At one of the two No Kings protests held in Richmond, Virginia this past weekend, one of the speakers urged attendees to go out and buy a gun and exercise their Second Amendment rights. There was no call to violence in his statement, just a call to arms.
I’m not sure how well that comment went over with those in attendance, but I’m pretty sure that if California writer Matt Stone had been in the audience he would have turned tomato-faced with rage. In a diatribe for the Davis Vanguard, Stone has taken aim at “the gun,’ which, in his mind, has primarily (and perhaps only) been a tool of oppression for hundreds of years.
To understand the American obsession with firearms, you have to strip away the nostalgia and look at the ledger. The gun was the specific technology required to seize a continent and build an economy. It was the instrument that turned “uninhabited” land into private property and human beings into chattel. The Second Amendment was not drafted in a vacuum of philosophical abstraction. It was drafted to protect the state militias, whose primary function, explicitly cited in the text, was to execute the “Law of the Union” and suppress “Insurrections.” In the language of the time, that meant one thing: killing Native Americans to clear the land and terrorizing enslaved Africans to keep the labor force in check.
I could devote this entire post to debunking just this paragraph, but I’ll settle for the Cliff’s Notes version since there’s so much more stupidity to cover. Chattel slavery existed long before the musket ever came into existence, and the African slavers who were the source of the millions of souls trapped in bondage weren’t dependent on firearms.
The Second Amendment was drafted, in part, to ensure that militias, which were comprised of every able-bodied male from young adulthood to old age, would not be destroyed by an act of Congress, but it was also meant to ensure that the people’s right to keep and bear arms outside of those militia purposes would not be infringed. Stone is simply off his rocker when he claims that “insurrections” only meant targeting Native Americans and “terrorizing” slaves. Even if Stone had referred to putting down slave revolts (which did fall under “insurrections”), it’s just flat out false to say those were the only “insurrections” in the colonies where the militia was used to stop the disorder.
Most famously, Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts was put down by militia forces, though not local militias that were sympathetic to Daniel Shays and his supporters. Even before the War of Independence, though, militias were regularly called out to restore order during riots periods of civil unrest. Militias responded to the bread riots in New Jersey and New York in the mid 1700s, not only serving as internal security but also guarding and escorting shipments of grain.
To be fair, in many of these instances some militia members were reluctant to police or use force against their fellow citizens, but the militias still played an active role in helping to quell disorder in situations where there was no conflict with native tribes or slaves held in bondage.
Stone’s historical revisionism continues, with his claims that the “”frontiersman’s rifle was not for deer,” but rather “the dispossession of the indigenous nations.” The conflicts that raged along the frontier, even in the early years of the Republic, were primarily addressed through government action, with frontiersmen using their muskets in both individual and collective self-defense as well as small-scale offensive campaigns.
When we talk about the modern “gun kink,” we are talking about the residue of this foundational power. The gun is not fetishized because it is a tool; it is fetishized because it is a symbol of dominance. It is the object that promises to restore the order that the modern world threatens. For the settler fearing the “savage,” the gun was security. For the slave owner fearing the uprising, the gun was control. Today, for a demographic witnessing the erosion of its social primacy, the gun is the last anchor of identity. It is the tangible object that says, “I still have the power.”
Boy, Stone must hate the fact that more folks on the left are deciding to exercise their Second Amendment rights. I’m not going to bother engaging in Stone’s psychobabble, other than to note that the gun was security for newly-freed slaves, and even for those shepherding slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. By the late 1800s, the Winchester repeating rifle (the AR-15 of its day) deserved “a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give,” as Ida B. Wells put it.
Stone says the gun is fetishized because it is a symbol of dominance. I’d say its revered because its a tool of equality. The Second Amendment, properly understood, is the right of the underdog to bear arms in individual and collective self-defense. Those in charge don’t need the broad protections of the Second Amendment. As we saw in “may issue” regimes, the chosen few will always be allowed access to firearms, even when the majority of the people are prohibited from doing so. Under a robust Second Amendment, however, the people as a whole can keep and bear arms, including members of disfavored groups and demographics.
There’s more to Stone’s screed, but you get the gist. He thinks guns are bad and they should go away, though like most prohibitionists he never does get around to offering his plan to disarm the American people. Stone has every right to express his displeasure with the Second Amendment, but he’s on the losing side of the argument over our right to keep and bear arms. In the time it took for him to write and post his complaints to the Internet, hundreds of Americans became new gun owners. Even if Stone and his ilk were to succeed in stripping the Second Amendment out of hte Constitution, there’s no way they’re going to get the guns that rightfully belong to the 80 to 100-million of us who own them.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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