By: Nick Santangelo

Religion Professor Mark Leuchter wanted his audience to know he doesn't hate guns. He doesn't even hate the National Rifle Association (NRA). But he does hate the NRA leadership's rhetoric on gun rights.

Meanwhile, Political Science Associate Professor Sean Yom made clear that he doesn't hate all gun owners. How could he? Dr. Yom was born into a family of gun-owning Texans. His father even has a concealed carry license. But he has his suspicions about some gun owners' supposed necessity of owning certain guns.

For her part, History Professor Lila Corwin-Berman said she didn't know whether or not NRA President Wayne LaPierre hates Jewish people. But she does know that he's used Jewish stereotypes when defending American gun rights against supposed threats from George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer.

And History Associate Professor Jessica Roney said she doesn't believe state and local governments should cede all control to the federal government, nor does Dr. Roney know precisely how modern judges and lawmakers should interpret the Second Amendment. She, along with her three Temple University College of Liberal Arts colleagues, was here only to present context for and ask questions about these and other topics relative to gun rights and gun control.

The Hard Numbers

The conversation about these issues is a loaded one. So much so that each of the four professors felt they had to explicitly state who and what they don't hate when presenting to a few dozen students who gathered in Gladfelter Hall's Weigler Room for the College's Way of the Gun panel, part of History Professor Ralph Young's weekly Dissent in America Teach-in Series. The panel took place just two days after schoolchildren and college students—including 30 or so from Temple—across Philadelphia and throughout the country walked out of their classes for 17 minutes on March 14. The walkout was a tribute to the 17 children who lost their lives to gun violence at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14.

The walkouts, however, weren't held only to remember the lost. They were also held to protect those who might yet be saved. It will not be the last such gesture. A week and a day after Temple's Way of the Gun panel, the March for Our Lives protest will see thousands take to the streets of Washington, D.C. and cities around the country to pressure legislators into enforcing stricter gun control laws Saturday. But while a February Quinnipiac University poll shows 66 percent of Americans favor stricter gun control, recent Gallop polling shows that five percent want looser gun control laws.

That second number may seem miniscule, and both Quinnipiac and Gallop show support for stricter gun laws is at an all-time high. Still, there exists a small minority who oppose gun control in all forms, and they tend to be the ones with the most guns and the most passion for defending their ownership and usage of said guns.

"Forty-two percent of people in this country own a gun, but that percentage has actually stayed fairly stable over the last two or three decades," explained Dr. Yom. "The issue is not who owns a gun. The issue is who owns most of the guns. Three percent of the gun-owning households own about half of the legally owned firearms in this country. That's not a normal distribution."

But these individuals aren't preventing the government from instituting laws like universal background checks, bump stock and assault weapon bans or magazine size restrictions on their own. They have the backing of the NRA, which has the backing of gun manufacturers.

"There are people who have vested economic interests in getting more guns in more hands," noted Professor Leuchter. "The NRA is one thing. They work for the gun producers, and there are people who see that as a real economic lifeblood of the country and who work to create the conditions under which more people want guns."

Them Against Us

But how did we get here? The NRA was founded in 1871, though it did not lobby the government to keep stricter gun control laws off the books until a radical group of members seized control of the organization in the mid-1970s. This was all in response to the Gun Control Act of 1968, which sought to restrict firearm transfers to sales by licensed manufacturers, dealers and importers. That's not where the debate started, however. Professor Roney believes Americans' divisive history of gun issues started in England before America was even colonized.

She mentioned a U.S. Court of Appeals case that heard arguments about whether or not the government could limit permits for carrying handguns. The appellate judges looked all the way back to a 1328 English statute in finding that the D.C. government could not require citizens attempting to obtain a permit to present a "good reason" in order to do so.

Jumping ahead to Colonial Times, Dr. Roney next mentioned a 1689 English law allowing Protestants—but not Catholics—to own arms for self-defense. According to the professor, modern US legal scholars still look at this clause when debating the Constitutionality of laws restricting gun rights. The law in question, Article VII of the English Bill of Rights, seemingly established that Colonial America's ruling government had the power to decide who could and could not own guns. It also brought religion into the debate.

Dr. Leucther is one scholar who sees religion as being deeply entangled in America's gun issues. As evidence, he examined the language LaPierre chose for his February's speech during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. LaPierre repeatedly used terms such as "they" and "them," pitting one group of unidentified Americans against the "we" and "us" hanging onto his every word.

"What these words do is draw lines between us and them," asserted Dr. Leuchter. "We are Americans. We have the Second Amendment. This is our country, and they want to take it away from you."

So, where does religion enter the picture?

"LaPierre's speech taps into a very old myth from the Bible called the Chaos Myth or Combat Myth," continued Leuchter. "This idea that society is very fragile. Society is licensed by God, licensed by divine will, but just beyond society the chaos monsters are trying to come in and get us. The chaos monsters are trying to erode and corrupt this beautiful reality that God has constructed for us to live in. This is a very, very old myth. You don't just find it in the Bible. You find it in a lot of religious texts. You find it in Hindu texts, you find it in Islamic texts.

"This idea that there's chaos outside and order within, that you must constantly be vigilant against the chaos is a very deeply formed belief in the formation of religious scripture that's still used today."

Dr. Corwin-Berman echoed much of Dr. Leuchter's thoughts on LaPierre's speech while filtering them through the lenses of nationalism and anti-Semitism. Recall that her presentation made mention of LaPierre's stereotyping of Jews: "He is calling upon that figure in a way that is meant to highlight, for those who are listening, that this is a figure to be reviled and be fearful of. That this figure makes you a victim, that it is a conspiratorial globalist figure. That he uses invisible power to control the world. That he is elite, refined, overly educated. Ultimately, the 'them' is who will destroy the 'us.'"

