My theories about why guns persist in America - Episode 1.

The Boy Scouts of America harbors a fairly bizarre white boy organization called “The Order of the Arrow.”  Ostensibly its purpose is to preserve the heritage of the native Americans along with promoting the concept of honoring those who serve others.  Very nostalgic. Lots of teenagers in feathers and war paint regalia lusting for the late evening firelight to endow them with purpose. They conduct lots of induction ceremonies. It’s kind of an exclusive group.   You have to be elected in by your troop. That’s a once a year deal, where very official looking guys show up with white sashes embroidered with red arrows draped over their already Christmas tree like uniforms. They extol what an honor it is to be chosen. Often by candle light. After that, they show up again, this time dressed as a generic Plains Indian tribe, while everyone is on a mass camp out, and conduct a tap out ceremony. Basically “the honored” are pulled from the audience and tapped on the shoulder in some manner, once then twice to signify the twelve points of the Scout Law. The tapping method varies from hands firmly whapped on the shoulders to a feather draped lance being lightly touched to either side of the neck.  Nobody is allowed to speak other than the great Chieftain conducting the ceremony.  Threats are made that breaking the code of silence will end the ceremony. The honorees are then told to keep silent till the next morning. Lest, their honor be reneged.   Young men eat it up.

Once you are in the organization of honor, you quickly figure out you need to do something besides hang out by campfires in monthly meetings with other sash wearers. So, you get into “Native American” activities: tedious loom beading and feather gluing for regalia manufacture and joining the Indian dance team to have an excuse to wear your regalia. That’s how I got introduced to the Order of the Arrow. A couple of high school guys in my scout troop were going to dance for the local senior citizen’s center in town one night and their drummer had a basketball game.  I had been elected, but not whapped on the shoulder, so they figured, I could qualify as an almost fake Indian.  As they dressed me in cotton loin cloth, and plastic boned breast plate, leaving my thighs & upper body uncomfortably exposed to the grandparents of town, they taught me some basic beats on the animal skinned tom-tom.  In the middle of practicing the beats, they asked me to choose and Indian name. I whipped out “Chingachgook,” final chief of the Delaware. I had just read “Last of the Mohicans” the summer before.  The three other scantily clad gave each other puzzled looks. Bob, the biggest said, “That one’s not good, pick another.”

“Uncus?” I said. I was running through all of the James Finemore Cooper Delaware names I knew.

The three re-exchanged the previous looks. Tim, an ultra-thin cross country runner shrugged his shoulders at Bob, who had become de facto “Sam I am” of not liking Indian names, “That’s not good either?”

I questioned, “Why?” Looking up from my drum at their over exposed butt hair poking out of the loin cloths.

The puzzled looks were exchanged again. I could tell there was something I wasn’t being told. Bob just looked back at me with one of those awkward looks like he’d just been caught masturbating. “Ah, we usually just use English names like: Rising Moon.  Pick one like that.”

My Dad had been yapping at dinner about a cow elk he had fired at and missed hunting that weekend. So I came up with “Little Elk,” noting the relative size difference between me and my three hairy legged brothers.

When Bob stood up to introduce us a few minutes later, he simply pointed to me and said, “-And he is Drumming Cub.”  Sitting, with the instrument I was to pound between my legs I felt more like a naked cub than a drumming one.

A month or so later, twenty of us were standing at Camp Wilson up in Idaho in front of a single campfire. The babbles of the South Fork of the Boise river lapped at the sand beneath our boots. Before us was Tim, garbed in an ill-fitting synthetic black fur buffalo headdress, accompanied by Bob and the other dance team members also dressed as fake Indians. Tim imparted “The Legend of the Order.”     It was a semi-Yoda like poetic telling of the threat the Mohican’s faced from dark outside enemies. Chingachgook and his son Uncas saved the day by rallying other area tribes to their common defense from unspecified outside oppressors. The Order of the Arrow is supposedly the organization Chingachgook started to honor the memory of Uncas and the others. –Conveniently lifted with a little editing of Uncas’s and everyone else’s death, from Mr. Coopers book. There were no footnotes. As Tim’s almost incomprehensible recitation of the legend progressed, Bob who was playing “Allowat Sakimia” mighty chieftain, studied me. Afterwards, with all of us passing the ceremony and clad in our embroidered sashes he asked, “So did you have a copy of the ceremony handbook or something?” He was still puzzled to my knowledge of the sacred Uncus and Chingachgook.

