Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Friday, February 16, 2018
GUNS AND AMERICAN IDENTITY
GUNS AND AMERICAN IDENTITY
Guns are deeply tied into issues, tissues, of white American identity.
Chattel slavery for hundreds of years of imported Africans, who were denied basic personhood, and all civil rights, was the reason for these white slave master fears.
White fears were easily stoked of reciprocal vengeance, retribution, that might be visited upon whites, by armed blacks, such as had been visited upon the blacks, by some whites, were they armed with guns.
Thus it was illegal for slaves to own guns, except under white officers; in times of national peril or crisis, i.e. the American Revolution, War of 1812, the Civil War, or World Wars.
Thus, the 2nd Amendment and its white "fantasy" of imperviousness to some hypothetical black violent form of recompense has had great white political appeal. This bootleg lying "fantasy" has been rigorously planted, cultivated, harvested by white terrorists, law enforcement officials, Democrats, Dixiecrats, Republicans, the National Rifle Association, or other opportunists.
Guns are, of course, objective . But the gun owners were all selectively subjective . Particularly susceptible to such subjectivity are those who are insidiously beholden to banal American identity issues like white supremacy, fascism, and Nazism.
But, with the continued assimilation of African Americans into the body politic, after the fall of segregation, black cultural influences have been vigorously saturating the American mainstream in music, television, sports, fashion, schools, literature , even in politics with the election of black mayors, sheriffs, legislators, governors, judges, and President. Blacks have also broken through in the business realm with a slice of millionaires and billionaires of note.
Now in wake of all these inexorable developments, in Parkland , Florida, where there have been maniacal mass murders by, yet another white man, this one, a former student at the high school, who slew 17 of his majority white, former classmates-indiscriminately and irrationally, the guns culture has broken an axle. Its lost, balancing, white power axle logic cannot carry the farcical load of latent black avengers. It was, it is nothing but mindless gun-mayhem.
So, though the 2nd Amendment's historical roots may well have been crucially based in white enslavers' fears of black slave revolts in 1791, and may have morphed into black economic and political power fears into Reconstruction and past it; the 20th century was not so much about white fear as white terrorists' repression, suppression of blacks, who merely sought respect and self-sufficiency. But, now, since the nonviolent civil rights movements' bevy of lawyers, students, civil rights organizations, churches, in the 1930s-1960s, it is clear that white fear of black vengeance, was but a misplaced, displaced, canard.
With the abundance of guns and the loss of any associative rationale for their ubiquity, besides the guns themselves, this has led to a vapid dissociative personality disorder of epidemiological proportions! A mentality of "me and my right to possession of my guns" is all that matters . No other lives , whether male, female, old, young, black, white, Hispanic , Asian, disabled, Muslim, Christian , American, or immigrant, is of consequence. Pure narcissism is this very strange fruit!