Sierra Pettengill: Roxanne, thanks so much for taking the time to talk today. My film, The Rifleman, focuses on a particular midcentury moment in the history of the NRA and of U.S. immigration enforcement. But how far back does this go? How deep are guns and white supremacy in the history of the United States?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Well, the Springfield Armory that George Washington orders created to make arms for the War of Independence means that gun manufacture is among the first U.S. industries. And despite industrialization and then globalization, the gun industry has remained heavily reliant on domestic manufacturing.
The gun as a technology is deeply tied to the history of U.S. expansion and warfare. A lot of guns are created specifically to serve the needs of particular U.S. wars. A whole bunch of new guns are created for or popularized by the Civil War, including the six shooters—you know, the Jesse James cowboy six shooter. And then the Winchester rifle was created for conquering the West by slaughtering Native Americans.
A key part of the story of America’s love affair with the gun is also how a romanticized fantasy of the American hunter gets invented—you know, Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, all that. It’s completely fake. These were all commercial hunters. They didn’t even use the meat. It was for the furs. It was a huge fur industry. And it was all commercial. And the fur industry becomes a way, in part, to sell guns to everyone. It’s an incredible amount of violence but it’s all treated as something that is rather banal at the same time.
Along those lines, something I really appreciate about your film is how it shows that Harlon Carter was just a very bland person. Yes, a teenage murderer. But he’s not some kind of colorful creature. He did study law, you know. He got a law degree at Emory University. He’s a very educated man. He was no border ruffian.
SP: Yes, I think his bureaucratic anonymity was part of his power. And his innate sense of entitlement. Here’s a guy who was raised on the border, and who murders Ramón because Carter’s mom hears that someone saw some Mexican kids looking at their car. And that’s enough. That’s all it takes. There’s such a clear sense of him feeling some entitlement to the borderlands. And he gets away with it. I was stunned to find how heavily that story was covered in the border press at the time. It was front-page headline news for the duration of the trial, in bilingual newspapers. You know, it wasn’t a small story, I think in part because Carter’s father worked in the Border Patrol—which later also helps Carter get a job there. He’s born to this kind of racist border enforcement—the murder he commits is really him performing what he understands as his duty as a white man.