Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
The issues of race and guns have been bound together since the founding of the country, and the latest mass shootings — in El Paso and Dayton — throw that connection into bold relief.
That the rant left behind by the El Paso shooter echoed the racist language of President Trump should be no surprise. Trump is a role model, of a dangerous sort, and he has demonized Mexicans, immigrants and other people of color, speaking of an “invasion” of migrants and denigrating our “infested” cities.
Trump’s racism is not new. What’s new is that racism so overt and destructive should emanate from the White House. Nor is the connection between racism and violence new.
Americans have loved guns all the way back to the beginning, depending on them to maintain the terror required to keep the nation’s slave population in subjugation. Of course, enforcing slavery was not the only reasons Americans have cherished their firearms; self-defense on the frontier and the hunting of game for the dinner table were important reasons for people to own and use guns. But the violence of slavery gave firearms an institutionalized role in the national life.
A new history of the Revolutionary War by Rick Atkinson, called “The British Are Coming,” describes how white people maintained control in the South. “For decades South Carolina’s militia had been designed primarily to suppress slave revolts,” Atkinson writes. “After the bloody Stono Uprising of 1739 left scores of blacks and whites dead, white men were required to carry weapons to church on Sunday and plantations had to employ at least one white for every ten blacks in servitude.” At the time, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina, 104,000 to 70,000. There was reason for white people to be afraid of the wrath of the people they were oppressing.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, Charleston, South Carolina, was the wealthiest of the colonial cities — richer than Philadelphia or New York City or Boston — serving as a trading hub for all the commodities raised in the Carolina lowlands by slave labor. When Americans rebelled against British rule, one of the ways the British sought to foment trouble among the rebels was by offering freedom to slaves who fled to the British. The British formed military units out of freed slaves in order to fight the American slave owners.
Thus, the War for Independence was not about independence for black people. Rather the Founders took steps to protect the right of Americans to maintain the militias they needed to safeguard their human property. The Second Amendment is written to reflect that need: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It wasn’t until 2008 that the U.S. Supreme Court found that the words of the Second Amendment guaranteed the individual’s right to bear arms, apart from the needs of a militia.
The most recent mass shootings have shown once again what happens when free access to firearms is connected to racist hatred. But that too is an old story. When Reconstruction ended following the Civil War and the racist terror of Jim Crow took hold, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups carried out a decades-long campaign of lynching and the kind of impressed labor that has been called “slavery by another name.” Access to firearms was essential to white supremacy.
But the right to bear arms is not absolute. When the Black Panthers decided to arm themselves in the 1960s, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California became an advocate of laws banning the open carry of firearms. Extending Second Amendment rights to black people was dangerous enough in Reagan’s mind to justify limits on gun rights.
Of course, even the Heller decision in 2008 held out the possibility that some limits on gun ownership would be permissible, and the battles raging over gun control in recent years are about what limits might be considered reasonable. Until now significant action to foster gun safety has been stymied by fear induced by the NRA and the cowardice of politicians, who have resisted change even after the lengthening catalog of recent horrors, from Sandy Hook to Orlando to Pittsburgh to El Paso to Dayton.
But amid this ongoing horror, it’s possible even for Republicans to change their tune. Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont had resisted new gun control laws until the arrest last year of Jack Sawyer, who had planned a mass shooting at Fair Haven Union School. In April last year Scott signed legislation expanding background checks to private sales, raising to 21 the age of firearm buyers, banning bump stocks and limiting the magazine size for rifles and handguns. His conservative base howled in protest, and his popularity took a hit among Republicans, but the governor said news of Sawyer’s plans for Fair Haven had “jolted” him.
The governor of Ohio has followed suit in the aftermath of the attack in Dayton. Gov. Mike DeWine, a conservative Republican, has introduced proposals, including what is being called a “red flag” law, which is meant to flag down dangerous individuals who should be kept away from guns. It is something Democrats have been pushing for years.
In Vermont, one of the whitest states, the fondness for firearms has more to do with hunting and other traditional uses than with race, but the issue remains a volatile one. Nationwide, the vulnerability of racial minorities to gun violence remains acute.
Police shootings of young black men captured public attention with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, five years ago and then a sequence of additional killings, all of them senseless. But the killing of black men by police is old news to black people, the continuing legacy of Jim Crow and attitudes of fear and hostility that are deeply embedded in the culture.
The moving 2015 book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, called “Between the World and Me,” was written as a letter to his son, exploring the layers of fear, anger, apprehension and alienation that black men face in life. It was a version of the talk that black fathers customarily have with their sons about how to stay alive in a world that is hostile to them. It is a hostility that young white boys are seldom aware of.
The very idea of race, according to Coates, is a creation of white people to identify and sequester a subservient class of people. In Trump’s rhetoric they include invading Mexican “rapists” as well as the residents of our “infested” cities. If, as a leader of the nation, you have warned the people that an invasion is under way, some are likely to take action, and the history and culture of the nation have guaranteed that the weaponry needed to carry on with the legacy of the Klan is available.
At times the federal government has specifically targeted the Klan for prosecution because it was plainly a terrorist organization working to secure white supremacy. The assaults now under way by white supremacists emanate from a much looser and more ill-defined organization — the haters who congregate around websites. Even Klan members have free speech rights, as do visitors to websites. But racist violence, fueled by a president who smiles at threats of violence, must become a renewed focus of law enforcement, of new gun safety laws, and above all, of awareness of how our long history continues to play out in the highly charged present moment.
