{"id":1281,"date":"2012-12-19T22:55:02","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T22:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2012-12-21T17:22:31","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T17:22:31","slug":"gary-wills-understands-the-roots-of-americas-gun-mentality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=1281","title":{"rendered":"Garry Wills exposes the cultural roots of America’s gun mentality"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>Survivors of the Newtown massacre. Photo: policymic.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Like so many, I\u2019d love to change the Second Amendment\u2019s \u201cright to bear arms,\u201d but saving more innocent people from random gun violence will take more than that. Laws would not stop outlaws or disturbed people, although stricter gun registration would logically help restrict the odds of tragedies continuing.<\/p>\n

But the problem is deep-rooted and our peculiar American culture must change because this is a self-perpetuating view of \u201creality,\u201d in the sense that a certain percentage of people in America are still cultivated to our self-destructive Wild West mentality of protecting oneself and one\u2019s property with a gun. The powerful NRA gun lobby has saturated much of our mainstream politics with its influence, and contorted, stuck-in-the-mud-with-my-gun\u00a0rationalizations for “let ’em be” firearms laws. And gun sales have\u00a0flourished, partly from reactive fear of whatever the future might bring.<\/p>\n

That’s why Garry Wills\u2019 essay is so insightful and I think important for everyone — and especially for conservatives of conscience — to read and consider, because much of their moral grounding is Bible based. Wills\u2019 argument derives from the Bible as well, so it’s an argument that might speak to them and break the stasis of dialogue that we suffer from today, between secular liberal and evangelical conservative mindsets.<\/p>\n

He speaks of the evil Old Testament god named Moloch and it\u2019s important to understand our culture through such mythology which reveals truth and archetypes of the American sense of self, for better and worse.<\/p>\n

Wills understands the American Christian mentality as well is anyone, as he demonstrated in his wonderful book Head and Heart: American Christianities. <\/em>Among other things, it probed the oppressive darkness of America’s Puritan psyche, which retains a strong grip on our collective psychosis as a culture.<\/p>\n

In that book, he notes America’s elevation of the value of \u201cindividualism\u201d \u2013 a word our ancestors did not even possess, a term \u201cwhich we have created for our own use.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wills quotes the first great observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville: \u201cEgoism dries up the very seed of every virtue; individualism initially crushes only the impulses to public virtue, for over time it turns on and obliterates every other virtue and at last it disappears into egoism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wills continues, this antisocial urge could be blunted by \u201cthe individual\u2019s partial re-entry into society by way of voluntary associations, which served as buffers between the individual and the state\u201d (Wills, Head and Heart,<\/em> 79)<\/p>\n

The problem is that we have turned the urge into a sunny virtue, erased the negative meaning and made \u201crugged individualism\u201d more of an ideal principle of the American way of life.<\/p>\n

The way we allow\u00a0leeway for vigilante gunner rationalizations — like George Zimmerman\u2019s about killing Trayvon Martin \u2013 is also symptomatic.<\/p>\n

Another problem I see is the pervasiveness of broken families in America. It’s unclear whether the socially misfit Newtown mass murderer Adam Lanza\u00a0had\u00a0paternal guidance from his divorced father, or from his parents as a coherent and supportive familial unit. And his murdered mother\u2019s Wild West zeal for guns surely facilitated the tragedy. She would have seemed to suffer from the Moloch mentality that Wills writes about in his New York Review of Books <\/em>blog.<\/p>\n

Wills\u2019 other books include What Paul Meant <\/em>and What Jesus Meant,<\/em> which show his knowledge of biblical literature and its significance to us today. Then there’s his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg<\/em>, which reveals his insights into the wisdom, challenges and leadership of our greatest American president at the peak moment of our most violent historical crisis, which, of course, resonates to the present, as Stephen Spielberg’s new Lincoln<\/em> film underscores.<\/p>\n

Due to Wills\u2019 deep historical erudition, the blog essay is somewhat high-toned and didactic, but as often it’s powerfully pointed. I think many of the people who have already commented on it do get it<\/em> and have very good down-to-earth responses and ideas which show that Americans can address this profound and festering problem.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the link to Wills essay: http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/blogs\/nyrblog\/2012\/dec\/15\/our-moloch\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Note: Garry Wills, Head and Heart American Christianities<\/em> Penguin Press 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Survivors of the Newtown massacre. Photo: policymic.com Like so many, I\u2019d love to change the Second Amendment\u2019s \u201cright to bear arms,\u201d but saving more innocent people from random gun violence will take more than that. Laws would not stop outlaws … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-kF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}