Opinion

How to reckon with the cult of the gun

I live in Texas, where gun culture is extraordinarily seductive. I could go this weekend for a fun day at a range and shoot an AR-15 with friends. Gun shows are family-friendly events. And I have to say, shooting guns is fun. And like any hobby, it gives people, men especially, a sense of identity and community.

In the United States, the holy symbol for our cult is the gun, and its sacred text is the Second Amendment. So how do we combat the cult of toughness? How do we stem the creation of criminals?

These were the topics under discussion at a conference I attended last weekend at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society, where researchers, lawyers, historians and movement workers grappled with the role of firearms in American life.

One interesting idea, brought up at the conference dinner, was how religious communities, particularly churches, could act as centers of spiritual resistance to America’s cult of gun death. As a former evangelical Christian, I grew up seeing people renounce all manner of things to deepen their faith in God. I remember seeing people bring empty alcohol bottles to church, pledging to give up drinking. Others testified to giving up drugs. What if prominent pastors and spiritual influencers were to begin renouncing guns?

After all, the Bible says, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you.” And holding a gun in that hand, having guns in a household, makes it easier for people in a household to violate (intentionally or accidentally) the sixth commandment — “thou shall not kill.” This being the case, simple deductive reasoning raises a question: Shouldn’t guns be cast out of Christian homes?

What if conservative, gun-owning pastors were to set an example, give up their guns to honor God and challenge their congregations to walk in faith, not in a spirit of fear?

I was thinking this over after the conference, on my flight back to Dallas. When I landed, a news alert hit my phone.

“Gunman reported at Allen Premium Outlets: Multiple Casualties.”

Home Front: Mass shootings, race matters

My column this week was a dispatch from the Allen Premium Outlets, a day after the gunman, identified by police as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, opened fire at the busy shopping mall. He killed eight people and wounded seven others. It was the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year.

I wrote that I grew up going to the Allen outlets with my family, and since moving back to Texas, I’ve shopped there again. It’s profoundly shocking to think that a place that brought joy to North Texas families is now the site of such a horrific tragedy.

Here in Dallas, people have expressed frustration at law enforcement authorities’ slowness to release information. But what we do know is that authorities have said that Garcia, who was of Hispanic descent, expressed neo-Nazi sympathies, a hatred of women and white-supremacist views. Officials are treating the shooting as a case of racially motivated violent extremism.

Allen, and North Texas as a whole, is becoming increasingly diverse, with Asians being the fastest-growing group. At least half of those killed in the Allen massacre were of Asian descent.

All of this has led to the question: Can people of color be white supremacists?

Of course, y’all know my answer is a big “yes.” Over at the Nation, Joan Walsh tackles this idea head on in a piece headlined “White Supremacists Don’t Have to Be White”:

Just like rape is not about sex, but power, white supremacy is all about power. It’s sad but it shouldn’t be shocking that a troubled 30-something named Garcia might want to grab that power for himself. He has company: Look at Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted last week of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, or anti-Semitic incel Nick Fuentes. Both have Hispanic heritage.

— Joan Walsh

One thing I predict, though: Garcia isn’t going to get the post-massacre sympathetic treatment from the media that White mass shooters do.

A 2018 study from Ohio State University found that “white shooters were 95 percent more likely to be described as ‘mentally ill’ than black shooters,” and that White shooters were more likely to be described as victims of society in some way — isolated, under stress, and so forth.

A Frontiers in Psychology study published last year found that perpetrators racialized as Black were more likely to be covered in ways that flatly situate them as “violent threats to the public,” while White male shooters were more likely to receive more nuanced and sympathetic coverage, and to be characterized with more complexity.

So far, I’ve not heard many attempts at compassionate coverage toward Garcia, and I doubt we will. Of course, I don’t think he or any deranged killer deserves the “but he was such a nice boy” type of coverage. But I do think that as this country grows more diverse, this is surely not the last time a non-White mass killer will slaughter people in the name of white supremacy. Ultimately, we should disavow hate and violence, no matter the killers’ origins or color.

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