How slavery helped spawn modern U.S. gun culture--Op-Ed in the LA Times.
By Nick Buttrick
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-11-06/slave-states-american-gun-culture-reconstruction-civil-war
Two-thirds of American gun owners say that they own their gun at least in part for protection — this despite data showing having a gun in the house doubles the likelihood that someone in the household will die by homicide, triples the likelihood that someone in the household will die by suicide, and provides little or no defense against assault or property loss.
Where does this unique set of beliefs about the protective power of a gun come from?
~snip
The South was a very dangerous place after the war. More than half a million men, with their weapons, returned to what rapidly became one of the most heavily armed societies in the world, and one of the most violent: The murder rate in the South during the 1870s was an estimated 18 times higher than in New England — largely driven by white men killing each other.
The postwar period was shaped by the Reconstruction administration’s efforts to expand political power to those who had been emancipated and the backlash against this attempt. Elite white Southerners considered the empowerment of the previously enslaved population an existential threat and worked to repress Black political power as completely as possible.
As part of that project, white Southern leaders explicitly anchored the protection of their way of life in the private ownership of firearms, arguing that guns protected white people from an illegitimate government unwilling to keep them safe. The huge supply of firearms from the war made this argument salient.
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