Open Carry Oath Keepers Swear to Keep Bigotry Alive

Photo by Ryan Dickey

CBS Detroit reported that a group calling itself the Oath Keepers--an open carry group--rallied yesterday in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn is a suburb of Detroit with a large Muslim population. According to CBS, a rally organizer explained:

As this invasion of Muslim colonization continues unchecked on American soil, we can only expect the same suffering now endured by EUROPE…Now is the time to act.

It's true that Dearborn has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in the US, a demographic phenomenon that began back in the mid-1970s with an influx of Lebanese fleeing their country's civil war. As Michigan Radio reported last year:

  Today, Dearborn is a unique Arab-American community--both nationally and among the smaller Arab communities scattered around Metro Detroit.
  The Dearborn community is overwhelmingly Muslim, and majority Shiite Muslim. Shiites are a minority in the Muslim world. It’s also mostly Lebanese, with smaller pockets of Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians.
  Nationally, Arab Americans are roughly half Muslims and half Christians. Metro Detroit also has a number of smaller Arab communities, many of them majority Christian—like the growing Chaldean community in Sterling Heights.

Is this an "invasion" or "colonization?" Hardly, but not surprising that some people think that. The British polling firm Ipsoso MORI found that people in the US tend to wildly overestimate the number of Muslims in the country:

According to the new poll, US citizens guessed the Muslim population of the US to be about 15 percent when asked “Out of every 100 people, how many do you think are Muslim?” This would mean that the US has 47.4 million Muslims. The reality is quite different, with current research putting the percentage of Muslims in the United States at about .8 percent of the population, with an estimated 2.6 million Muslims in the US as of 2010 [quoted here, see also the Pew Foundation's similar estimate here, which also predicts a doubling of that population by 2030, to 1.7% of the US population].

But given that Oath Keepers label this tiny demographic shift an invasion of colonization (an odd conflation of two different concepts), no wonder they want to gather in Dearborn, openly bearing their weapons. They've a country to defend! Even humanity to defend, for yesterday's "resistance" was part of a nation-wide "Global Rally for Humanity."

Apparently, humanity excludes Muslims, who make up almost a quarter of the world's population. What are we to make of a group that dehumanizes such a large number of people? Worse, a group that connects the demand for unfettered gun rights to the fear of Muslims?  And not just fear of them. This regurgitation of John Birchers (see a profile of their leader here) is afraid of the United Nations, of a black president, same sex marriage, and immigrants in general who don't look like what they think an American should look like, even if they're Christian (see here for a resume of Oath Keeper actions). Must be tiring to go around lugging those guns, day to day, afraid of so much.

They remind me of a lovely person I live with who happens to be tragically sliding into dementia, talking to people I cannot see, who won't come out of her room because there's a "man" out there, who fears unlocked or open doors, who is constantly startled by whatever. But she has no control over this. The Oath Keepers, on the other hand, have made the choice to live a life of fear, and to take it out on others.

According to one source, only "about twelve" showed up, just four of them openly armed. The Detroit News reported that

Saturday’s boisterous assembly included about 75 people, mostly counter-protesters, according to Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad.

That heartens me. Only a paltry number in Michigan exhibit, at least publicly, this collective dementia that unjustifiably translates difference into existential angst.

Letter to Governor Snyder: Please Veto SB 59

Dear Governor Snyder,

I urge you to veto Senate Bill 59, recent legislation permitting Michigan gun owners to carry concealed arms in public places.

I teach at Grand Valley State University, and in no way will I feel safer with armed amateurs around me--I'll instead feel more insecure.  The eight hours of extra training proposed in the legislation hardly eases my mind.  The undependable benefit of an armed amateur stopping a mass slaying, itself a minute possibility, does not match the costs of multiplying the chances of accidental or intentional gun violence on campus (I'm thinking: alcohol + irritability over grades or noisy neighbors or just the angst of youth + gun = possible horrible result).  A 2011 New York Times article surveyed the data on the relationship between crime and concealed weapons in states with permissive laws: “...Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue, economists and law professors, concluded that the best available data and modeling showed that permissive right-to-carry laws, at a minimum, increased aggravated assaults.”  As well, the article further reports, loose oversight of the law in places such as North Carolina has resulted in a spate of violence by permit-holders with records of felonies, substance abuse, and mental illness (Michael Luo, “Guns in Public, Out of Sight,” December 26, 2011).

More generally, this law means we both succumb to fear and increase it, hardly the basis for a healthy civil society.  I agree with Jill Leporte's point made in an April 2012 New Yorker piece ("Battleground America"):

Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Please, Governor, do not give in to those who think the answer to social ills is a gun, to those who have twisted the ideal of liberty into a right to assuage their individual, and often exaggerated, insecurity with concealed weapons, and thereby contribute to public insecurity.

Sincerely,

Andrew Schlewitz