Too many urgent present-day realities are at stake in that debate, and we are accountable in and to our present. Deepening historical knowledge this way may enable more empathetic discourse but, in the end, I argue, it cannot resolve our debate about gun control. To get at this varied cultural inheritance, I sketch here guns’ role in the era of the Second Amendment, particularly in British colonial expansion and the rise of private property-and how their meaning evolved afterwards. In fact, history offers substance to both narratives about “what guns mean”-the focus of this Palgrave collection (Metzl, 2019). Meanwhile, the dispute itself drives panic gun purchases by a pro-gun community fearing imminent controls. If guns have historically been the bedrock of American liberty, so should they continue to be if they have not, they may not become so now.
While social scientists gather data about the effects of guns today, much of the debate about whether and how to regulate gun ownership is fought out on the terrain of history: What did the Second Amendment mean? Is there a tradition of gun control in America? Have Americans always been well-armed and liberally-armed? The implication is that the proper role of guns in American life today depends on their historical role: the side with the more accurate historical narrative should carry the day.
But many more Americans calling for tighter gun control today see guns themselves as tyrannical: the imperial rulers’ instruments of conquest, enslavement, and genocide, which now terrorize a generation of American school children.īoth narratives look to history for validation about the true meaning of guns in America. They credit the Second Amendment, written in 1791, for having saved the newly freed United States from the fate of Britain’s other colonies: places like India whose tight gun control laws originated in British efforts to keep arms out of the hands of anticolonial revolutionaries. Today, many Americans see guns as a symbol of freedom from tyranny.