Gregg Lee Carter on Alexandra Filindra’s *Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture*

This is an important and well written book on the history and ideological development of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and how the organization has impacted, and ultimately distorted, the proper role of guns in American society.

On its face, the NRA’s current ideology might seem critical for both keeping contemporary Americans safe and keeping them appreciative of the foundational roots of their nation.  As Filindra quotes Charlton Heston, the NRA’s president 1998-2003, humans are “egotistical, corruptible, vengeful, … [and] power-mad … [thus, a nation where] police, military, and government agents are allowed the force of arms and individual citizens are not” will end in tyranny.[1]  Indeed, this worldview was one aspect of the nation’s founders’ political philosophy, the aspect being labeled martial republicanism:  The new republic would depend upon an armed citizenry for defense against internal and foreign enemies—gun ownership was not just a right, but an obligation; this same citizenry had the duty to participate in the political process by voting, as well as to protect the ballot box with ball & musket if necessary.

Sounds great.  However, who was actually entitled to citizenship and to participate in the new republic was very problematic by contemporary standards:  The founders were property-owning, white men, many being slave owners, and hence women and people of color were left out.  Thus, Filindra argues we can better understand this part of the founders’ political philosophy as ascriptive martial republicanism— with ascriptive social positions being those that an individual is born with and has difficulty in changing, including race, gender, and often religion.  These ascriptive positions are aligned in hierarchies—hierarchies that are supported by major social institutions, including education, government, and the military—such that white men are on top.  This all seemed as it should be, as during the first two hundred years of our national history, social institutions—subtly or overtly—sent the message that these individuals were the morally strongest, the intellectually strongest, and the physically strongest members of our society.

Ascriptive martial republicanism receded with the anti-war and progressive social movements of the 1960s.  However, the NRA redefined the ideology and kept it alive despite the dramatic social and political changes the country underwent during the last third of the twentieth century, and the organization was successful enough that by the late 1990s, it had gotten the Republican Party to take over much of the heavy-lifting. This extolling of firearms possession as a sign of a good citizen has been a growing presence since this has occurred, and it is reflected in the momentous Supreme Court decisions of 2008 (Heller), 2010 (McDonald), and 2022 (Bruen)—which defended the individual right to own and bear firearms for personal defense and to resist tyranny; note that these rulings ran counter to almost all previous appellate and Supreme Court decisions, which had held the second amendment as protecting the collective right of the people to possess and bear arms, not the individual right to do so.  Martial republicanism’s resurging power is also reflected in the huge wave of gun rights laws that have been enacted at the state level since the early 1990s, including the protection of the right-to-carry a concealed weapon for ordinary citizens in all 50 states (allowed by only a handful of states before then).  Finally, martial republicanism resurgence has been due to the NRA’s redefinition of it:  the revised ideology emphasizes that citizen soldiers don’t actually have be in the military, nor do they need to have actually served therein; they can qualify simply by being gun owners.

Race, Rights, and Rifles is well organized into three major sections.  Chapters 1-4 use solid primary and secondary historical sources to show the origins of ascriptive martial republicanism in early America, and how major social institutions promoted it throughout our history—very successfully so until the progressive movements of the 1960s.  For example, until the 1970s, the “lost cause” narrative was a common theme in U.S. history textbooks, especially in the South, and it still lingers in the minds of those defending the presence of Confederate monuments in many southern towns.  The narrative holds that “noble Southern men fought the Civil War not to protect slavery, but rather to defend local self-determination and democracy from federal encroachment—what [would come to be labeled as] ‘states’ rights.’ … Southern men were virtuous because they trained in the art of war; this allowed them to be enlightened political stewards. Slavery was presented as a protective and enlightening institution: masters cared for their slaves in the same way they cared for children.”[2]

