product: guns

As you may have heard, this week the Republican Party released what they’ve termed a “Pledge to America,” a document that lists their agenda for the next legislative session. Erin Echols, a student at Kennesaw State U., took a look at it and was struck by the contents, particularly the images.

Of the 48 total pages of the document, 14 consist of images, either a single one or a collage of several. Of course, in a document of this sort, you’re going to have the required patriotic images — the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Capitol and other buildings in D.C. Nothing surprising there. But Erin points out that the cowboy seems to be a recurring theme.

It reminded me of a post by Macon D. over at Racialicious a while back about some ads by a Republican primary candidate for Agricultural  Commissioner in Alabama:

The hat, the horse, the rifle, the sweeping music that makes me think of old Western movies… it all evokes what Macon D. calls the “Independent (White) Cowboy Myth,” a version of rugged, stand-alone, honest manhood. Macon D. quotes Mel at BroadSnark:

In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Here’s the follow-up ad he made after losing:

And, for the record, I’m not arguing this presentation of Dale Peterson is necessarily fake; for all I know he dresses and acts like that all the time. People do; I’m related to some of them. I’m not saying Peterson is a fraud who really wears tuxes and has never been on a horse. That’s irrelevant. What I’m interested in is the power of a particular cowboy mythology, the one on display in Peterson’s ads.

As Macon D. points out, Ronald Reagan actively appropriated the cowboy persona, often wearing cowboy hats and jeans, sometimes alongside a horse (he had also played cowboys in a couple of movies). He openly identified with the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” an effort by groups in the western U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s to stop designation of federal lands as protected wilderness areas, push for more mining and livestock grazing rights on public land, and oppose some other environmental and land use regulations, depicted as impositions from distant elites.

Macon D. quotes Sarah Watts on the appeal of the White cowboy myth when Theodore Roosevelt first used it:

…he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

The cowboy myth, then, arose partly to allay deep anxieties about changes in American society. But the myth is just that — a myth, a romanticized notion largely unmoored from the realities of cowboys’ lives. Mel says,

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

This isn’t true just in the past. I know people who work as hired hands on ranches now. They love many aspects of the life. But most of them aren’t particularly well-paid; they don’t have retirement benefits or health insurance; they aren’t on a path to being able to buy their own ranch and be a self-reliant family farmer. Some become managers, with more responsibility and money, as in any occupation. But sometimes what initially seemed like a great deal — getting free housing as part of the job — turns out to have downsides, such as being expected to be available round-the-clock since you’re right there on the property, or fearing that if you piss off your employer and get fired, you’re out of a place to live immediately as well.

The examples I’ve given here have all been Republicans. Democrats use the cowboy mythology as well — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is well known for often appearing in a cowboy hat and nearly always wearing a bolo tie rather than a necktie. However, Republicans seem to appropriate the cowboy persona more often, or at least more successfully.

Anyway…back to Erin’s analysis of the “Pledge to America.” The other interesting feature of the images is their overwhelming Whiteness. Some examples of group photos:

Overall, the photos show a sea of Whiteness. As Erin says, whether it’s an unintentional oversight or a calculated choice, the resulting message is that America’s citizens, the hard-working, patriotic folks who matter and to whom the party is making pledges, are White. Given the current racialized tone of much of our political debate (especially regarding Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, a racialized group often conflated with “Arabs”), it’s a portrait of America that is likely to speak to, and soothe, the fears of some groups more than others.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.

A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (source). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.

At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (source). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”

To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”

Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.

One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

Mindy J. and Andrea F. sent in a really interesting project by artist Nathan Vincent.  Vincent recreates masculine items and ideas with feminine crafts in order to upset the gender binary.  He explains:

My work explores gender permissions and the challenges that arise from straying from the prescribed norms. It questions the qualities of gender by considering what constitutes masculine and feminine. It critiques stereotypical gender mediums by creating “masculine objects” using “feminine processes” such as crochet, sewing, and applique.

