The progressive pundit talks to Street Roots about his new book highlighting American’s history of firearms, which have been a tool of oppression for centuries, he says
Literally nowhere, at any time, under any circumstances – even remotely – did any of the founders sit around and say, “Yeah, this government we’re creating, someday it may go just nuts, so we should tell the citizens that they can kill government employees if the government is oppressive.” They literally never thought that. That’s the most bat-guano crazy thing that you could assert.
Progressive radio talk show host and provocateur Thom Hartmann takes aims at the mythology around guns and gun ownership in America in his new book, “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.”
Hartmann will be at Powell’s City of Books in the Pearl District at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 12, for a book reading and signing.
Every year in the United States, about 34,000 people die a gun-related death. That’s an average of 96 deaths every day. Homicides and mass shootings often dominate headlines, while suicide quietly accounts for roughly two-thirds of those deaths.
This contemporary social cost of guns trails from a long and gruesome tradition of firepower in the United States, one that’s cloaked in folklore and often glossed over in history books.
In what’s slated to be the first in a series of “Hidden History” books, Hartmann sorts fact from fiction and seeks to explain how the Second Amendment came to be and whom it was written to protect.
From the murder of Native Americans in what Hartmann calls the most massive genocide the world has ever seen to today’s over-policing of communities of color and open-carry laws that only white Americans enjoy, guns reveal themselves as being central to white supremacy.
Until Americans fully understand and reconcile their past, they have little hope of addressing the epidemic of gun violence in America today, he writes.
At fewer than 200 pages, his newest book is an easy, yet illuminating and often demoralizing read that leads readers through injustices of past and present, leaving them with a set of solutions he argues Americans should be striving toward.
Hartmann spoke with Street Roots about his new book from his home near the outer edges of Portland along the Columbia River. The Michigan native recently returned to Portland, where he continues to host an internationally syndicated radio show, which airs locally on XRAY FM from 9:06 a.m. to noon Monday through Friday and is also available on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. He’s a four-time Project Censored award winner and New York Times best-selling author.
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Emily Green: There’s a common perception that our constitutional right to bear arms is there to make sure that regular citizens, like you and I, can defend ourselves from the government, should it become oppressive. But you argue that’s a misnomer. Can you explain what the Second Amendment is really all about?
Thom Hartmann: Let’s puncture that mythology. I have read through the vast majority of James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention, on six or seven of the constitutional ratifying conventions, and the debates around the Bill of Rights. Literally nowhere, at any time, under any circumstances – even remotely – did any of the founders sit around and say, “Yeah, this government we’re creating, someday it may go just nuts, so we should tell the citizens that they can kill government employees if the government is oppressive.” They literally never thought that. That’s the most bat-guano crazy thing that you could assert. These people just put a country together and they were building a republic, one that they hoped would last centuries. The whole point of the division of government into three parts, in order to diminish the power of any one branch, was key to making sure that it worked. So that’s just a complete nonsense story.
Where that story seems to have come from is in the ’70s, the (American) Rifleman magazine – the NRA’s magazine – a teenager wrote an op-ed suggesting that was maybe what was on the mind of the founders. That idea got picked up by people in the John Birch Society and other hardcore right-wing groups, who were already, at that point, viewing the federal government as oppressive, and it grew into this thing. There is absolutely no basis to it.
The actual reason for the Second Amendment is twofold. The first was that there was an absolute and broad consensus among the founders and framers of the Constitution that a standing army during times of peace was a threat to liberty, was a danger to the governments. This grew out of the experience that these people had of watching country after country in Europe over the preceding 2,000 years have great military victories, and then when the army comes home when the war is over, the army takes over the country and boom – you’re suddenly living in a military dictatorship.
So they did two things: No. 1, in Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, they said that Congress can appropriate or spend money for anything – except the army. And if Congress spends money and appropriates for the army, it may not be for more than two years, ever. And that’s why every two years, since the founding of the republic until today, Congress has to pass a military appropriations bill.
No. 2 was the alternative to a standing army during times of peace was basically to have citizen militias, who could be called up by the state governor or by the federal government, if necessary, and turned into an army to fight a war. That was the real intention of the Second Amendment, which is why it starts out talking about well-regulated militias.
Green: You say in your book that the Second Amendment has never been colorblind and that open carry has really become the new “white hood.” Can you explain this, and also the thread that connects the slave patrol militias in the Southern states of the past to police forces of today?
Hartmann: Open carry is a relatively recent thing. In fact, one of the epigraphs in the book is a sign (that was posted throughout Wichita, Kan., in 1873) that said to leave your guns at the sheriff’s office and get a check – and that was the norm in the Wild West. Towns did not tolerate people walking around with firearms. Maybe a long rifle on a horse saddle, but the whole idea of people walking around armed has been considered bizarre from the founding of the republic right up until about 30 years ago.
