Insomniactive

http://tinyurl.com/gun-show-nation

“Any time I get mad at the government, I go out and buy a gun.”

If you get that statement-borrowed from a friend of author Burdick’s and conflating as it does the purchase of a fire arm with an act of supreme political empowerment-you have a pretty good idea of where the book is headed.

If in Gun Show Nation, guns-rights enthusiasts expected a liberal screed, Burdick’s opening reference to various university gender studies departments likely didn’t calm them. (A quick web search plus a surf of Amazon reviews supplied me with plenty of advice, including the exhortation to “HELP SLAM GUN SHOW NATION ON GUNVERSTAION.TRIBE.NET!!!!!!!). All this, before I cracked the cover.

But whereas some of Burdick’s critics are doubtless living on borrowed !!!’s, shouting is not the author’s style. With great care she describes the twining of gun-rights activism with various threads of white male patriotism-tricky stuff for a self described member of the liberal intelligentsia, even if she is a passable markswoman. And I must agree with one of her uncharacteristically low-key cover blurbs which finds her “very careful in her conclusions.” High praise, indeed.

Burdick is at her best in chronicling the evolution of the National Rifle Association and its house propaganda organ, The American Rifleman, and the relationship of both to conflicts over the Second Amendment and civil rights. The racial violence of the 1960s brought increased venom and street-level militancy to what had been-predominantly though not entirely-a shooting club devoted to an idealized version of the American Frontier. In 1987, the NRA was further and finally radicalized in the “Cincinnati Takeover,” a coup in which a dissident fashion began to hammer the NRA into the single-issue political powerhouse it is today.

Many of Burdick’s conversations with gun-rights enthusiasts are not much more than multi-decibel monologues. Not surprisingly, given its 2004 publication date, most have to do with the sanctity of the Second Amendment and its relation to the individual’s-as opposed to “a well organized militia’s”- right to bear arms. Now that the Supreme Court has made itself clear in District of Columbia v. Heller, it would be interesting for Burdick to follow up. Where is all that vitriol channeled, now that “gun grabbers” have been so thoroughly disempowered?

Gun Show Nation caused me to think a lot about the nature of patriotism. In the world Burdick describes, those who claim to be the most patriotic often have the least faith in the social structure of the nation they say they’ll do anything for. The lyrics of their call to arms tell a story of rebublic where the consensus cannot be trusted, and where the righteous individual and his (and yes, his) gun must firmly but fairly dileneate right from wrong.

It’s clear to me that a patriot has, as NRA members remind us, the right to be left alone. It’s equally clear that true patriotism requires much more than merely the defense of that right.