JAMELLE BOUIE: America's rifle fetish is destroying its sense of freedom

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times columnist. He was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. 

In Anthony Mann’s 1950 Western “Winchester ’73,” a rare and much-desired Winchester rifle brings misery and death to the unlucky souls who manage to bring it into their possession. In the West as brought to you by Mann — and his star, a troubled and morally ambiguous Jimmy Stewart — the gun isn’t a symbol of freedom as much as it is a curse, destined to ruin everyone who covets its power.

It was a theme echoed that year in the Joseph H. Lewis noir “Gun Crazy,” a take of sorts on the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Our protagonists in this film are two young people so enamored of the power of guns — and the freedom they seem to provide — that they go on a wanton spree of theft and murder. It ends, predictably, with their own deaths.

In both films, guns become truly dangerous when they become a fetish: an object worshipped for its supposed power and symbolic meaning. Guns, Mann and Lewis seem to say, aren’t actually totems of freedom or liberty or youth; they are instruments of death and should be treated accordingly.

I thought of both movies last week during the search for Robert Card, the 40-year-old suspect in a mass shooting that killed 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.

For nearly two days after the shooting, no one knew where Card was. He was armed and dangerous and on the run. To prevent any more loss of life, law enforcement authorities urged tens of thousands of residents of Southern Maine to shelter in place with their doors locked. He was found Friday night, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Card is believed to have used an AR-15-style rifle in the shootings. Introduced to civilian buyers in 1964, the Armalite Rifle 15 Sporter and its offspring are now some of the most popular rifles in the United States and a potent symbol of what guns mean to tens of millions of Americans. “It’s an icon,” one owner told The New York Times in a 2018 feature on the AR-15 and similar weapons. “It’s a symbol of freedom. To me, it is America’s rifle.”

That, in fact, is how gun manufacturers have promoted the rifle, not as a tool for hobbyists and sportsmen, but as a lifestyle accessory that stands for freedom, individualism and masculine self-sufficiency. “Stand out and blend in all at the same time,” reads one 2011 advertisement for a camouflage-finished assault-style rifle.

It’s not just about the AR-15, of course. For many Americans, the right to own a gun is liberty itself — the very definition of what it means to live in a free country. But the question raised by the Maine shooting, and especially the lockdown that followed, is just how free that freedom is.

How free are you really when you know that a trip to the grocery store or a morning in prayer or a day at school or a night at the movies can end in your death at the hands of a gun? How free are you really when you protest on behalf of a cause you believe in and are met on the street by armed counterdemonstrators? How free are you really when state authorities have to lock down a city so that they can stop a mass shooter from striking again?

I have written about the fiction that an “armed society is a polite society,” an aphorism taken from science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s novel “Beyond This Horizon,” where men carry weapons and duel with one another over perceived slights and insults. An armed society, I argued, is a society in which fear and suspicion replace trust and equal regard. And in that society, democracy cannot work.

What the Lewiston shooting shows is that society itself cannot work in a situation where guns proliferate to be used by anyone with the urge or inclination to kill. We cannot live when we fear violent death. In such a condition, there is hardly any society at all. And if there’s freedom, it is the false freedom of the state of nature, in which our weapons are always pointed and our eyes are fixed upon one another.

It’s not that guns can’t be useful, but they should be tools, not totems. They have been used to secure freedom, of course, but they aren’t freedom in and of themselves. To think otherwise is to fetishize. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the worship of the gun as a symbol of American freedom grew even deeper in the years after the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, reduced the communal language of the Second Amendment — “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” — to an extraneous detail.

As Americans, we understand the ownership of guns as an individual right, but in so many respects it is an atomizing right. When given pride of place in our political lives, this particular right can cause the ties that bind society to fray. It can also consume the other rights we hold dear: the right to speak, the right to assemble, the right to worship and the right to live.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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