For example:

More examples of his work at his site.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Example One: Is it me, or do the bare buns in this ad seem just a little bit child-porny?  It’s a nice example of how our sensibilities change; these days there is a loud and ubiquitous discourse around children’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation.  A discourse that, I think, would make this ad inappropriate today.

Example Two: After decades of anti-smoking public health initiatives which included, along with health warnings, the association of smoking with bad breath, yellow teeth, and stinking clothes and hair, I somehow don’t think food would be marketed with a cigarette in its mouth (1950).

Example Three: This candy ad begins “Some tigers eat people.  I eat tigers.  His tail was 3 chocolates longer.”  Then, it continues, “P.S. I made a gun from the tube.”   Today, in most parts of the U.S., childhood innocence is no longer marketed with firearms.

Source: Vintage ads (here, here, and here) and Found in Mom’s Basement.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

From statehealthfacts.org using data from 2006:

At the website you can scroll over each state to see the exact number. The overall rate for the U.S. is 10.2 per 100,000. The high is in the District of Columbia, at 20.6; the high among states was 19.3 in Louisiana. The lowest rate is in Hawaii–2.5 per 100,000.

I don’t know what’s going on in the U.S. Virgin Islands–the table has a rate of 43.2 per 100,000. Perhaps that’s statistical noise in the estimate due to the fact that the territory has a total population of only about 110,000, which might distort rates given per 100,000 population.

I am also embarrassed to admit that until this very moment I thought the Virgin Islands were somewhere in the Pacific, probably near Tahiti. Turns out it’s in the Caribbean. Huh.

One way to study social problems is to take a social constructionist approach.  This approach suggests that the degree to which a social problem is perceived as problematic, as well as the kind of problem it is understood to be, is a function of social interaction.  For example, many Americans consider drunk driving to be a very bad thing and a serious threat.  Drunk driving is not only embarrassing, it is punishable by law, and a conviction could result in social opprobrium.  It wasn’t always that way, and it still isn’t all that stigmatized in some parts of the U.S. and, of course, elsewhere.

So, social problems aren’t immediately obvious, but need to be interpreted and presented to us.  And, of course, some people have more power to deliver a message to the public than others.

Artist Susannah Hertrich developed this graphic (via) designed to bring to consciousness the difference between the likelihood of harm from certain threats and public outrage:

I am unsure as to how she measured both “public outrage” and “actual hazard” but, giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this information is based on some reasonable systematic measurement, the image nicely draws our attention to how some social problems can receive a disproportionate amount of outrage, contributing to their social construction as significant or insignificant social problems (or, alternatively, their social construction as public problems for which outrage is appropriate and useful, versus private problems that have no public policy dimensions).

So, for example, heat is seen as relatively harmless even though, as Eric Klinenberg shows in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, it kills many, many people every year and is severely exacerbated by social policies both directly and indirectly related to weather.  But the people who die from heat, and those who love them, tend to be relatively powerless members of our society: usually the elderly poor.

Conversely, the threat of terrorism attracts a great deal of public outrage, but is not a significant threat to our individual well-being.  Still, certain members of our society with an ease of access to the media and authoritative roles in our society (mostly politicians and pundits) can raise our fears of terrorism to disproportionate levels.

Similarly, bird flu makes for a fun story (as all gruesome health scandals can) and gun crime feeds “mainstream” fears of the “underclasses” (often perceived as black and brown men).  Both make for good media stories.  Less so, perhaps, pedestrian accidents.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Chris Uggen, at our sibling Context blog Public Criminology, posted an interesting graph showing that background checks for gun sales during the period from November to April for each year from 1999-2000 to 2008-2009. We see that they’ve increased significantly this November-April compared to previous years:

Background checks should serve as a decent proxy for gun sales, keeping in mind that not everyone who requests a check will eventually purchase a gun, not everyone who gets a gun bothers to go through legal channels and get a background check, and people who get a background check might then buy multiple guns.

