That's the, to me, that's the menace of our time, that undercurrent of resentment and fear and hatred that finds an outlet in the legitimated forms of violence.”
Moyers: “Including the killing of 26 people, 20 of them children, in Newtown, Connecticut.”
Slotkin: “Yep.”