California had laws allowing open carry, and in the ’70s, when Reagan was governor, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (founders of the original Black Panther Party) pulled up to the statehouse as Reagan was doing some sort of photo-op with a bunch of little kids, and they walked up the steps of the Capitol building with loaded guns and Reagan freaked out, as did all the legislators, and within a month, California had banned open carry.
With regard to the slave patrols, when the Constitution was being debated at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1789, the largest slave holder in the state, Patrick Henry – ironically, the guy who said “Give me liberty or give me death” – stood up and said, “This could be the end of slavery for Virginia.” The original Second Amendment said for the security of a free “nation”; now it says for the security of a free “state.” And that’s because Patrick Henry pointed out that if there was ever a president from a Northern state – from an anti-slavery state – all they would have to do to destroy the slave patrols in Virginia was call up the militia under some pretext, some Shays’ Rebellion kind of thing (Shays’ Rebellion was an uprising against the government in Massachusetts in the late 1700s) and say, “OK, we’re calling up the militia, all the militia people in Virginia have to come to Massachusetts and help defend us.” He was quite emphatic about that, and James Madison basically said to him, “You’re being paranoid; we’re not trying to do that.”
In Virginia, as was the case in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina at the time, the militia and the slave patrol were the same thing. Every able-bodied white man from 17 to 47 years old was required to be a member of the slave patrol, aka the Virginia state militia, and to show up every week in many parts of the state and travel the back roads, looking for runaway slaves and people of color behaving poorly, and they were armed. What Patrick Henry, who wanted to preserve slavery, was saying was a Northern president could take away our militia, which would take away our slave patrol. And the only way you can enforce literal slavery is with a police state, which is what Virginia was at that point in time, for people of color and for women. So, he was looking at the end of slavery, in his mind.
Madison said, “No, no, it’s not that,” and Henry was like, “OK, prove it to me,” so Madison changed the word “for the security of a free nation” to “for the security of a free state.” That way, Patrick Henry could argue that he had protected the Virginia slave patrol.
Green: What happened after slave patrols dismantled? Didn’t many of them essentially turn into these police forces that then started enforcing Jim Crow-era laws and such?
Hartmann: Absolutely. I’m not sure slave patrols ever faded out. I think what happened is a lot of the people who were participating in the slave patrols fought in the Civil War, and then after the Civil War during Reconstruction, you had this resurgence of these slave patrols in the form of local law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. This really started kicking into high gear in the 1870s and 1880s, but particularly in the South, an awful lot of the policing, particularly the local policing, grew out of the slave patrols, and therefore it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a racial edge to the way policing is done in the South. Of course now it’s spread all over the country.
Green: On this idea that the Second Amendment has never been colorblind, one example in your book that hit home was the incident that took place here in Portland last year, when police found Patriot Prayer had several rifles in their possession on a parking garage roof before a rally. Police decided they could keep their guns as long as they locked them in their trucks, and then they let them go about their business. But in the book you ask: What if it had been Black Lives Matter activists on the roof with guns that day? Would the outcome have been different?
Hartmann: Ever since Huey Newton and Bobby Seale brought this to a head in California, we have seen case after case. Philando Castile had a concealed-carry permit, and he was stopped by a police officer, and he was in his car, his girlfriend was filming it, and he said, “Officer, I have a concealed-carry permit and I have a weapon, and I’m going to take out the permit card and show it to you,” and he reaches into his back pocket to get his wallet, and the cop shoots him dead.
Black people with guns are targets for police. It’s just that simple. And even if it’s Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old in Ohio who was shot – he had a BB gun. White people have a long history of being able to walk around with guns and carry guns and display guns and threaten with guns, but black people do it at their peril, at risk of life.
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Green: I also wanted to talk about suicide. There was a study published earlier this year that found that while global suicide rates have declined since 1990, suicide is on the rise in the U.S., and that increase is most significant in rural communities. Would you say this is related to the high rate of gun ownership in the United States?
Hartmann: Yes, there’s a statistically demonstrable correlation between the number of guns in a society in a local area or larger geographic area and the number of gun homicides and gun suicides. It’s basically because guns drive those numbers up.
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In Australia in 1996, there was a horrible mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, and pictures of people being shot up were displayed in the Australian media, and people were horrified. In that year, they made it much more difficult to own guns and launched a nationwide gun buy-back program and bought back hundreds of thousands of weapons. In the years since then, what they found was there was an immediate drop in both homicide and suicide rates, and that drop has maintained over time.
Suicide seems to be particularly sensitive to this, and my personal opinion is the main reason for that is many suicides are impulsive acts. People hit some kind of lull and say, “That’s it, I’m out of here,” and they slit their wrists or they take some poison or an overdose of sleeping pills or whatever, and they still have time to reach out and have second thoughts.
