What the Guns Are Saying: A Look at HB-4009 in Michigan
In mid-January, State Senator Mike Green sponsored House Bill 4009 into the Michigan Legislature. We have Green to thank for our concealed weapon laws in Michigan. Now he wants to take away “gun free zones” from the current state law. The new bill will allow people to carry concealed weapons into schools, bars, sports arenas, and churches.
Under the new law, gun owners will also be able carry guns into hospitals, college dormitories, casinos, and concert halls with capacities over 2,500 seats.
When Representative Gabrielle Giffords was gunned down in January along with eighteen other people, some pundits wondered if this might finally bring about tighter gun control regulations nationwide. It seems that, in Michigan, we’re having the exact opposite reaction. Just looking at the gun-free zones that might be going away makes the mind boggle: it’s easy to picture the consequences of guns at a rancorous sports event…in a college classroom where a professor’s grade just took away someone’s scholarship…in a hospital where a doctor failed to save the life of some outraged and grieving man’s partner or girlfriend.
But judging from reader comments at the Grand Rapids Press site, many people feel that they need guns with them at all times. They say they need them for protection. This even though Michigan ranks midway in gun deaths in the U.S., 27th out of 50 states, and gun violence in Michigan has dropped steadily throughout the 2000s.
Of course, gun owners will tell you the drop is due to more people carrying concealed weapons. These people routinely ignore studies that show that just owning a gun makes you more likely to become a victim of gun violence. They adamantly believe the opposite, in fact. As one person wrote on MLive, “An armed society is a polite society.”
There are well-known facts to counter that statement: The United States has more gun deaths than almost any other country in the world. We’re only lagging behind Columbia, South Africa, and Thailand. Current figures show that in a one-year period, there were 9 gun deaths in Chile, 12 in Ireland, 68 in Switzerland. Canada had 144, and Germany 296. El Salvador had 1,441 gun deaths, and Mexico had 2,606. Meanwhile, the United States had 9,369 gun deaths. An armed society is a killing society. Tighter gun controls obviously lead to less violence.
Still, it’s not a set of facts that sinks easily into the American consciousness. Why? Let’s start by thanking Buffalo Bill and the myth of the Wild West, the reason why little boys love to play cowboys. But it’s important to remember the real lure of the game. There are not just cowboys; there are also Indians.
There was plenty of real-life, wholesale slaughter of Indians during the 19th century in the battle for White supremacy in the Western states, but the image that most people hold in their minds of this violence is pure fiction. William Cody’s Wild West Show was the first to frame our familiar national tale: cowboys triumphantly shooting and killing hostile, menacing Indians who attacked wagon trains or military forts without provocation. Audiences in the stadium cheered the brave cowboys and booed the Indians.
By the 1930s, cowboy movies such as “Dodge City” and “Red River” were presenting the same myth—that Indians were always the attackers, and that cowboys, with deadly accuracy and perfect aim, always successfully gunned them down, protecting grateful women and children as they did so. In other words, in this story White people act solely in self-defense, putting them on the side of the angels.
This theme of defending against the aggression of “the Other,” the terrifying element bent on the destruction of American hard work and blocking American imperialism, has now carried over into action films—where the protagonist fends off the foreign enemy du jour (Russians, Vietnamese, Saudis). And it’s found in science fiction films, where alien invaders bent on taking everything away from us are destroyed by scrappy heroes who not only save their wives and children, but the entire planet.
Most people who want to carry concealed weapons into places like sports arenas, hospitals, and even churches aren’t usually planning to gun down random victims. Instead, fortified by these embedded myths in the male culture, they are sure that they will use these weapons in self defense—always successfully, just like any lawful cowboy.
What’s interesting is that you can actually hear these themes in the comments about HB 4009. “Gun free zones should be called sitting duck zones,” wrote one reader, and another added, “There is no reason that law abiding citizens should be denied the right to defend themselves with a firearm if they choose to do so. These ‘gun free’ zones only mean one thing…everyone but criminals are unarmed.”
Another man wrote earnestly about defending his family, adding, “This [law] does help the people of Michigan. It gives anyone that has the good sense to handle their own self defense the ability to stay ready wherever they are.”
Not one person in the thread spoke about the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, or racial minorities. No one named their imagined adversaries. But Michael Moore deftly nailed this point recently on the Rachel Maddow Show:
“That imaginary person that’s going to break into your home and kill you, who does that person look like? It’s not freckle-faced Jimmy down the street. We never really want to talk about the racial or the class part of this in terms of how it’s the poor or it’s people of color that we imagine we’re afraid of.”
The proposed Michigan legislation seems to go hand-in-hand with a growing fear that immigrants are taking jobs away from “real Americans”…that Arabs and Arab-Americans are all secretly bound in a conspiracy to take down the United States…that Black people would rather be on welfare than have jobs and will drain the unemployment coffers. At any moment, one of these perceived enemies can attack. You can read comments expressing this fear on MLive and other sites daily. And a recurring theme for those favoring what the Tea Party calls “Second Amendment solutions” is that arming oneself is the first step toward holding all this “chaos” at bay…at saving what gun owners see as the very fabric of American life.
