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America Is a Country In Love With Guns. That Makes Gun Control More Important, Not Less.
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” I’ve been thinking about that quote, which is from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, a lot in the weeks since the Buffalo and, then, Uvalde shootings, particularly as Republican politicians, in their desire to avoid putting any blame for the shootings on the easy availability of guns, have instead tried to talk about culture as the source of the problem.
Talking about American culture when talking about this country’s propensity for mass shootings is not a mistake. But the way these politicians talk about American culture — and, even more, the “culture” they talk about — seems almost designed to miss the point. They talk about video games and social media, or a decline in churchgoing, but never about the simple fact that America has always been a culture in love with guns, a culture that almost from the start embraced the fantasy of what the historian Richard Slotkin evocatively called “regeneration through violence.”
There are, after all, other countries that, like the U.S., have a long tradition of gun ownership, with Switzerland being the most obvious example. But in Switzerland, the cultural valence of the gun is dramatically different than in the U.S…