There was a fellow I saw on TV who tried to kill himself by jumping off – I think it was the Golden Gate Bridge – and he survived it. And he was asked, “What was your first thought as you let go of the rail and you were falling toward the bay?” And he said, “Oh my God, it was an instant regret. I never should have done this.”
If you’re using a gun to commit suicide, you don’t have an opportunity to have that thought. The availability of guns makes impulsive suicide so much easier, so much so that societies with high densities of guns, you see a much higher rate of suicide.
Green: Right now it seems like every other week there’s a mass shooting in the news. Can you describe the factors at play in America that are contributing to this unique rate of public mass shootings that we’re experiencing in this country?
Hartmann: You’ve got 40 years of an aggressive war on working people and on working people’s wages that was launched by the Reagan administration and has never been turned back by any president or administration since, which has gutted about a third of the American middle class. If you look at the research done by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, they’ve done research country to country and in the United States, and what they’ve found is – and it’s not just poverty, it’s inequality – as inequality gets worse, mental health deteriorates, homicide rates go up, suicide rates go up, teenage pregnancy rates go up, STDs go up and crime goes up. All these social ills, loss of social cohesion, a loss of sense of social identity, seem to be associated with massive inequality. And the United States is the most unequal developed country in the world, and it’s one of the most unequal countries in the world, period. And that’s driving it. And when you combine that lethal potion of massive inequality and taking away people’s ability to earn a living and maintain a lifestyle that they had believed was available to them and the despair associated with that – when you combine those two things with the easy, ready availability of guns, you’ve got the formula for suicide and homicide.
Green: So, how do we solve the crisis of gun violence in America?
Hartmann: No. 1, we need to understand our history, and we need to understand the myths about our history.
No. 2, I’m suggesting we regulate guns the way we regulate cars. At least that’s a very simple starting point. In the 1900s, cars became so ubiquitous that they were starting to kill people at rather alarming rates. So we came up with this three-part system over the next 30 or 40 years to make the use of cars safer:
The first part was you register the car from the time of its manufacture until the time it’s destroyed. We should do the same thing with guns.
The second was that you require somebody to prove that they know how to drive 3,000 pounds of steel down the road at 60 miles per hour before you let them drive. In other words, you have a driver’s license test and proof of competence. We should do the same thing with guns.
And the third is we require – and this is the free-market, should-appeal-to-Republicans part of the equation – we require with cars that people have liability insurance, so if you accidently kill somebody, they get a payout. I think it’s insane that if the kids in Newtown, Conn., had been murdered by a drunk driver or malicious driver mowing them down as they were crossing the street, their families would have been getting a million bucks each from GEICO, but because they were killed by an AR-15, they didn’t get a penny.
Your insurance rates are based on the kind of risk you represent, and the insurance companies are really good at calculating risk. If somebody has a conviction for domestic violence, odds are the insurance company, rather than charging them $100 a year for their gun liability policy, is going to charge them $5,000 a year or maybe even refuse to write the policy.
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We can also make guns safer. There are now safer guns widely sold in Europe. They are not sold, generally speaking, in the United States, and the reason is the people who have tried to sell these in the United States have been on the receiving end of massive levels of death threats.
There are guns that you cannot fire unless it recognizes your fingerprint, it won’t fire unless it recognizes your grip on the handle, it won’t fire unless you’re wearing a watch or piece of jewelry or a ring that has a RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip in it that matches the one in the gun, and all three of those technologies are for sale right now in other parts of the world.
And, we need to take the weapons of war off the streets. No more semi-automatic weapons. Even our police didn’t use them until about 30 years ago, until they started showing up on TV all the time and every police department wanted to look just like the cops on TV. So let’s go back to revolvers and bolt-action and break-action guns, rifles.
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Green: You write, “There are solutions to this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings, but they first require a clear-eyed reconciliation of America’s past with its present.” Why do you think understanding the past is so important to solving these issues?
Hartmann: Germany has done a reasonably good job of reconciling the Holocaust, but the United States has never come to terms with a much larger Holocaust that we did. In terms of population numbers, a massively larger Holocaust – we killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million Native Americans. Now, all of them weren’t killed with guns; in fact, probably a majority of them were killed by disease, but at least 10, 20, 30 million were killed with guns or other ordnance, and we’ve never acknowledged that.
We had slave patrols throughout the South; we’ve never really acknowledged that. We don’t teach how slavery happened and how it was enforced by guns. We have not connected the crimes and sins of our past to our present.
We’re just now starting, in some small parts of the political ecosphere, to have conversations about reparations. As long as we continue to pretend like this country was birthed in purity and all manifest destiny, we’re going to continue to have these problems.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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