Sad but oh so true! Ban books but not guns. Ban books
but let kids get killed while in school. The call of
conservative America.
"After another school shooting, conservatives still
want to ban books — but not guns
"The news that two students and two teachers were
killed, and nine people were wounded, in a Wednesday
shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia,
should draw forth our full fury.
“What should have been a joyous back-to-school season
in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another
horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear
our communities apart,” President Joe Biden said in a
press release that day. “Students across the country
are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to
read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as
normal.”
But it is normal, in America. It has been normal. And
the system has been intentionally designed to keep this
— the lack of gun regulation, egregiously, in the name
of “freedom” — the norm. Congress has been largely
unwilling and, arguably, even resistant to pass gun
control legislation since the 1994 Federal Assault
Weapons Ban, which President George W. Bush allowed to
expire in 2004. The first major piece of gun control
legislation since this ban was the 2022 Bipartisan
Safer Communities Act, which implemented background
checks for gun purchases under the age of 21 and
outlawed the trafficking of illegal firearms.
Even more egregious is the fact that books have been
deemed dangerous and must be banned while guns have
been protected fiercely. And therein lies the tragic
reality of present-day America.
Rather than ban guns as a nationwide public safety
effort, this political negligence (thanks in large part
to a powerful gun lobby) has forced school
administrators and teachers to emend school curricula
and the environment around the credible threat of gun
violence, with traumatizing active shooter drills and
the instillation of carceral apparati like metal
detectors and fences and locked doors.
Still, such limitations are not enough to create a safe
educational environment or one that is conducive to
learning, a vulnerable experience that requires the
freedom of known security. Children like the 14-year-
old Apalachee shooter can still get their hands on a
gun, or five, especially when guns saturate our
culture. The nonprofit The Trace estimates that there
are more than 378 million guns in circulation in the
United States, not accounting for 3D-printed or DIY
guns. That’s more guns than people. More weapons
designed to kill than people to be killed.
There’s a logic to the priorities of banning books over
controlling guns: Conservative ideology seeks to
conserve the societal status quo in order to maintain
society’s sexist and racist power structures.
Education, as a key indicator of social mobility and
determinant of health, thus has been a perennial
battlefield in America. Ignorance is bliss, the saying
goes, but it is also a necessity for conservatives who
do not want traditions and traditional ways tested or
overturned.
Books, and all the potential they possess within their
pages to stimulate curiosity and encourage deep and
critical thinking, thus have been political targets for
conservatives. They are vehicles of liberation, of
opening the mind, of wandering into corners of thought
yet unexplored. And they are being banned at a greater
frequency than ever before. According to a 2024 PEN
America report, 4,239 books were banned in fall 2023
semester — more than were banned during the entire
previous academic year (3,362).
As I wrote in my book, “Breaking Free: The Lie of
Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom:”
Guns are weapons that kill or maim. Books are published
to educate and enlighten. One is a barrier between the
self and the world, representing aggression,
intimidation, and violence misconstrued as
“protection.” The other is a conduit between the self
and the world, connecting the reader to people unlike
themselves and fostering critical thinking and a self-
awareness born from empathic connection. Yet US
legislators and a vocal minority of the public would
rather a teacher be armed with a gun than teach a book
that has a gay character. That guns — and not books —
are cherished as an emblem of American freedom tell us
everything about the meaning of freedom in this
country. The predominant understanding of freedom in
America—a definition that stretches back to the
nation’s founding in slavery and genocide—is what both
historian Tyler Stovall and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates
have called “white freedom.”Entitlement without
accountability, either personal or structural. As
author Ta-Nehisi Coates described it in The Atlantic,
white freedom is “freedom without consequence, freedom
without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant;
freedom to profit off a people in one moment and
abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom,
freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a
Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom.”
Guns kill. Books liberate. So why are books being
banned, while guns are not? That guns are valued more
than books in our society represents a devastating
reality that the United States is hostile to our
collective freedom."
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