Let’s revisit that man who pictured himself defending his wife and children at, say, a shoot-out at his church. It’s guaranteed that he sees himself as a person with perfect aim as well as what he calls “good sense.” Somehow you just know that he pictures the attacker as whatever “Other” he fears the most. Just as you can be sure that it doesn’t occur to him that all the good sense in the world may not boot up fast enough to help him during an actual attack by someone with a semiautomatic weapon. Or that, because he is armed, he might actually draw fire to himself and his family if he draws a gun. It’s highly unlikely he’ll have time to fire that spectacular, John-Wayne shot that he’s fantasized about a hundred thousand times.
Senator Mike Green either has these same fantasies himself, or he is cynically feeding on them to grab more votes during his next election cycle. The idea of circling the wagons against threatening hostiles has always played well in American politics. We like our stories simple and, quite literally, drawn in black and white.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
i understand what it’s like to think this way about gun control. but from my experience and in my opinion this is petty-bourgeois morality. the life of most human beings in this society is shaped by the constant denial of individual and collective freedom, as well the theft of the precious, precious time we have on this planet. the institutions of the family, school, work, and even urban landscapes are engineered in a way to maintain control and normalize hierarchies and institutional violence, for the sake of capital. even just the fact we have to play by the rules of a society we didn’t agree on, or go to prison, is a form of violence.
the expectation for people not to fight back, to defend themselves, to attack the institutions that control their lives, must be from a morality that’s on the opposite side of the institutional violence, the side that benefits from it. most of it, at least.
The main point of my article was to draw a connection between those who feel that they must be armed at all times and institutional racism in this country.
However, I don’t concur with your point of view, although I do understand it; at times I’m tempted to agree. But I believe there are ways to fight effectively without exchanging bullets.
Who cares what folks are saying on MLive.com? I don’t think that is reflective about much of anything, it’s just the opinion of folks who have the time to comment.
Aside from that as GRIID showed (
https://griid.org/2010/12/13/racism-and-the-readers-of-the-gr-press/), MLive’s comments are a cesspool of bigotry. Can you honestly say that you were surprised that “Not one person in the thread spoke about the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, or racial minorities. No one named their imagined adversaries”?
I think the commentor above was right to question the petty-bourgeois morality of this article.
I also want to add that there might be a bit of “othering” going on in the way you are talking about the MLive.com commentors.
Scott,
I myself think that inclusiveness in creating solidarity is going to be far more important if any actual change is going to occur. Picking and sorting is not very useful, particularly among those who have an overall agreement about what changes need to be made. Yes, I admit it; I don’t like guns–especially not in the hands of the type of people who seem most likely to own them in this country. That doesn’t render me ineffectual in terms of my overall political outlook.
I wouldn’t dream of labeling you as bourgeois, but if I did, I would use the correct term, which is petit-bourgeois, not “petty.” Marx used the term to refer to a class of people who are both laborers and employees, usually dependent on the haute-bourgeois for their livelihood. Originally, it meant the lower-middle class, such as shop owners whose shop’s profits actually went to the real owner, a wealthier person.This is opposed to those who work in collectives or cooperatives or rely onthe sale of their labor for survival. By that definition, almost everyone in the U.S. who is not purely a business owner is petit-bourgeouis. You can use it in its corrupted form as a sneering insult if you wish, but it’s not really very effective since it doesn’t really mean what you seem to think it does. The Russians used it as an all-purpose put-down, and you seem to be repeating their use of it as a label of anyone ranging from a Nazi to a Bakhuninite anarchist…anyone who isn’t you with your perfect revolutionary outlook, in other words.
My point about the silence of the MLive commenters is that they are not, as you point out, usually shy about their feelings re: minorities. So I found their complete silence on that in this thread to be significant. As for “othering” them, I don’t know how many racists and bigots you embrace personally in your circle of friends–but I tend to give them a wide berth if I can.
And as for “othering,” what are you doing with your name-calling and nitpicking of someone who probably agrees with you politically much more than disagrees? What’s the use or point of that?
I meant to say that the petit-bourgeois were both *employers” and workers–such as a shop proprietor who worked alongside his or her staff.
I am curious if the author honestly believes her “argument” or if she is trying to deceive people. Let’s start with the notion of “gun control”. Even if some magic made all guns instantly evaporate in the U.S., they would be readily available again in weeks or months. There are thousands of machine shops in the U.S. that can manufacture guns. And people would smuggle them in from other countries. At that point only criminals would have guns. And even if the magic spell continued to evaporate all guns as fast as they appeared, criminals would use knives, clubs, spear guns, or gangs to carry out their violent agenda.
The author also mentions a large number of “gun deaths” in the U.S. compared to other countries. The population of the U.S. is much larger than most other countries so the U.S. will have more of everything (drownings, slip-and-falls, etc.) compared to other countries so her statement is meaningless. Further, the U.S. Justice Department and F.B.I. have readily available information on their websites that indicate the overwhelming majority of gun deaths happen when criminals turn on or attack other criminals. Law abiding citizens are not killing thousands of people every year with guns. The author also conveniently fails to mention Switzerland where the citizenry is heavily armed and yet there is a low rate of “gun violence” and “gun death”.
