A great majority of this minority of gun owners are white men who are descendants of the original settlers, or pretend to be.16 These descendants are most obvious in the former Confederate and border states but actually are also scattered in clusters and communities in all parts of the United States. They are the latter-day carriers of the United States’ national origin myth, a matrix of stories that attempts to justify conquest and settlement, transforming the white frontier settler into an “indigenous people,” believing that they are the true natives of the continent, much as the South
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