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‘Over There’ is right here in Macon, Georgia . . . a smallish, provincial city eighty five miles from the hurly and the burly of Atlanta to the north. Now Georgia was a charter member of the CSA, The Confederate States of America. A few Georgians are still fighting the ‘War of Northern Aggression' as some diehard souls refer to our Civil War (1861-1865), the bloody internecine conflict that almost destroyed our Federal Union before the end of its first century. Georgia is a conservative state and went heavily for George W. Bush in the election of 2,000. We had more disputed ballots than did Florida to the south, but we missed out on the swarms of lawyers (barristers) who infested the Sunshine State like hordes of dung beetles in the weeks following the election. The outcome here was never in doubt.

Macon is a pleasant enough place where the mild winter is balanced by an intolerably hot, sticky summer. Like many cities in the deep south the population is roughly equally divided between White and Black. At this point in time the races get along reasonably well, unlike numerous, stereotypical depictions. Examples of racism are not uncommon; it cuts both ways: White folks’ racial attitudes about Black folks and vice versa.

My family lives in Macon, but we are not from here. You can find out everything you might want about me, my pop, the dog, and my impossible older brothers by following the Internet links at the end of this brief piece. What I do in all the spare time I have is write. That’s why I am here. it is our intention to amuse, challenge and, sometimes, outrage. 

It shocks most people in the civilized world that Americans are so in love with their firearms. There are more guns in American homes than there are Americans. Many of our citizens feel passionately that the Constitution of the United States guarantees us the ‘right to keep and bear arms’. There is a great debate raging in this country over guns. The arguments are not heard much in public these days. The voters knew that now President George W. Bush was a gun and hunting advocate. His opponent, Mr. Gore made a conscious decision not to argue the gun issue during the campaign because his pollsters told him he would lose more votes than he could gain. Our politicians, like yours, have the backbone of worms when it comes to taking a moral stand.

So why is the United States such a firearm loving country? The answer is simple and historical and it’s your fault, my British Cousins, not ours. 

Most sociologists since de Toqueville cite the obvious that the U.S. is still, basically a ‘frontier society’ in which rugged individualism is prized and the people are consumed by romantic visions of their own Wild West days when gun-toting was a commonplace. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most modern Americans do not carry firearms. Many possess them…having weapons in their homes and sometimes in their vehicles. We do not approach one another in malls and super markets saying things like, “I will give you ten seconds to git outta my way or I’ll ventilate your miserable hide with my 9 mm.” Our frontier days are long gone and most Americans take out their hostility by smashing smaller autos with massive truck-like, SUVs, those urban assault vehicles we now favor as the extension of our self-perceived masculinity. 

So why are we Americans gun crazy? It started back many years ago when we were colonies of the Crown . . . YOUR crown. Around 1775 there was a popular expression in the original thirteen political units which went, “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” Parents use to coach small children to utter the phrase to taunt the King’s soldiers Now, of course, children are taught the expression, “Taxation WITH representation is tyranny,” which is one of the reasons we exchanged eight years of Clintonian idealism for Republican leadership in the last election go around. 

Now in those olden days the British Monarch was of the House of Hanover. The Royals then were not English at all but German. All this made much more sense in the eighteenth century than it does to us now. George barely spoke English and had problems communicating with his subjects who did. Most Colonists at first were pretty much loyal to the Crown, tended to think of themselves as British subjects, and simply wanted to get a tax break or at least some kind of say in what taxes they should be forced to cough up. 

George III peopled the American colonies with an army of occupation which he quartered in major cities throughout the land. Many of these soldiers were Prussian mercenaries called ‘Hessians’. They were tough fighters, a little on the loutish and heavy-handed side, and spoke little or no English. They could, however, communicate just fine with the king and were happy with the relatively easy duty of occupation. (It was customary in those days to quarter soldiers with private citizens except for infrequent calls to arms to quell civil unrest or break up snowball fights.) Occupation was a heck of a lot easier than fighting the French or Spanish or some other European power. 

As 1775 wore on, increasingly the hard-drinking Hessians were employed to enter private and public buildings for the expressed purpose of seizing stores of firearms and gunpowder. That’s what the firefight at Lexington and Concord was all about: a detachment of British Troops marched out of Boston into the two hamlets and fired ‘the shot heard ‘round the world’. Hessian casualties were heavy because the American civilians refused to ‘stand and fight’ but took advantage of the cover of trees and stone walls as they discharged their muskets at the retreating Redcoats. It was not a good day.

The biggest headache many colonists were forced to suffer was the unwelcome intrusion into their homes to find and seize firearms and other weaponry by red coat wearing brutes who did not speak English and smelled of sauerkraut, sausage and strong beer. These men were frequently discourteous and overbearing, and did not even give the poor colonials a warning before they broke down doors to begin the grisly task of confiscation. This was not only rudeness on the part of the Hessians, but it cemented the Colonists’ resolve that once the war was terminated, search and seizure would be a thing of the past. 

Years later, when the war was over, independence won, and the British army returned to the Sceptered Isle (or the Black Forest, in the case of the Hessians), American politicians set to work to form a government and frame a constitution. They remembered those barbaric forays into the privacy of their domiciles to steal and make away with hidden caches of precious firearms. They remembered well and, in their collective wisdom, included (as amendments to the original document) such freedoms as the right to assemble peacefully, the right to bear arms, and the right to be secure in their own persons. 

And so began America’s lengthy love affair with shooting and guns. Owning one became, to many, a patriotic duty as well as an inalienable right. Through more than two centuries now of turmoil, growth, expansion, and transition to the status of the Ultimate, Self-indulgent, Consumer Society, most Americans still stand four square behind the Second Amendment. We can thank a German speaking British monarch and the gaggle of foreign mercenaries who made up his strike force.

Be back in about two weeks. Might discuss our Mr. Carville and Tony Blair’s re-election campaign.  Then again, we might not.