“If activists want to make headway on reining in gun violence, they need to understand gun culture.” So opines the subtitle of a recent article in Texas Monthly about why there will be no grassroots movement coming out of the Lone Star State after the Santa Fe school massacre. It’s a mistake, we learn from a Houstonian who wrote the piece, “to harbor the liberal East Coast condescension” that Texans who carry firearms are crazy. No one is quoted with those words about Yankee snobs, so it must be taken for granted by the reader that they exist as a widespread phenomenon. One particular paragraph should be repeated in full here, because otherwise you might think I’m making it up:
“Hunting and plinking at cans are recalled fondly by many in Texas as bonding activities with their parents. Guns are heirlooms passed down through generations and are used to hunt the Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas goose. Moreover, millions nationwide participate in tactical or sharpshooting competitions and belong to gun clubs that are the focal points of their social lives. Those enmeshed in gun culture take pride in their safety-mindedness and technical skills as well as their ability to protect themselves and their families if necessary.”
Exactly, yes. Searching American history for an analogous cultural identity marker that was as divisive as gun ownership, let us consider slavery, which was also a deeply embedded feature of selfhood embraced by countless Texans on all rungs of the social ladder–rednecks, politicians, attorneys, grandmothers, professors, clergy, journalists, etc, etc, etc. The shelves of a good university library today, even in the South, groan under the weight of scholarship devoted to portraying the antebellum normalcy of human beings as livestock, whether you owned some or not. Telling abolitionists in those days that they needed to accept the validity of the pro-slavery point of view led straight to Gettysburg.
So we can only pray–they do this everywhere in Texas, too, I hear from my book-lined study on the East Coast–that the editors and writers at Texas Monthly may come miraculously to see gun control or, dare we say, gun abolition (take that concealed handgun from granny right now!) as a moral and sociopolitical imperative, thereby joining not only the haughty East Coast, but every advanced nation in the world.