Chapters 5-9 use NRA documents to show how it modified ascriptive martial republicanism to fit its needs, eventually pushing its new narrative into broader public awareness by convincing the Republican Party to adopt the organization’s hardline gun-rights agenda.  The NRA refrain of preparing men to become virtuous citizens by teaching them how to be good shooters and thus good soldiers, which predominated from its founding in 1871 until well into the 1970s, was changed.  The change was partly due to its loss of government support­­—including inexpensive access to military surplus rifles and ammunition.  And it was more dramatically due to new leadership coming to power in 1977, a leadership much more interested in political involvement to protect gun rights than the leadership it replaced, which had been focusing on hunting, conservation, shooting contests, and youth gun safety.  By the 1990s, the changed refrain was complete.  The vanguard of virtuous citizens was now gun owners:  “If classical republicanism assumed two coequal pillars—military service and political participation—as grounding the Republic, contemporary NRA ideology argues that a single pillar—gun ownership—is the fountain of political virtue and safeguards all rights, including the right of political participation and voting.  The ‘insurrectionist theory’ of gun rights posts that American citizens, in their capacity as individuals, have a right to keep and publicly carry arms, openly or concealed, both for preemptive self-defense and as a deterrent to government tyranny.”[3]

During much of the first half of its history, the NRA ensured its Whiteness, maleness, and ideological purity by requiring “sponsorship for new members by an existing member in good standing—a practice that persisted through the 1960s. … the men … were to be ‘reputable citizens,’ that is, White middle- and upper-class individuals.”[4]  In the decades following World War II, Filandra demonstrates through content analyses of the NRA’s main publication, The American Rifleman, that it has both reflected and encouraged the organization’s preferences for White men.  She concludes that in “the NRA universe, minority men and especially African Americans are exceedingly rare.  So are women—even White women.  Non-White women are practically nonexistent.  The magazine is not meant for them, and this is evident in the pictorial content and the content of the articles.”[5]

In her final section, Chapters 10 and 11, Filindra uses national survey data of White Americans to show the prevalence of ascriptive martial republicanism ideology.  Her data analyses use sophisticated statistical techniques that will be familiar to many social scientists, but much less so for historians and those lacking graduate-school level quantitative data analysis training.  She does, however, offer clear and accurate textual interpretations of her quantitative work.  The data reveal the power of this ideology in the thinking of White Americans today:  43 percent embrace it, in either its traditional sense of linking military service to ultimate political virtue, or in its NRA-evolved sense of linking gun ownership and carrying to such virtue.  The power of the NRA narrative is revealed in that 40 percent of White Americans agree that people need firearms to protect themselves against the government. This is a substantial minority of White Americans, and Filandra is fearful of the nation’s future if this percentage grows:  of those strongly embracing this narrative, 54 percent believe they need guns to protect themselves from the government; 43 percent think White heritage is so important that they support “laws that classify as terrorism any activity that promotes beliefs that criticize American’s White and European heritage”; 46 percent believe that the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol was justified to expose “the corruption of the deep state”; and, finally, 78 percent assess “twice-impeached Donald Trump among the country’s best presidents.”[6]

In her concluding chapter, Filindra argues that the militarized, gun-owning conception of political membership fosters political behavior that is detrimental to U.S. democracy— which in our past has encouraged vigilante violence against people of color, armed labor strife, and political assassinations.  She fears January 6, 2021 might be an omen for U.S.’s future.  (I can only imagine that she is even more fearful now that Donald Trump has been reelected.) That said, she also finds hope in the national survey data:  Importantly, only a small fraction of White Americans say they believe in the use of political violence (less than 10%), and the same can be said even for those scoring high on an attitudinal measure of ascriptive martial republicanism.  It is almost certain that many of those saying political violence is justified “to preserve the rights of our particular group” are simply expressing their frustration and anger,­ and they would not participate in actual violence.  Moreover, the overwhelming majority of White Americans express support for a second, competing form of republicanism, a form she labels inclusive civic republicanism.  Eight in ten White Americans share this ideology, which “fuses a commitment of peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and strong beliefs in multiculturism.”  And she concludes that:  “It is through the rejection of ascriptive [martial] republicanism and the conscious embrace of this inclusive republican ideology that America may have a way out of the current crisis of democratic politics.”[7]

[1]. Alexandra Filindra, Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 1.

[2]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 87.

[3]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 211.

[4]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 137.

[5]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 140.

[6]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 3-4.

[7]. Filindra, Race, Rights, 20.