The yellow Gadsden flag flies high over many rural districts in the United States, bearing the phrase “DON’T TREAD ON ME” and a coiled rattlesnake poised to attack. Created during the American Revolution as a rallying symbol against authoritarian British control, the flag originally promoted the principles of individualism and freedom. Nearly 250 years later, it endures as a co-opted symbol by right-wing movements that champion white nationalism, limited government, and the Second Amendment.
With a record 647 mass shootings occurring in 2022, it seems illogical to many non-Americans that gun control remains hotly contested among US legislators. And yet the extent of the “right to bear arms” is a polarizing topic in American politics. The United States is a world leader in gun violence because of the historical tenets the American identity was founded upon: rugged individualism, the frontier, and the right to take up arms against an oppressive government. Thus, overcoming the gun violence crisis in America at the legislative level will require a nationwide change in self-perception. A core difference between the United States and other countries is that, in America, being a “gun owner” is a historically entrenched identity. Consequently, in the American public psyche, the gun must be transformed from a romanticized symbol of freedom to a reflection of the oppression, conquest, and brutality it has historically perpetuated.
The modern United States has been shaped by a continuous drive to conquer new frontiers. After settling in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia, American colonists expanded through unknown Western terrain during the early 19th century. However, these “new frontiers,” such as the Hawaiian Kingdom, had been inhabited by Indigenous nations for millennia before. Conflict quickly raged on both sides, but the colonizers were armed with a uniquely destructive technology: the gun.
Rather than serving as a shameful symbol of the genocide of Native American people, the gun has arisen as an emblem of the “wild west” and the “God-given” right to American expansion. This perception continues to permeate the mainstream media today. For example, in “Westerns”—a popular film genre that has traditionally portrayed early Americans in the West as heroic symbols of morality, masculinity, and bravery—the protagonist is typically clad in cowboy boots with a silver pistol loaded at the hip. Through the cowboy, a uniquely American cultural character is born, and with him comes the reinforcement of the gun as a part of American identity.
A key tenant of this identity is the concept of “rugged individualism,” a term coined by President Herbert Hoover to describe the American spirit of self-reliance and independence from a strong central government. Support for the Second Amendment aligns with several of the core ideas of “rugged individualism”: self-sufficiency, limited government, and an idealization of rural America. For many, the Second Amendment serves as a relic of a traditional American hero who, via gun control proposals, is at risk of extinction.
The chief organization that legitimizes the “gun owner” identity today is the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has strategically intertwined gun ownership with right-wing movements and Republican identity. New NRA members receive the option to subscribe to a set of hunting, marksmanship, and political magazines promoting gun ownership as an integral aspect of American life. NRA stickers, flags, and t-shirts encourage a sense of community between gun owners, creating a culture of like-minded people to mobilize against the threat of gun control and defend American values. The group’s commercials feature men dressed as cowboys superimposed over black-and-white clips of rural landscapes and Western industries as they speak of America’s glory.
In 2017, 45 percent of NRA members said that owning a gun was “very important to their overall identity.” For some members of the NRA, the gun is a symbol of brotherhood—both a literal and metaphorical weapon against progressive social reforms, which attempt to deconstruct the problematic undertones of America’s founding ideals that continue to define its culture today. By contrast, of non-NRA members who own a gun, only 20 percent said that it was “very important to their overall identity.” The NRA’s existence as an interest group has cemented the fervor around gun ownership as a part of the American “rugged individualist” identity and enabled the fight about gun control to become a polarized culture war rather than a nationwide public safety issue.
For a country like the United States, who in large parts owes its imperialist founding to modern technology like guns, disentangling these early revolutionary symbols from the core of our culture will not be an easy task. From 1776 to present, the gun has followed American history every step of the way, leaving disproportionate oppression and devastation to marginalized communities in its wake. The violence that began with the massacres of Indigenous tribes continues today in synagogues, a Walmart on the Mexican-American border, queer night clubs, a Black church, and Asian American businesses. Tellingly, those who commit hate crimes in America have often been found at the butt of a gun. Yet Western romanticism, reactionary nationalism, and the NRA have carefully repainted this ugly picture into one of heroism and morality.
So long as the gun is a symbolic cultural icon to a large portion of Americans, no amount of mass shootings or lives lost will inspire bipartisan gun regulations. The gun control movement has long since passed the tragic “#NeverAgain” slogan. Rather, the gun’s history in America must be disentwined from identity politics, divorcing the gun from the American hero and revealing its true role as a treacherous weapon of conquest, oppression, and America’s founding shame. Disconnecting the gun from the American identity will require a nationwide education effort to reframe the gun from a symbol of American glory to one of systematic violence. These efforts will be slow and generational, but it is possible to shift the false narrative on guns by presenting the statistics and implications of the damage they have disproportionately caused to marginalized groups throughout history. Mitigating gun violence in the United States will require a core identity shift and a rejection of the gun’s cultural martyr. Those roots are buried deep in this country’s founding, and it will take a slow, purposeful excavation effort to dig those ideas out of the ground and into the light, where all may finally recognize the unplumbed darkness they carry.