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Writer Francisco Cantú attacked what he considered the "nostalgic delusions" about guns in America that have led to a "doom spiral of gun worship" in a July 4 New York Times op-ed.
Cantú claimed that the "national mythology" about guns has given rise to idea of the "usually white and positioned in opposition to people of color" lone gunman, a dangerous myth that has limited proper gun control.
"Proponents of gun reform in this country are not just up against a powerful gun lobby, they are up against our most durable myth, the exceptionalist notion that a man with a gun is a force powerful enough to defend against any danger," he argued.
With loaded firearms in hand and flags all around people gather for a 5 Mile Open Carry March for Freedom organized by Florida Gun Supply in Inverness, Florida, U.S. July 4, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Tilley
For an example, he pointed to the recent Supreme Court ruling that found New York’s concealed carry law was unconstitutional as proof that the myth has been "metabolized into law." By contrast, he derided the "delusion" that "a good guy with a gun" can stop "a bad guy with a gun."
"This delusion, disproved in Uvalde and countless times before, flows directly from Hollywood fantasy and underlies arguments about arming teachers, expanding open-carry laws and ushering armed law enforcement into more and more public spaces," Cantú insisted.
The shooter in the Texas elementary school mass shooting, however, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent after police officers hesitated to enter the classroom. Uvalde, Texas school police chief Pete Arredondo resigned on Saturday after facing massive backlash for the decision not to immediate breach the classroom.
In addition to his critique of gun culture, Cantú attacked the Border Patrol, which he writes he was inspired to join based on the "lone gunman" mythos.
Border Patrol agents have been fired upon in a series of targeted attacks this month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said. (Getty Images)
"Instead, what I found was a place that absorbed individual ambitions into an institutional culture too often awash with cruelty and impunity, where acts of violence and dehumanization both big and small were normalized to the point of banality, carried out by agents who were often gleefully living out unburied boyhood fantasies of cowboy lawmen chasing criminals across a strange and foreboding frontier," Cantú wrote about his experience with the Border Patrol.
MOTHER WAS LIVESTREAMING HIGHLAND PARK SHOOTING WHEN GUNFIRE ERUPTED: ‘WORST DAY OF OUR LIVES
Although a bipartisan bill on gun control was signed into law in June, Cantú lamented that it fell "dismally short" of the responses of other progressive countries like New Zealand, which in 2019 banned "assault weapons," and "created a national firearms registry, penalized illegal modifications and gun sales, and instituted a new mental health warning system." He touted that "the country had bought back more than 56,000 firearms" by the end of the year, neglecting to mention, according to the NPR article he linked to, that number was at the low end of the estimated 56,000 to 173,000 banned guns in circulation and how anyone who still owned those guns after the amnesty buyback period ended faced up to 5 years in jail.
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 08: A protester holds signs calling for an end to gun violence in front of the Supreme Court on June 8, 2022 in Washington, DC. The court is expected to announce a series of high-profile decisions this month. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
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Cantú closed writing, "In recent weeks, America has reached new depths in its long doom spiral of gun worship. The urgency of disentangling guns from our sense of individual and national identity has never been more clear. We can safely keep our exceptionalist myths, our cowboy archetypes, our notions of gun-toting good guys holding evil at bay, only as long as we also recognize them as nostalgic delusions at odds with the reality of what it means to live in community with others."
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