Political scientist Alexandra Filindra’s Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (Chicago, 2023) complements Anderson’s The Second in focusing on the centrality of white male supremacy in the founding of American gun culture and the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Amid considerable interest in the future of the NRA, Filindra provides a novel and compelling analysis of its origins and development. Moreso, this book tells the story of the birth and development of a core ideology of American culture generally: ascriptive martial republicanism (AMR). This “syncretic combination of two worldviews” brings together White male supremacy (“ascriptive”) and the belief that citizens bear rights and duties (“republicanism”), including military service (“martial”) (p. 7).

Filindra tells this story in three parts. Part one explores the rise of AMR in the founding era, including the role of militias into the 19^th century. Part two shows how the ideology was embodied by the NRA from its founding and carried into the present. Part three uses survey data to highlight the persistence of AMR beliefs today.

Today the NRA has decoupled republicanism from military service, substituting the act of owning a gun as one’s patriotic duty. While this might seem to also decouple republicanism from its ascriptive limitations, Filindra argues that contemporary gun culture remains firmly planted in its white male supremacist origins. Consequently, far from being a bulwark of liberty, right-wing gun culture fosters support for anti-democratic norms (concluding chapter title: “Democratic Stability in Peril”).

That American gun culture is racist in its historical foundations and remains racist at its contemporary core is a central tenet of The Master Narrative. Emory University Professor Carol Anderson’s The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an exemplar of this line of thinking.

Anderson argues that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the US was purposely designed to maintain the subjugation of African Americans. Patrick Henry and George Mason insisted that local control of militias was “essential to put down slave revolts and protect plantation owners. . . . The Second Amendment served that purpose” (p. 164). The ability to control Black people by controlling access to firearms continued through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

Moreover, the racist purpose of The Second is not just a part of America’s past. The original intention continues to marginalize African Americans. The security fears that drove the rise of Gun Culture 2.0 were fears of Black criminality. The “bad guy with a gun” that the “good guy with a gun” was supposed to stop is typically Black. Even when the good guy with a gun was Black, his Blackness trumped his good guy-ness. A legally-armed Black man with a gun, Philando Castile, opens the book.

The crux of Anderson’s argument is: “Regardless of how African Americans have engaged this right, it has been used against them. In other words, what is so striking about the Second Amendment is witnessing its inherent anti-Blackness centuries after its ratification” (p. 160).

Harel Shapira’s book, Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America, is forthcoming, but he previews the argument in a New York Times opinion essay (“Firearms Taught Me, and America, a Very Dangerous Lesson”) from May 2023. I wrote extensively about his ideas here back then, discussed it on “Light Over Heat,” and cover some of that same ground in the chapter on firearms training in my forthcoming book.

In the essay that previews his book, Shapira writes: “The classes I attended trained students to believe that their lives are in constant danger. They prepared us to shoot without hesitation and avoid legal consequences. They instilled the kind of fear that has a corrosive effect on all interactions — and beyond that, on the fabric of our democracy.”

He concludes that a “less recognized casualty” of defensive firearms training “is the kind of public interactions that make democracy viable. The N.R.A. says that ‘an armed society is a polite society.’ But learning to carry a gun isn’t teaching Americans to have good manners. It’s training them to be suspicious and atomized, learning to protect themselves, no matter how great the risk to others. It’s training them to not be citizens.”

In summary, defensive gun training — which is at the heart of Gun Culture 2.0 — undermines democracy.

Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force by political scientist Matthew Lacombe is one of my Top 5 books on guns in America (as of August 2022). Lacombe correctly argues that much of the legislative strength of the National Rifle Association is due to its ability to politically mobilize guns owners on its behalf. And key to that political “weaponization” has been the cultivation of “gun owner” as a social identity in the first place.

Unlike many who tell a simplistic tale of the NRA, Lacombe rightly observes that the NRA was both highly political and highly ideological prior to the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977. In fact, in the Virtual Book Club I am running right now on Gun Country (another piece of The Master Narrative), Andrew McKevitt highlights activist journalist Carl Bakal’s claim in his book The Right to Bear Arms that “the NRA has for nearly four decades conducted one of the most intensive and imaginative lobbying operations witnessed in Washington” (p. 8). Written in 1966. The post-1977 difference is that the NRA became partisan and Lacombe explains how today’s NRA political alignment with the GOP grew.

This work contributes to The Master Narrative mostly in the final conclusion Lacombe draws from his meticulous and clever empirical analysis. In the final paragraph of the book he writes that the NRA “represents something of a democratic paradox: it subverts the will of the majority, but does so by working the levers of democracy” (pp. 236-7). Furthermore, “the NRA’s identity-based appeals tend to rely on fear in a way that encourages polarization, discourages compromise, and–in some cases–advances conspiratorial views that are misleading and offensive” (p. 237). The final sentence of the book that secures its standing in The Master Narrative reads: “In the end, then, the NRA demonstrates that groups can be effective at using democracy to their advantage, even to the point of undermining it” (p. 237).

My first example is actually not by a scholar, but the book so purely reflects The Master Narrative that it provides a great starting point: Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse. (I have previously reviewed the book here.) Busse is the former Vice President of Sales for the gun manufacturer Kimber. He is mad and he doesn’t deny it. He also wants to atone for his sins and this book is part of that process.

Busse argues that the National Rifle Association and its economic arm, the gun industry, have played a “leading role” in politically radicalizing America (p. 57). He concludes, “The gun industry and the NRA have successfully transformed an entire country” (p. 303).