CHAPTER 1

The Unholy Alliance of Racism, Genocide, and Guns

If I had my life to live over, I would die fighting rather than be a slave again. I want no man’s yoke on my shoulders no more.

-Robert Falls, age 97, Knoxville, Tennessee ¹

In Isaiah 14:21, the Lord tells Isaiah, “Prepare for his sons a place of slaughter because of the iniquity of their fathers.” It’s a variation on the old story of karma and seems in a very real way to be playing out today in the United States.

America is facing an epidemic—public health officials use that word—of gun-related suicides, accidents, and even homicides and police killings. That epidemic has grown worse in the past decade, largely because the number of guns in America has increased—in large part because of the racial fears of white men who bought guns in record numbers for eight years during the time in office of America’s first black president.

A landmark 1999 study from researchers Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins showed that the main correlation —far surpassing mental illness, socioeconomic status, or race—that could be defined as causal in predicting the rates of gun deaths is a simple number: the number of guns distributed among society.

In the 30 years since that study, Zimring and Hawkins’s results have been replicated and re-analyzed dozens of times. ²

As the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a release published in AAAS’s Science magazine, “New research shows dramatic differences in the number of children hospitalized and killed each year in the U.S. from firearm-related injuries based on their states’ gun legislation, even after adjusting for poverty, unemployment, and education rates. It found twice as many pediatric firearm deaths in states with the most lenient gun regulations compared with states where gun laws are strictest.”

They added that this is a critical issue for children, quoting Stephanie Chao, MD, the lead author of the abstract. “Firearm-related injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the United States,” she wrote, “but we found a clear discrepancy in where those deaths happen that corresponds with the strength of states’ firearm legislation. In states with lenient laws, children die at alarmingly greater rates.” ³

And, unsurprisingly, America not only has unusually lenient gun laws but also has more guns in civilian hands than any other country in the world. America has a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population but holds almost 50 percent of all the guns in civilian hands worldwide—more than 390 million guns. And the more guns a society has, the more gun deaths it will experience. ⁴

The NRA and their army of lobbyists have been quite successful in making this happen. During Obama’s presidency, there was a steady and hysterical drumbeat of articles, emails, and political proclamations by “pro-gun” politicians and think tanks suggesting that Obama was preparing to take away everybody’s guns at any minute.

There was even a subtext embraced by the hard right that he wasn’t going to stop there; after disarming white Americans, these folks said, Obama was going to intern them in otherwise-unused “FEMA camps.” Flipped-out gun owners were repeatedly arrested during the Obama years trying to break into retired or temporarily vacant military facilities and toxic waste sites, looking for evidence to prove that Obama was, in fact, preparing the modern-day version of the World War Il-era Japanese internment camps.

White supremacy was the founding notion of this nation. White Europeans thought themselves so superior to the human beings they met here in 1492 that Columbus himself became the first major North American slaver, shipping Taino “Indians” back to Spain as slaves for the royal family.

“A slave is as good as gold,” Columbus wrote to the king and queen.

Europeans in the Americas then stepped up that game into a hemisphere-wide campaign of racial genocide, pulling off the largest multigenerational mass murder in the history of the world. In the midst of that effort, they also created the legal mechanisms necessary to define and legally regulate slavery, and even built those systems into America’s founding document, the Constitution.

America was birthed in slavery and genocide. And both needed guns.

It was the superior weaponry of guns that gave the European settlers a massive advantage over the bow-and-ar- row-equipped Native Americans, and it was the raw power of widespread white ownership of guns in the South that propped up the institution of slavery for hundreds of years. Without guns, neither would have been possible, or at least neither would have been as easy as they were to pull off.

And now, after centuries of guns being used to kill off and keep down people of color in America, those same guns are creating a terrifying epidemic of gun-facilitated violence from public schools to private homes and public concerts.

It’s enough to make one think that Isaiah was on to something.