How Gun Ownership Revolves Around Power, Self-Sufficiency — Not the Liberal and Conservative Divide
By Marta Tahja-Syrett.
When marginalized people are deterred from gun ownership, they are actually being deterred from a particular avenue of power. This same avenue has long been utilized by the United States government, and individual citizens, to enforce and maintain lethal systems of oppression.
In slivers, and flashing moments, my father has instilled in me the notion of sticking to your guns: standing behind your beliefs, and holding tight to the things you feel cannot be compromised. My father taught me what it was like to live as a coonass (for those who don’t know, coonass means a Cajun person, and is a term that reflects either connotations of pride or prejudice), with a fierce heart and a need for self-sufficiency that originates from trauma and poverty. He also taught me to cling, with white knuckles, to my identity and my right to live as a woman. I know that this information, imparted from him to me, was rooted in my father’s life — informed by both his individuality and the collective sense of strength and outspokenness that stems from his rural Cajun-ness.
My identificatory narrative has been formed, in part, by the stories I grew up hearing about my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother, who was referred to by her racist son-in-law as “Blackie” Bertrand, owned a gun just like everyone else in the south. Her marbled wood-grain shotgun, now collecting dust in my parents’ closest, was once utilized as a tool — both a source of concentrated physical power and self-sufficiency. For prolonged periods of her life, my great-grandmother, Bernadette, lived alone. She needed to keep herself protected from the woes of Texan dusk, where the shimmering pelts of panthers shuffled bushes, cooing like crying infants just beyond the back porch. Her gun kept her safe from home invasions, and it signaled to the abusive, betraying hands of men that they weren’t welcomed. Bernadette’s black walnut shotgun also kept our family off the brink of starvation — no baby goes to the crib hungry when their ma’s equipped with great aim and a hankering for some rabbit gumbo.
In terms of staying full during times of financial drought, my father, Toby Syrett, articulates a similar attitude surrounding gun ownership. Through the pages of writing once long-forgotten, my father conveys to his readers a sense of his life.
“When I was in the 3rd grade, my Uncle Richard was on the run from the law and he’d come to live with us. He spent most of his time hiding in the Southeast Texas woods along the gumbo-muddy banks of Cow Bayou using the skills he picked up in Vietnam to lay low. It was 1981 and for Christmas he gave me a present: a Benjamin .22 caliber air rifle. Some would call it a BB gun, but it was far more than a BB gun,” Syrett states.
“He entrusted me with the responsibility of possessing a useful and dangerous tool, one that carried great responsibility. This tool was like a passport into the woods and bayous of my youth. Without it, I was just a kid running around playing. But with it cradled in my arms, I became a biologist, connecting with and learning from rabbits, armadillos, squirrels. I became a scout, walking the woods and neighborhood, taking in information, detecting trends, watching for trouble. I became a provider, putting food on our kitchen table many times as a pre-teen.”
I am fully aware that these narratives may catch someone dazed with fright, heart-racing at the thought of “Blackie” and her gun — the image of a poor Cajun boy utilizing weaponry to feed his family juxtaposed with gun violence statistics and school shooting photographs. Perhaps the onset of cold sweat inducing fear is not just the liberal “oh no, guns!” alarm sounding; it may very well be a reflection of white-progressivism-fueled racism and sexism. According to Lara Witt’s 2017 article published by Harper’s Bazaar, white liberals fear confronting “how white supremacy protects them” and how “they still benefit from generational wealth and privilege from as far back as 400 years ago.” “Well-intentioned” anti-gun liberals will likely struggle to address the reasons why my great-grandmother needed to own a gun, as many of them find it easier to reject, rather than accept, the blatant truth that the United States continues to uphold, on a very deeply rooted and systemic level, violence against women and people of color.
Although there is validity in the statistical evidence surrounding homicidal violence against women, many narratives concerning these statistics fail to examine the ways in which sexism should be dismantled, seeking instead to disarm women as a means to end femicide. These narratives seem to serve as a warning, a cautionary tale, that asserts the belief that women — women whose safety has been compromised (beyond the inherent safety risks that come with being a woman, no matter the individual context) — shouldn’t be looking to weaponry in terms of protection. Writing for The Atlantic in 2014, Evan Defilippis cites a 2005 study to back up his claim that guns are not “a great equalizer between the sexes.” The study found that two-thirds of femicides committed by an intimate partner end in suicide. Drawing his conclusion from this statistic, Defilippis states that mental help for men at-risk (of killing women) needs to be viewed with great immediacy. He goes on to state, “that owning a firearm may make a household more vulnerable than ever.”
But does the issue of violence perpetrated against women really lie solely in debating the mental health of men, or is it possible that it also lies in the very systemic policing and oppression of women? Is it the gun that makes the household vulnerable, or is it really just the man?
Barring oppressed groups of people from gun ownership far predates these aforementioned narratives surrounding the need to disarm households where women live, in an attempt to end gendered violence. In his 2018 article written for The Root, Michael Harriot addresses legislative attempts to prevent black gun ownership. To support his argument that “White men have always been afraid of armed black people,” Harriot highlights Ronald Reagan’s fight “for gun control legislation after another group of black men called Black Panthers marched on California’s Capitol carrying shotguns.”
Marginalized gun ownership isn’t the solution to dismantling and overturning systemic oppression, but it is a tool that some seek in regard to protection — protection from both interpersonal violence and systemic violence. We should never deny the people who have long been brutalized by our nation the right to deal with their oppression as they choose. To quote Toby Syrett, “Until we make the world safe for everyone, we have no business telling someone that they can’t carry a gun to protect themselves.”