I just gave him the Indian dance team puzzled look. “No.”

He got a little more perturbed, “As a member of the Brotherhood, you must tell me.”

Truth is, having joined the secret brotherhood, I wasn’t about to spoil the ruse. At 13.75 or something, I was more worried about fitting in than pointing out reality. As I progressed through high school, even I eventually tossed on the fake buffalo medicine man hat and recited the lines of the poem, “Years ago in the dim ages, there lived a peaceful tribe of Indians…”  I also progressed through the various levels of the Order. Yeah, they had like three, “The Brotherhood” was the second.  Being a low level inductee Ordeal member Bob had tried to use the two bars on his sash above and below the arrow to beseech information I was keeping.  It didn’t work.  All the brotherhood bars meant was he’d been in longer than I had, and got his finger pricked to mix blood. You had to sit through another fake Indian ceremony too. Over the years, I got elected to Indian lodge positions, eventually ended up running a summer camp, got the third level of honor and never told any of my brothers about Chingachgook. They were all too busy believing they were following the founder’s intents. So what if it was a plagiarized story from a fictional band of Indians. We were preserving their heritage. Plus, we got to hang half naked with each other and play with fire. Over the years I came to understand how important it was for men to have a sense of self-worth, manufactured or not. I kept mute.  Then in 1992, Daniel Day Lewis garbed up as Hawkeye, in a movie version of the book and blew the cover. Dan, one of my camp buddies who is really into the Indian thing asked “Did you know about that the OA ripped off a novel.”  He and I have sponsored a few work training programs on the Yakima Reservation over the years. He still runs a Pow Wow in Pittsburg PA every year.  It’s almost all white people who attend.

I looked at him with that same puzzled look I did with Bob years before, “Yup, I always have.”

He looked at me kind of shocked. Like it was me who had been deceiving him.  Of course it was Dan, Bob, Tim and all the others who had deceived themselves believing in something without question.

Here’s the thing about Dan. When I first met him, he was the rifle range director at our boy scout summer camp. The guy who taught eleven year olds about gun safety. NRA trained an all that. The Boy Scouts have an active program to promote guns and gun safety among youth. We had everything from BB guns and .22 caliber rifles, to shotguns and muzzle loading rifles at our camp. Unfortunately, a lot of those programs, shotgun shooting and black powder rifle shooting, I actually was one of the original promoters of. Hey, I had a camp full of adolescent males who like fire and things that make loud noises. We catered to them.

Having lived in rural areas a lot as a kid, with a father who hunted, I have been around guns all my life. They had a purpose, it was to blast birds and dispatch deer to the dinner table. Nothing more. By the time I was program director for the camp, I knew three people who had been shot.  The first was a little girl who made the mistake of squatting in front of her brothers as they looked at a rifle one day when their parents were out. The boys didn’t know the gun was loaded. The second, a friend from 9^th grade, who was looking at a handgun with another friend. The other kid didn’t know the gun was loaded and pointed it at his face and jokingly pulled the trigger. The final, a friend who was out hunting with his brother, and got caught in shotgun cross fire, as one of the boys tracked a bird that jumped into flight in front of them. These were all issues prevented by basic gun safety, things we drill into kids at scout camp.

