We like to start the story in the warmth of a myth. We picture the musket over the fireplace, the citizen farmer tending his fields, the Minuteman dropping his plow to fight for liberty. It is a romantic image. It suggests that the American gun culture was born in a cradle of freedom, a tool of necessity for a new world. It feels innocent. It feels like heritage.
But that is the story we tell to hide the truth from ourselves. The gun was never a neutral tool. It was the original American machine. It was the first factory. It was the means of production.
To understand the American obsession with firearms, you have to strip away the nostalgia and look at the ledger. The gun was the specific technology required to seize a continent and build an economy. It was the instrument that turned “uninhabited” land into private property and human beings into chattel. The Second Amendment was not drafted in a vacuum of philosophical abstraction. It was drafted to protect the state militias, whose primary function, explicitly cited in the text, was to execute the “Law of the Union” and suppress “Insurrections.” In the language of the time, that meant one thing: killing Native Americans to clear the land and terrorizing enslaved Africans to keep the labor force in check.
The frontiersman’s rifle was not for deer. It was for the dispossession of the indigenous nations. The musket was the title deed to the West. Without the gun, there is no plantation economy. Without the gun, there is no westward expansion. Without the gun, the hierarchy of the new republic collapses. It was the tool that manufactured the American aristocracy.
This history didn’t vanish. It calcified into a culture.
When we talk about the modern “gun kink,” we are talking about the residue of this foundational power. The gun is not fetishized because it is a tool; it is fetishized because it is a symbol of dominance. It is the object that promises to restore the order that the modern world threatens. For the settler fearing the “savage,” the gun was security. For the slave owner fearing the uprising, the gun was control. Today, for a demographic witnessing the erosion of its social primacy, the gun is the last anchor of identity. It is the tangible object that says, “I still have the power.”
This is why the debate is intractable. We are not arguing about recreational hunting. We are arguing about the existential fear of losing the “means of production” for the American self.
You can see the pathology in the numbers. The United States has roughly 4 percent of the world’s population. We possess nearly 40 percent of the world’s civilian-owned firearms. But, the ownership is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated. A small percentage of Americans own an arsenal. They are not building a militia; they are building a private fortress against the specters of a changing nation.
The cost of maintaining this cultural architecture is measured in blood, and it is a cost no other developed nation chooses to pay.
Look at the comparison. In 2020, the U.S. gun homicide rate was 26 times higher than that of other high-income nations. For children and teens, it is the leading cause of death, surpassing car accidents. In Canada, a nation with a similar frontier history and a strong hunting culture, the gun homicide rate is roughly one-eighth of ours. In Japan, a nation that never built its identity around the armed settler, the rate is effectively zero.
We have had 300 school shootings since 2009. The rest of the G7 nations combined have had a handful. The difference is not that Americans are more mentally ill. The difference is not that our media is more violent. The difference is that we are the only nation that has enshrined the tool of conquest as a sacred right, refusing to acknowledge that the war it was built to fight is over, and the only people left to shoot are each other.
The “good guy with a gun” is the modern retelling of the settler myth; the lone protector holding the line against the encroaching chaos. But the data tells a different story. A gun in the home is vastly more likely to be used in a suicide, an accidental shooting, or a domestic homicide than in self-defense. The protector is the predator. The fortress is a trap.
The “gun kink” is not a hobby. It is the final, desperate grip on a history that was built on the barrel of a gun. The settlers used it to take the land. The enslavers used it to keep the labor. The modern gun owner uses it to hold back the clock. It is the same impulse. It is the same object. It is the same violence.
The gun was the means of production for a nation built on theft and terror. We have allowed that tool to become the defining feature of our national psyche. We are not protecting a right. We are preserving the wound. And every year, thousands of bodies are fed into the machine to keep it running.
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MS, There’s a lot here that is true about the use of guns to expand the USA violently against the native people for example. A bit overstated as a singular driving force.
But I’m puzzled by one line that seems to undercut the argument rather than strengthen it: Canada has “a similar frontier history and a strong hunting culture.” It also has a history of doing what most expansionist European people’s did during that period: push out or subdue the native peoples.
