One Nation Under Guns by Dominic Erdozain

Author:Dominic Erdozain [Erdozain, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

II

Reagan’s arrival in the White House, remarked a writer in The New York Times, was one of the darkest hours for the cause of gun control in America. With his election as president, “the battle shifted from winning passage of stiffer handgun control legislation to trying to keep the conservative tide in Congress from sweeping away laws already on the books.” That is what happened. Reagan’s gun policy was an extension of his foreign policy: good and evil, light and darkness, “peace through strength.” With Watergate, military defeat in Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, the seventies had been a decade of humiliation, a mood in which Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, seemed to wallow. For Carter, the problem always seemed to be “us.” For Reagan, it was “them.”

“We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin,” Reagan reflected in a widely quoted speech of March 1983. But “we,” he proceeded to argue, are not the sinners. Any reasonable observer would have to agree that America had “kept alight the torch of freedom” in a dark and fallen world. It was, therefore, essential that the United States remained armed and alert against “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” America’s strength was her virtue. As Alexis de Tocqueville had famously warned: “if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

Only, Tocqueville never said this. It was not the kind of thing he would say. Tocqueville was as caustic as John Adams on the stupefactions of national pride and the “vainglorious” patriotism that plumed itself on “the corruption of all other nations.” Vanity in a nation, he wrote, was like vanity in a person: “it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.” Reagan was deaf to this insight as he divided the world into the chosen and the damned, describing the armed opponents of Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government in Nicaragua as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers,” and refusing to believe reports that they were committing atrocities with American weapons. When the Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, confronted the president with photographs of an extrajudicial execution carried out by the Contras, Reagan was unfazed. “I saw that picture,” he replied, “and I’m told that after it was taken, the so-called victim got up and walked away.” Such was the thinking that poured weapons into Central America, in defiance of international law, and launched a new era of gun rights at home.

In his speech to the National Rifle Association in 1983, Reagan situated the struggle for gun rights within the crunching dialectics of the Cold War. The theme was innocence. The tone, astonishment that anyone could see the world differently. “We’re a free people, a democratic people; we believe in God and we love peace.” But as George Washington always said: to be prepared for war is “the best means of preserving the peace.” We needed the guns, at home and abroad.

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