Abigail A. Kohn Shooters, Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures (2003)

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.They are tried-and-truegun enthusiasts, loving the flash and the bang and, in some cases, the intri�cacies of expensive but temperamental firearms that need a delicate touch.Cowboy shooting is an elaborate costume ball almost every weekend inwhich men indulge their closeted desire for sartorial splendor and womencan be tough and feminine simultaneously, with no one batting an eyelash.This is Halloween for adults, in the words of one shooter, where shooterscan be Wyatt Earp or John Wayne, and the only limitations are budget andimagination.The Wild West in the SuburbsCowboy shooters are using their sport and their love of guns to keep theWest alive in a wide variety of ways.By ritually reenacting how the West waswon on a local community level, cowboy shooters are using the Frontier asthe idiom to express their pride in their American heritage.This is whatcowboy action shooting is about: predominantly white, middle-class Amer�icans claim a national identity, or even a white middle-class identity, usingthe authentic Wild West of the cowboy range as their venue.This is one ofthe primary ways that shooters use mythic history to contextualize their loveof guns.Guns are so thoroughly intertwined with mythic history that shoot�ers cannot think about guns without referring to images of citizen soldiersdefending the republic or hardened cowboys riding across lonely westernplains, carving out civilized spaces in the hostile American wilderness.Amer�ican mythic history conveys the sense that the earliest American heroes andpatriots wielded their guns almost naturally, so naturally that it s almost im�possible to imagine them without their guns.This is the principal reasonthat mythic history links guns so powerfully and persuasively to broaderAmerican core values for shooters.Performing mythic history during cowboy action shoots thus serves sev�eral purposes for these suburban cowboys.These shooters are ostensiblyperforming culturally meaningful rituals.They are working on a culturalproblem (or several at once), stated or unstated, and then work various op�erations upon it, arriving at solutions reorganizations and reinterpreta�tions of the elements that produce a newly meaningful whole. 11 In the con-cowboy acti on shooti ng 53text of cowboy action shooting, shooters focus on the most important sym�bol, the one that holds these rituals together: the gun.The cultural problemthey re addressing is the stigma attached both to guns and the people whoown them.By analyzing a ritual symbol like the gun, we can thus attemptto understand the questions of structural conflict, contradiction, and stressin the wider social and cultural world. 12 In other words, analyzing whatguns mean to shooters, we can understand why guns are important culturalsymbols more generally.We can then more easily understand the kinds ofcultural stresses and frustrations that shooters face in their lives more gen�erally, which will provide a window into stresses and frustrations that allAmericans face, whether they choose to own guns or not.54 the anthropol ogy of gun enthusi asmPART TWOThe Meanings of GunsThis page intentionally left blankThe possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.He, whothinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defendhimself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.14Citizen SoldiersColonial America and Early RepublicanismIn the 2000 movie The Patriot, South Carolina farmer/landowner BenjaminMartin (played by Mel Gibson) reluctantly rejoins the colonial militia to takeon the British during the Revolutionary War.With his wily bravery and un�orthodox battle strategies, Martin embodies the ideal citizen soldier, dis�playing the kind of courage and principle that Americans have always imag�ined marked the early militiamen.The Patriot assures viewers that abstractpolitical principles can have significant personal impact, and that in Amer�ican mythic history, wars and violent conflicts forge timeless links betweenmanhood, citizenship, and patriotism.Such mythic (re)tellings continue toresonate with how Americans process their own history, as the success ofsuch movies demonstrate at the box office.2There are a number of philosophical strains that contributed to how colo�nial Americans understood citizen gun ownership.These philosophies werecarried over with early colonists from seventeenth-century Britain but werereshaped and reformulated relatively quickly in the early American experi�ence, eventually providing the ideological foundations of the American Rev�olutionary War.Eminent historians have pointed out that one of the mostimportant of these philosophical paradigms was republicanism, also calledcivic humanism.3 This paradigm was so ingrained in the rhetoric of latecolonial theorists and activists that it would be impossible to ignore as animportant component of the configuration of early American principles andvalues.4Republicanism at its most basic is an ideological system that was used toboth support and critique the British monarchal system of government.Arepublic is a state governed by and for the people, those citizens who lit�erally and figuratively compose the state.The political ideology of republi�canism had its roots in classical antiquity: the Greek and Roman philo�sophers who wrote of patriotism and a love of virtue and liberty were theearliest republicans.American colonists contrasted their idealized vision ofa classic republic with their own time and their political struggles with theBritish system.They perceived the British monarchy as a corrupt power thatchallenged their own provincial but heartfelt values of freedom, liberty,and rustic purity.5Colonial governments required citizens to arm themselves and form cit�izen militias.Because the government recognized that armed citizens wereneeded in specific areas for the protection and maintenance of the localeconomy, the government called for volunteers or drafted quotas from var�ious companies.In the years before the Revolution, officers complained aboutpoor training (e.g., their men wouldn t march or obey orders, displayedpoor soldiering skills) and poor attendance.Yet colonial Americans recog�nized the notion of militia as inherently valuable, in part because it repre�sented a departure from the notion of a standing army, but also because itsconceptual vagueness meant it remained in the colonial mind as synony�mous with the idea of defense itself: against general emergencies, Indianattacks, or foreign aggression.6 Early European colonizers realized quicklyenough that they were ill-prepared for such a harsh wilderness.Thus, themilitia was more a concept of defense, practiced very differently than its or�ganization on paper would suggest.7The mythology of the American citizen soldier rested in large part on hisskill with a rifle.Despite the fact that seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryfirearms were inaccurate and cumbersome, these guns were indispensablefor settlers in terms of hunting game, protecting land from predators, andconfronting or defending against hostile Indian forces.8 American colonistsbrought with them some decidedly English attitudes toward arming them�selves, not simply for militia purposes but also for self-defense.However, theways these customs were modified in the new American colonies differenti�ated them from their practice in England.9 The need for firearms in all ar�eas of life was so great that early colonial governments encouraged the no�tion of an armed citizenry, which in turn gave birth to a new and stronglyheld vision of civic responsibility [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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