Good Guys with Guns?

       For quite a while I’ve been reflecting upon why we Americans seem so fascinated and attached to the gun, or more correctly, the concept of “the gun.” We see frequent, and frequently irrational, claims regarding the “good guy with a gun” as potential savior of the populace.

         How did we get here? Why us? I have concluded that we have been, to a great extent, brainwashed by out nation’s history. By that I mean that we have allowed ourselves to grow into the belief that historically, everything that our nation has done has been good, just, and justified. Unfortunately, gun culture has been a large part of that history.

       As immigrants poured into northeastern Atlantic coast cities and either integrated or moved west, the vast majority came from places where gun culture was far less prevalent. At the beginning of the colonial period, as the English, also convinced of the rectitude of their own religious convictions but demonstrably less zealous, settled, first in modern Virginia, followed by Massachusetts Bay, conflicts again, and probably inevitably, arose. Guns came to be primarily used in confrontations with the original inhabitants of the land.

        Indians were seen as “in the way” and, should they object to being so characterized, they could either (using New England as an example) move into pacified and, perhaps more significantly, geographically defined and limited, “praying towns” or be considered the enemy. One significant difference between North America and the Caribbean was that generally English settlers had far less interest in forced religious conversion that in land acquisition, especially in Virginia. In any case, there was no British royal conversion mandate as had been the case with Spanish conquistadors to the South. The massacre of the Mohegan Pequots is more exemplary. Daring to resist English colonial expansion, they became simply in the way, earning, thereby, the right to be killed, with guns, which almost all of them were, in 1637.

        The Spanish to the South, also with guns, and with Rome’s blessing had already accomplished this ethnic cleansing or subjugation beginning in 1492. Spanish Conquistadores were directed to read a document, in Spanish, which no native could understand, called the Requerimiento.  In brief, it claimed that: The Pope commanded then to obey Spanish masters and to convert to Catholicism. Failing this, they could be killed with impunity (with guns, among other even more hideous methods including being torn apart by dogs, burned alive, dismembered, etc.)  

       How odd that, as a people who would, in 1945, be appalled by genocide by poison gas, we would be remarkably placid in the face of 250 years of genocide by the gun in our own territory. 

        As the colonies, and eventually the nation, crossed the Appalachians, the Mississippi and plains expanding west, the gun was the principal instrument of subjugation, retaliation, and extermination of indigenous peoples and, too frequently, to anyone with whom the gun owner disagreed. It is instructive that the least violent removal of Indians was Jackson’s forced evacuation of eastern tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw) to what was viewed as empty land, now called Oklahoma, still in some ways pretty barren.

        Frontiersmen with guns became the good guys, regardless of reality, which was that many were simply greedy landgrabbers who regarded Indians as vermin. In fact, a not uncommon 19th century western  based cavalryman’s tobacco pouch was made from a dead squaw’s breast. Even decent homesteading farmers, albeit still taking land from natives, even if it had been declared “government” land, were subject to gun violence from landowners/landgrabbers  who had gotten there first.

         Frontier lawmen used guns against outlaws in confrontations where the good guy /bad guy line was often blurred at best. Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and others frequently were only marginally more moral individuals than the bad guys they killed. So why do we venerate these men and the culture of the gun so much? Why so much more than other nations?

       I believe there are several explanations. One, is that there were several and often conflicting versions of how the West really was. To the homesteader in the west, trying to scratch out a living and perhaps raising sheep on public land or, even more daring, fencing his own land, purchased under the homestead act, survival could mean fighting Indians with a gun. Sadly, It could also mean hoping not to be shot by killers like Tom Horn, hired by rich open range grazing ranchers to keep things “the way they should be,” which meant unfenced.