Then you say Canada gun homicide rate is “roughly one-eighth of ours.”
I was waiting for the why.
To use your framing, if “the gun… is fetishized because it is a symbol of dominance,” then that cultural pattern should appear in both places with comparable force. The eightfold gap is unexplained.
“We are the only nation that has enshrined the tool… as a sacred right” identifies a legal distinction. Canada still has widespread lawful gun ownership, a strong hunting culture, and a frontier past. The presence of guns, and familiarity with them, exists on both sides of the border.
I’m asking because I’m wondering why, not because I have the answer. But since the cultures were similar, it does seem to erode the thesis, unless the exception is explained. For example, “Ownership is not evenly distributed” holds in the United States and in Canada. Concentration exists in both systems. So why the radically different levels of violence?
Alan,
The answer is not the gun. It is the machine that built the myth.
The difference between the United States and Canada is not the presence of guns. It is the presence of the Second Amendment. Canada has guns. Canada has hunters. Canada has a frontier history that includes violence against indigenous peoples. What Canada does not have is a constitutional theology that enshrines the firearm as a sacred right of citizenship.
But the legal distinction is only the first layer.
The United States was built on two foundational violences that Canada never experienced at the same scale: slavery and the subsequent armed enforcement of racial hierarchy.
The slave patrols. The militias that suppressed rebellions. The post-Civil War campaign of terror against Black citizens. The modern police forces that evolved directly from those slave patrols. The gun in America was not just for hunting or frontier defense. It was for keeping human property in line. It was for maintaining a racial caste system that required armed enforcement for centuries. The fetishization of the gun is tied to the fear of the “other.” First the enslaved. Then the emancipated. Now the demographic that threatens the old hierarchy. The gun is the last anchor of identity for a group that feels its dominance slipping.
But here is where the machine becomes visible.
The gun as identity did not happen organically. It was manufactured. The NRA of the 1960s was a marksmanship and hunting organization. It supported gun control. The NRA of the 1970s was transformed by a deliberate internal coup. The “hardliners” seized control at the annual meeting in Cincinnati and pivoted the organization from “sportsmen” to “patriotism.” They rewrote the narrative. The gun stopped being a tool and became a line in the sand against tyranny. This was not culture. It was marketing. A lobbying organization deliberately created a constitutional theology to sell more weapons.
The mythology serves a financial purpose. Gun manufacturers faced declining sales in a saturating market. A person only needs so many hunting rifles. The only way to increase revenue was to increase the number of guns per owner. That required a new kind of marketing. The narrative of danger. Of tyranny. Of the need to defend home and family against an encroaching threat. The industry devoted billions to convincing citizens that they were under existential assault and needed to arm themselves. The eightfold gap is not just cultural. It is commercial. Canada did not have a multi-billion dollar industry devoted to convincing its citizens that they were one election away from tyranny.
Same history of expansion. Same violence against indigenous peoples. Different foundational relationship to the gun as a symbol of identity and power. And a different industry devoted to weaponizing that relationship for profit.
The gun is not the variable. The mythology is the variable. And the United States has built its entire national identity around a weapon, then monetized the fear that identity produces.
Thanks for the response and explanation. There is some of that I vibe with. A bit of a singular explanation, but I wouldn’t outright disagree.
From AI: “Gun violence and illegal firearm possession are disproportionately concentrated in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, often termed “the hood”. Studies indicate shootings cluster near gun shops in these areas. However, gun ownership is pervasive across all areas, with high rates of gun ownership for protection in urban communities.”
Every “white” person I know (except one I think) doesn’t have a gun, which seems to conflict with the narrative in this article.
Also pretty sure that anyone reading this would be more likely to be shot in Oakland than Montana. Actually, anyone FROM Oakland would also be more likely to be shot in Oakland than in Montana. Even if they moved full-time to Montana.
Also reasonably sure that most of the guns in Oakland are there illegally in the first place (unlike those in Montana).
Not too worried about white yahoos shooting me (unless they mistake me for a deer out in the wild). Or unless their name is Dick Cheney.
Oakland, Richmond, Antioch, and Stockton are a different story (even if they’re not “packing” at any given time).