Gun nut. Ammosexual. Guntard. The anti-gunners love coming up with new ways to denigrate and demean the tens of millions of Americans who believe the right to keep and bear arms is worth preserving, and Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr has now added her contribution to the vocabulary of the anti-2A crowd.
I have to say though, Stohr's new nickname is so clunky I don't expect it to catch on, even among the most ardent opponents of our Second Amendment. In her latest column, Stohr claims that "as the nation reels from yet another shooting on a college campus and Americans ask themselves why we haven’t managed to do much about it, they should look at those who profit most from shootings."
Her answer? The "gun industrial complex," which she argues actually benefits from high-profile shootings like the one at Brown University last weekend in Rhode Island (which, incidentally, is "A-" rated by Giffords and has the lowest rate of gun ownership in the country according to a 2022 CBS News report).
It’s good business for the American makers of guns, ammo, and other related products that, after bottoming out as an industry in the 1980s, turned their attention and marketing from the military squarely to US civilians. Groups like the NRA helped create the false narrative that it is somehow un-American to pass laws curbing access to military-grade weapons, require background checks for gun purchases, and bar firearms from community spaces that are meant to be free of violence. That’s not protecting Americans’ constitutional rights. That’s putting them in grave peril.
Stohr is an absolute idiot if she honestly thinks that the firearms industry was primarily marketing its products to the military until the 1980s. Here's an ad, for instance, from 1878 by Boston, Massachusetts gun company C.W. Turner and Ross, which called itself a "dealer in firearms, sporting and military."
The "$10 revolver for $2.50" offered by the company was advertised as using "the EXTRA LONG Rifle cartridge and will kill at 100 yards," and as the company declared, "everyone should own a good revolver, and this opportunity will never come again."
That's just one example. As long as we've had advertising, we've had advertisements for firearms aimed at the civilian market, despite Storh's wild claims to the contrary. And it wasn't the NRA who "created the false narrative that it is somehow un-American to pass laws curbing access to military-grade weapons." It was perfectly legal to own a cannon in 1791, a Gatling Gun in 1861, and a Colt 1911 in, well, 1911. The Civilian Marksmanship Program started offering M1 Garands for sale in 1956, while it was still the preferred rifle of the U.S. Army.
Background checks are a thoroughly modern invention, and the list of places off-limits to lawful concealed carry have been few and far between throughout much of U.S. history as well. What Stohr is really claiming is that our right to keep and bear arms was invented by the "gun industrial complex," and that strict gun control was the norm throughout American history.
The Framers never intended that. The Second Amendment was ratified at a time when the nation’s leaders were seeking to ensure the ability to maintain “well-regulated militias,” like the minutemen at Lexington and Concord who helped fight the British army during the revolution. It was not meant to be construed as the kind of bar against reasonable gun control measures that has led to a flood of domestically manufactured guns and tragic outcome after tragic outcome.
And who made up the militia? Every able-bodied man capable of bearing arms.
If the Founders only intended that portion of the American populace to have access to firearms, though, they wouldn't have declared that "the people" have the right to keep and bear them, nor would they have specifically stated that the right "shall not be infringed."
Yes, the Second Amendment was mean to be a bar against gun control measures that would prevent average, everyday Americans from keeping and bearing arms. The Founders lived in a world where mass violence was hardly unheard of, even if it was rarely committed by a single individual. Raiding parties committed by both Native Americans and frontier settlers, mob violence in urban areas, and even acts of rebellion by hundreds or thousands of citizens were a regular feature of life in the late colonial and early Republic periods, yet the Founders never sought to disarm the American people. To the contrary, they explicitly stated that Congress had no power to infringe on the people's right to own and carry firearms.
It's not the firearms industry or Second Amendment supporters who have engaged in a "gross distortion of the Constitution." It's anti-gunners like Stohr who are engaging in revisionist history in pursuit of a disarmament agenda that is completely contrary to our framework of government and the history of gun ownership in this country. The "gun industrial complex" isn't really a thing, but the gun prohibition lobby most certainly is.