        To Theodore Roosevelt, historian and author of the four-volume epic “The Winning of the West,” the West was "won" by people like him, sickly eastern adventurer who went west mourning his wife’s death and turned into the vigorous rancher who tracked down rustlers and lived the "strenuous" life, of which guns were a large part. He later parlayed that adventure into a colonelcy in the U.S. Army with absolutely no military experience and, again with the gun, charged up a hill in Cuba and into the White House.

           More persuasive perhaps, than all these, was the fact that for many Americans, especially those in the more densely populated East, the American West provided a more modern and immediate version, usually involving firearms, of the Good versus Evil struggle which British forbears had vicariously experienced in tales of knights and faire maidens rescued by them.

        In the United States, however, there was real immediacy, provided by the availability of cheap paperback books and novels.  The Western as a specialized genre got its start in the "penny dreadfuls" and later "dime novels." Published in June 1860, Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter is considered the first dime novel. These books, cheaply printed in paperback and affordably accessible, capitalized on the stories, many inventions, most exaggerated, that were told about the mountain men, outlaws, settlers, and lawmen who were taming the western frontier. 

       Many of these novels were largely fiction, based on actual people, such as Bill Tilghman,  Wyatt Earp (who, with Bat Masterson, was still alive at the time), Wild Bill Hickok, Pat Garrett and others. Along the way, dime novels, as well as newspapers eager to sell news, any news, also glorified characters such as William (Billy the Kid) Bonney, Butch Cassidy, Jesse James and more, charismatic perhaps in print, but stone cold criminals, sometimes killers, in real life.     

        The common factor in all was the gun. In the Western dime novel, there was a sense of fair contest in the street, a la High Noon, far removed from reality, which was far more accurately portrayed in the modern in films such as "The Wild Bunch," "Tombstone," and "Unforgiven." 

       
       Owen Wister’s “The Virginian,” the first true major western novel, brought the “good guy with a gun” fantasy mainstream. Authors such as Zane Grey, Luke Short, Louis L’Amour and numerous others have perpetuated this notion, abetted, since the development of motion pictures, by a string of poorly acted B movie "Pulp Westerns” with a common theme – “nothing is so dismal that a good guy with a gun can’t fix it.” 

        Unsurprisingly, The first real story telling motion picture made in America was a western, Edison's "The Great Train Robbery." It was the beginning of what would become an avalanche of modern American morality plays featuring good guys  in white hats administering gun justice to bad guys in black hats. In the extreme case, we had The Lone Ranger simply shooting the bad guy's gun out of his hand. Riight! As a young boy whose grandmother loved her cowboy flicks, I grew up on a steady diet of western movies, all conforming to the formula. 

        Largely lost in the fog of gun smoke were better and more relevant works like Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona.” This 1884 American novel is set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War and it portrays the life of a mixed-race Scots–Native American orphan girl, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship. This groundbreaking  novel became immensely popular but not to those who preferred the shoot ‘em up/evil Indian pulp. It has had more than 300 printings and been adapted five times as a film. All this aside, it is unlikely that most western Pulp, Comic Book, TV and Movie fans have even heard of it, due to its lack of conformity to the stereotype.   It is a safe bet that those who eschew Ramona and other factual treatments of history in favor of gun oriented violent stories are also those who see no problem with the proliferation of assault rifles.

             One actual historian who fell for this "romance of the gun" version of America was Frederick Jackson Turner,  whose  "frontier thesis" proposed that the constant struggle of the frontier as America expanded west was the most significant factor in shaping America's culture and character. Turner's proposition is largely discredited today, but to Roosevelt, it made perfect sense. The fact is that Turner ignored, as in fact TR did in his 4 volume opus, the contributions and influences of women and any other than white males. Facts, such as that the totality of what we would come to call "cowboying" is Mexican in origin were ignored. The eventual growth of stable communities due to the influence of women was irrelevant, and the many, uniformly negative, sometimes fatal, negative effects on indigenous peoples were simply of no concern. 

        We as a nation have been raised with the notion of guns as sometime cures for social ills. On the other hand, some of us have grown up.