{"id":968,"date":"2022-07-06T10:43:14","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T14:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/?page_id=968"},"modified":"2022-07-06T10:47:59","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T14:47:59","slug":"our-gun-myths-have-held-america-hostage-for-too-long","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/our-gun-myths-have-held-america-hostage-for-too-long\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Gun Myths Have Held America Hostage for Too Long"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Credit…<\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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By\u00a0<\/span>Francisco Cant\u00fa, New York Times, July 4, 2022<\/span><\/p>\n

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Mr. Cant\u00fa, a writer and a teacher, is the author of \u201cThe Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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Like so many Americans, I have been called into relationships with guns since I was a child and have been made to understand, even long before I could articulate it, that guns represented something essential about what it means to become a fully realized American man.<\/p>\n

My first guns were toys, followed by a pump-action Daisy BB gun that I used to shoot down green army men in my father\u2019s garage. Then came the real guns: the .22 rifle I learned to use at summer camp in the fourth grade, the handgun my father taught me to shoot during a boyhood visit to a friend\u2019s ranch in Nevada and the Colt 1911 he let me fire years later, which had been carried by my grandfather throughout his service in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.<\/p>\n

As I became older, guns were given to me as a rite of passage \u2014 by my father, by my mother\u2019s boyfriend and by the United States government upon my graduation from the Border Patrol academy when I was 23.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Guns have long been an integral part of our national mythology, woven deep into our most sacred lore about the winning of our independence, about manifest destiny and territorial expansion, about the defense of democracy and the spread of our empire across the globe. At the center of this mythos is an abiding archetype \u2014 the lone man and his gun. This figure (usually white and positioned in opposition to people of color) has been represented throughout history in many familiar forms: the musket-toting militiaman with a revolutionary thirst for liberty; the cowboy chasing freedom with a six shooter across a frontier full of hostile natives; or the soldier with a rifle deployed to conquer or save a distant people inferior to his own. In each case, the gun is an essential counterpart \u2014 serving, like King Arthur\u2019s sword or Luke Skywalker\u2019s lightsaber, as the one tool that makes possible the hero\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n