A Colorful Issue

But while that may all be true enough, Dr. Yom pointed to the surprising reality of who makes up the American gun-owning population. Targeted and random studies in mixed and red states have shown that most gun owners are white males with limited educations but who are not overly religious. In fact, the data indicate that the more evangelical a citizen is, the less likely they are to own a gun. They also tend to display high levels of anxiety about their family, their job, their race or their future.

Dr. Yom's data revelation likely came as little surprise to Dr. Corwin-Berman. She sees the American gun debate as being deeply entangled with issues of power, specifically in sorting out which races and religions ought to have access to that power.

"I think we need new scripts about how power works," she said. "If we're going to address gun legislation, we're going to need new scripts about power. Scripts that don't view people of colors or figures of difference for the 'they' against which we define an 'us.'"

The NRA and its constituents' scripts seem to largely exclude people of color, specifically African Americans and Muslims from the distribution of power, according to Dr. Yom. As evidence, he brought up a 1967 Black Panther rally at California's capital building. The Panthers showed up brandishing guns to protest racial injustice. No bullets were fired, and the Panthers were legally licensed to openly carry, but the event nevertheless led to then-Governor Ronald Reagan banning the open carry of loaded weapons.

That may have been more than half a century ago, but even today, many people of color and Muslims feel that at least some Americans would prefer not to see them arming up. One commentator mentioned after the Stoneman Douglas shooting that he did not believe NRA leadership would be thrilled if three million of his fellow Muslim Americans applied for membership. Dr. Yom paraphrased the commentator: "No, we probably will not be welcomed with opening arms."

An Unwinnable Fight

Another group that gun advocates have long seen as "others" coming for their guns works for Uncle Sam. Yes, the debate over gun control is also tied up in concerns over local or individual rights being taken away by the federal government. Dr. Yom pointed to gun sales being up 300 percent after Barack Obama was elected president in 2007. It's probably not entirely inaccurate to say that liberals were (and are) trying to take at least some guns away from at least some people. Although it was Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) who passed new gun restrictions in his state after Stoneman Douglas survivors called for them, it has historically been liberals speaking out the most for stricter gun laws while conservatives have tended to resist them the most ardently.

But there's another component to this that goes beyond left versus right issues. For that three percent of Americans who own multiple guns, there exists a fear that the United States government will try to forcibly take their guns away. For these Americans, the reaction has been to stockpile even more firearms, specifically assault weapons. Dr. Yom couldn't help but laugh at this notion while painting an absurdist picture to make his point.

"If the goal is to defend your home against government tyranny, and the government comes after you with all its firepower, an AR-15 is not going to do anything against an M1 Abrams tank!" he quipped.

Dr. Leuchter sees this whole scenario as a bit backward. Gun owners argue they need their weapons for self-defense, but here they are making the argument that they need more and more powerful guns to protect…their guns.

"There's kind of blurring of the lines. The gun becomes the object that you have to protect," he says. "How do you protect it? By invoking the Second Amendment. You don't study the Second Amendment. You don't debate the Second Amendment. You don't parse the Second Amendment. You don't look at the language and the historical context in which the Second Amendment was created. You just invoke it."

In this way, the panelists agreed, the gun becomes an icon, a symbol of heroism and individual freedom. This didn't happen overnight. Dr. Roney mentioned early American fears of a standing federal army, thinking it would serve the federal government's interests rather than that of individual colonies. Many colonists instead favored militias, or "Minutemen." But tales of the militia's heroism may have been greatly exaggerated.

"When revolution came about, the militia failed in almost every case," explained Dr. Roney. "There is this myth of the Minuteman defending his community, his farm, his family. In reality, it didn't work out at all. George Washington has these wonderful letters written back to Congress excoriating the militia and requesting a standing army, the Continental Army."

The Big Guns

So, where does the debate go from here? It might seem easy to dismiss the historical context as too old to be relevant today. But is it really possible to do so when those on one side of the debate focus so heavily on their reading of the Second Amendment? And can you really ignore cultural issues tied up in racial and religious tensions when so many on the other side see those issues still causing major problems today?

None of Temple's panelists offered anything close to a final solution for the gun debate or these issues that make up much of its narrative. Dr. Roney specifically mentioned that she didn't have all the answers for sorting out individual versus collective or state versus federal rights. Professors Leuchter and Corwin-Berman agreed with an audience member who said it's business interests that are ultimately driving gun advocacy. Both, however, also stressed that this is successful because the reasons for doing so are relayed through cultural arguments.

"Is it a sham?" asked Dr. Leuchter. "Well, you may think so and I may think so, but if somebody really believes it, then it's not a sham to them."

In any case, Dr. Yom sees a reason for hope. Through increased globalization and passion among young people like those who walked out of class a couple days before the Way of the Gun panel, he sees a path toward change. And although often lost in these arguments is that most gun violence involves a single homicide or suicide via a small handgun, the Political Science professor thinks the culture of self-defense makes it difficult to go after handguns. Meanwhile, assault weapons existing as icons makes them the best first target.

"I think if we're going to get the gun debate to a point where you can ever touch a sidearm, a 9mm, then we would have to start with the assault rifles. We're not going to do it the other way around. And also we have a 10-year history in this country where we banned assault rifles, and we didn't fall apart. I think we can build on that."

Photography by Colleen Claggett