Then the author suggests that nearly all armed citizens are incompetent — at best they would be ineffective and at worst they would shoot bystanders or focus a criminal’s actions on themselves. This is absolutely false. Armed citizens defend themselves all the time with a superb track record. When is the last time you saw a news story about an armed citizen who shot bystanders or invited their own injury? There are no news stories because it doesn’t happen. On the other hand, there are thousands of news stories of armed citizens effectively and safely defending themselves. And YouTube has plenty of security videos of armed citizens in action. When the victim suddenly produces a gun and starts shooting, the criminals either run away or drop and become ineffective.
Perhaps the real irony is in the author’s mention of “wholesale slaughter of Indians in the 19th century”. That was due in large part because the Native Americans did not have guns. Strangely, less guns equated to more deaths. And that history repeated itself in other nations as well. Unarmed people have been “purged”, “cleansed”, or downright eradicated. Examples include Stalinist Russia, Rwanda, Pol Pot Cambodia, to name a few. Whoever the aggressor may be, whether a street punk or something much larger, I don’t want to be in the position of the Native Americans, Rwandans, or Cambodians.
For anyone who is uncomfortable with allowing concealed carry everywhere, just look at states like Indiana or Utah that allow concealed carry in churches, hospitals, etc. The simple truth is that the people who obtain a concealed pistol license have an outstanding track record and are not a menace to society. Anyone who claims otherwise has no facts to support those claims.
KIS, per your post, I’m only going to make a couple of points:
Your assertion that we have more gun deaths simply because we have more people is not true. Example: Canada has 1/10th the population of the US. So, if Canada and the US had equal numbers of residents, Canada would still only have 1,440 gun deaths to our 9,369.
The FBI does list gun deaths that are caused by incompetent gun owners, and I also linked in a study. It also states that gun owners merely serve, in many cases, as a way that criminals arm themselves, with over 600,000 guns stolen from private homes each year. And did you bother to read the links? My point was summing up a study that owning a gun puts you at more danger at being a victim of gun violence. Read the study; and then read the studies that the authors cite.
And where on earth did you get your “fact” that Indians didn’t have guns? From Rush Limbaugh? Have you ever had a history class? Ever been to the museum in Mackinaw City or at dozens of historical sites out west?
Native Americans in this country traded goods like furs and hides for rifles and ammunition since the 1600s. They were also armed by the French and British when they allied with them in various colonial wars. As early as King Philip’s War in 1675, the allied tribes had flintlock rifles–better guns than matchlocks that most of the Europeans were using in battles–and it gave the Indians a serious tactical advantage. By 1800, the Blackfoot tribe dominated the region of Montana and Idaho because they lived closest to the Canadian border and had amassed the largest arsenal of guns in their trade with the British. (Confirmed in reports by Lewis and Clark). At the battle of Little Big Horn, the tribes who fought carried Springfield and Winchester rifles. Any elementary schoolchild know that.
I’m not going to dignify your comment point by point. Go peddle this NRA/right-wing radio crap somewhere else. Thanks.
That America has more gun violence is not indicative that overall gun ownership is the cause. There are many other factors from our culture at play, including a prevalence of drug dealing, smuggling, gangs, youth drop out rates, poverty, urbanization, and overall diversity. You cannot pin one aspect of a culture on one specific variable. Gun ownership has risen dramatically in the last four years, but crime has dropped. Yet, in the 80’s, when gun ownership was also rather high, we had some of the greatest spouts of violence in our history, mostly attributed to the high influx of cocaine and related gang violence. The point is, gun ownership has little to nothing to do with the violent crime rates. There is too much else going on.
You mention that other countries that have strict gun control have low gun deaths. In some cases, this is true. I agree that if guns were inaccessible, less people would have them, and there would be fewer found on the street. You fail to mention that these countries that ban guns are surrounded by countries that also ban guns, so there is a low risk of smuggling. We don’t have that in the United States, where Canada is still a free nation and Mexico is a Sinaloa-ridden war zone. However, these countries also have higher violent crime rates (UK case and point). To put an end to this, I will say that cross country/cultural comparisons are not accurate, and should not be used in this debate.
Your agenda at connecting concealed carry holders with paranoid racists is insulting and an attitude better left in the early 20th century. They have nothing to do with each other. I carry to defend myself where I would otherwise be completely helpless. If I need to defend myself, I do not care what the attacker’s motivation is, what color his skin is, his income level, or how messed up his childhood was. I don’t care who he is, only that he made the choice to attack me, and I won’t ever consent to be a victim to a violent stranger. I won’t ever consent to allow my loved ones to be victims of a violent stranger. Your attitude is arrogant for an argument so ignorant.
You may have seen this on bumper stickers before, but it is no less true. “Gun free zones are defense free zones.” Criminals don’t abide by laws. Even if they don’t have guns, they have knives. If they don’t have knives, they have clubs. If they don’t have clubs, they have rocks.
Also, remember that you are posting your opinion on the internet. Be prepared for that opinion to be challenged, and to argue your point reasonably. Running away from intelligent arguments like a five-year-old is a good way to ruin your credibility.