As anyone who followed my campaign knows, I am a gun owner and I support the right of citizens to own guns. It’s been disturbing, nevertheless, to see a recent wave of “Second Amendment Sanctuary” declarations passed in a number of places, including Lee County and Washington County, Virginia. In Washington County, where hundreds of people turned out for the Board of Supervisors meeting, the vote was unanimous, including two Democrats and one Independent. While these declarations are purely symbolic, the symbolism is clear and defiant: Guns are safe here. Don’t try to control or limit them in any way. If you do, we won’t cooperate. The county’s newly elected Commissioner of Revenue, a self-described “Trump Republican”, testified to the supervisors that “we need our guns to defend our religious freedom”.
I called four different Supervisors, including the two co-sponsors of this declaration. I was only able to speak directly to one, who admitted the effort was “not worth the paper it’s printed on”, but who supported it nonetheless, expressing that we need to be sufficiently armed to be prepared to fight a tyrannical government. Given the recent shift in Virginia’s balance of power, and the vulnerability of Trump and a handful of Republicans in the US Senate, a potentially tyrannical government presumably is always one led by Democrats.
Five years ago in Washington County, Kevin Palmer shot and killed his estranged wife, his teenage son, and his mother-in-law before killing himself. This happened just days after his wife and son had fled and secured a protective order, based upon his repeated abuse of both mother and son. Kristin Palmer, a beloved local school teacher, told police that she feared for their lives. A ‘red flag’ law, if we had one in Virginia, would have allowed local law enforcement to temporarily remove the guns that Kevin Palmer owned, based on the clear threat he posed to his family. I brought this up when speaking to the supervisors (by phone message in some cases). “What if it was your daughter who was facing such a lethal and immediate threat?”, I asked. “Would you not want the sheriff’s office to be able to do something to protect her?”. Obviously, that argument did not move them.
Every right in our constitution has limits. None are absolute. The right of free speech does not allow us to shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre, causing panic and injury. The right to assemble freely does not allow me to bring a hundred unwanted visitors onto your private property. If all of these basic, constitutionally-guaranteed rights have limits, why has the Second Amendment become, in the minds of many, so absolute, so fundamental that even the most modest and life-saving proposals are met with such fury?
For one, it is the fear of government tyranny, made plain by speakers at the BOS meeting and at least one supervisor with whom I spoke. This ‘threat’ was promoted relentlessly on right wing media during the Obama years, including the conspiracy theory that FEMA was setting up concentration camps for those who disagreed with the President, and that the military was preparing for an invasion and take-over of Texas. The fact that none of this crazy shit happened seems to have done little to reduce the fear of government.
But it’s more than that. The defiant stance for Second Amendment sanctuaries is also part of a widespread culture of grievance, stoked relentless by President Trump, Fox News and countless right-wing media outlets. The sense that good, ordinary people, are having things taken from them by liberal elites; that our most basic values are under threat. This is why so many white Christians in rural communities believe that their religious freedom is under threat, even as churches freely operate and evangelize, as prayers to Jesus bless food at non-religious civic and public meetings, as students hold prayer meetings in their schools and as more and more people sign off with “Have a blessed day”. This culture of outrage and grievance has persuaded more than half of white people to believe that they are the most frequent victims of discrimination; that their values, religion and culture, which utterly predominate, are under assault; that their very life, demonstrably safer than the life of an immigrant or a person of color, is most endangered.
The political right has succeeded in embedding fear, outrage and grievance in the minds of many Americans. The left has failed to offer a persuasive counter narrative, in word or deed. The only thing I know to do is to keep working for a better world, locally, nationally and across the globe. A world where a sense of common cause and mutual support undercuts “us” vs “them” fear and loathing. It may well take a generation, but it is essential to our survival.