Anyway, it appears that the reason for the jump in sales may be the election of President Obama (although as Chris points out, it’s possible the recession or some other factor could be driving it). When I mentioned this to a couple of friends, they assumed it meant some crazy White people were preparing for a race war. I presume that is true for some people, and that some of them are my relatives. However, there’s another explanation, which is what most news stories I googled report and which, having talked to a number of very right-leaning individuals I happen to know, seems more likely to me: with a Democratic controlled Congress and a Democratic President, many people are convinced that gun control is right around the corner, and they are taking advantage of the period before guns can be outlawed to stock up, with the hopes that after guns are outlawed, they can either hide them or maybe people who bought theirs before the law was passed get to keep them.

I haven’t seen as much news coverage of it, but in addition to gun sales, apparently bullet sales have gone up. My friends and family members who have guns have been complaining about the increasing price of bullets, as well as their scarcity. I was recently with a friend who is a police officer and needed to buy some bullets for shooting practice, and when he asked at Wal-Mart, the price was much higher than usual (I don’t remember the specific price, just that he said it was high) and they only had one specialty kind in stock; the rest of the shelf was bare.

So anyway, it’s sort of an interesting social trend that appears likely to be related to Obama’s election and the fear of liberals taking away guns (something I find highly unlikely), though I’m open to other explanations.

And as for why I don’t object to my friends and relatives having guns and buying bullets, I have a friend who is a police officer, so he has to have a gun while at work, and I gave up long ago on my family members, who are mostly ranchers and hunters; I’ve settled for being happy that my grandma shoots a lot fewer things than she used to.

UPDATE: In response to my story about going to Wal-Mart with my friend and checking on the price of bullets, Jeremiah says,

I question the veracity of this anecdote. In all my years of firearm ownership, only the most n00b newbz buy retail ammo for ‘practice.’ Everyone else buys repacked rounds at a HUGE discount.

People call me dumb or question my interpretation frequently enough, but being called an outright liar is new. I did, indeed, go to Wal-Mart with my friend Clint, who is a cop, and he went to the gun section and asked about bullets. I just called him and asked what kind he was looking for; he said he asked about .22 bullets, and I asked what he needed them for. He said “just for practice.” I didn’t think to clarify if he meant official practice at the firing range, or informal practice as in “a group of my friends and I are going to drive to a field and shoot at stuff.”

Point being, I am many things: crazy, bossy, sometimes overdramatic, a bit cranky. I am not, however, a liar.

UPDATE TWO: Joshua provides more information on background checks:

In states like Georgia, without a mandatory waiting period (the majority of states), the background check occurs at the time of purchase. The dealer makes a phone call, gives your identifying information, and in most cases gets an instant answer. At that point, you purchase the gun and away you go. The idea that someone would “request a background check” and then not purchase a gun seems questionable to me, because it is the act of attempting to purchase a gun that triggers the background check.

…

There are many legal channels for buying a gun without a background check. Only gun dealers are required to perform background checks. In most states, non-dealers can sell or give away guns just like they can sell any other possession. No background check is required for so-called private-party sales. There are limits on the number of guns a person can sell before they become a de facto dealer. A few states amend the federal requirements by requiring all gun sales to go through a dealer, who typically charges a small fee for the service.

…

Also, in states who issue concealed-carry permits, and whose permit requirements meet federal minimum standards, people who have a permit can buy firearms without a background check. The thinking is that the federal minimum standards mean that a permit-holder has already been vetted to a much higher degree than the NICS check system does, and at that point, NICS is redundant. This serves as an incentive for states to meet the federal recommended standards for carry permits.

Elisabeth R. sent us this one-minute commercial.  I’ll let you experience it as designed (it has a surprise ending) and include my comments below:

We might feel that feminism and gun ownership are incompatible.  An argument could be made that (especially machine) gun ownership is anti-feminist, but it’s also true that we artificially cluster rather random, unconnected ideas into political ideologies that we then understand to be compatible by definition.  For example, what does being anti-gay marriage and anti-taxes have to do with each other?  Nothing.

For more on pro-gun propaganda, see this extensive set of really fascinating posters making feminist, anti-racist, and pro-gay arguments in favor of gun ownership.

For another example of an effort to bridge the political binary, see this post on pro-environment/anti-immigrant activism