Outside of friends of my dad, most of the guys I know who own guns I met in Scouting. Scouters are a demographic made up of predominately white males. Troops for the most part are sponsored by churches. Hence, there is a lot of premise acceptance with little question that goes on in the Boy Scouts. This explains why it took thirty years of fervent debate to get the Boy Scouts to stop witch hunting gays. (Now if we could just get them to stop doing that with Atheists.) It also explains why young men inducted into the Order of the Arrow accept a premise about the Delaware peoples stolen from an early American novel.  –And how they ignore the fact the reason Uncas was the last of the Mohicans was his tribe was actually wiped out and forced west to Kansas by white men’s guns and diseases. But the legend poem is nice. –Actually, it kind of sucks. Its incomprehensible even then the hands of a gifted orator. Much like the King James Bible, explanation is needed by others to explain what it’s all about. Like most poems, a lot more is read into it than the authors intended. It was written by a bunch of high schoolers sitting on the banks of the Delaware summer camp in 1915 as they created a mutual admiration society. Everyone seems to have forgot that. They just like how the sashes make them feel important. Much as everyone seems to have forgot why we have a weirdly worded second amendment to the constitution. (Also conceived on the banks of the Delaware.) They just like how guns make them feel important even if they struggled with high school.

At this point, if you are still with me, you have to be wondering: Where the hell is he going with this? There have been a lot of sensational gun killings lately. Each time, my gun buddies get on the internet and pass on stories and premises that aren’t based in much fact pronounce them as truth. Usually from behind some sort of gun toting costume.   It reminds me a lot of what goes on in Scouting and in church.

I was a college debater so I tend to like to analyze arguments. So when people cite the fact there are 300 million guns in the U.S. and that the 2^nd Amendment was put there so “We the people” can check our government, I start to analyze. Long gone are the days when I let stolen fiction from some old fat early 19^th century novelist run my life and long gone are the days when I think I need to follow the group. In my journey to determine if the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun, I discovered a few things. A lot of the crap the NRA and gun owners put out there is a bit like the “Legend of the Order of the Arrow,” its borrowed and edited for expediency in advocating self-worship. The important thing is to have the sash or the gun. All else is not important.

Looking below the poetic slogan and memes the NRA puts out, I discovered only thirty percent of American’s actually own guns. Ninety percent of women don’t. Gun owners are predominately white guys from the Bible Belt and very much in the minority. More than two thirds of Americans have opted not to own guns. There is a good chance if a popular vote was held tomorrow, the second amendment would be rescinded and the good old white boys would have to give up their toys. They would claim tyranny of the majority, a basic thing our founding father’s feared.  In reality, what the founding fathers did was find a substitute for the gun, the king, and all the proclamations of one with the other: the vote.

But as I really look at it, I begin to think the gun has been at the center of most of what is bad about America. It was the device that allowed us to steal land from the natives, slaughter their food sources, and force them to other lands.  The gun made kidnapping of Africans and their forced slavery possible. It was the device that after the Civil War was decided, still allowed the South to subjugate the former slaves. Those are the items gun owners edit out of the narrative. Substituting defense of the realm, private property, safety from rattlesnakes etc. while camping.   There is a whole false lore that has been created around guns, much like the Boy Scouts that hides some the blatant racism and open discrimination it allows to go on within it, while advertising lofty ideals though laws and constitutions. 

The reality is, 100,000 people are shot in American annually. 33,000 die. The NRA and a small segment of gun owners (white guys) would like to spin you a set of poems about the virtue of the gun wearers of America.

Those white guys need to get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to intimidate people that don’t agree with them with a device meant primarily to kill. We need to stop stealing our own created myths we propagate and start dealing with reality. We are fast becoming the minority. As a gun owner, I include myself. I don’t own a gun to blast birds, I gave up hunting when I was twenty. I don’t own a gun for defense purposes, because I’d never get the thing out of the cabinet and loaded in time to do much. I also don’t think the U.S Army is going to attack me anytime soon, so I won’t be keeping the government in check with my 12 Gauge and half of box of shells I have on hand. I own it because of a legacy of skeet shooting at camp. But given what that legacy represents, I would turn the gun over in a second if asked by my fellow citizens.

My next few posts will be about why I think we should give up guns. How their insidious presence in our society has led to a police state mentality, continued second class citizenship for people of color, and an atmosphere of fear propagated by a minority of still racist white men who have captured the Republican Party.  A group determined to preserve undue influence in national politics by taking advantage of checks and balances instilled in the Constitution to protect minorities, but which they use to project minority points of view on the majority. The white selfish assholes of America. The guys who create false narratives to make sure they can preserve power and the mutual admiration society by pointing guns at people who have long since decided they don’t want to participate in their club.