"Deeply held American values"?

I bet you thought I'd forgotten all about this blog, but no such luck.

So I saw a news item last week that has me grumbling about its least important part, just because I'm like that. You may have heard about it. Some Congressman was shot in a baseball park during a practice for the annual Congressional baseball game. (Me, I didn't know there was an annual Congressional baseball game.)
 

The Congressman was a Republican; the shooter worked last year for the Bernie Sanders campaign and his social media suggest a strong hatred of conservatives. Anyway, Bernie Sanders commented for the news, predictably enough, "I am sickened by this despicable act. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values."

And that's fine. I'm with him right up to the last six words. Only, … what does he mean by the words "our most deeply held American values"?

This is what I mean by niggling over the least important thing in the whole article. I'm not griping about anything substantive. I totally agree that violence against Congressmen is a terrible thing: bad in itself, bad as precedent, and ineffective to boot. Charles Sumner was nearly killed on the Senate floor for opposing slavery, but in the end slavery was abolished anyway.

But, speaking purely as an anthropologist … can anyone seriously argue that nonviolent political action is one of our most deeply held American values? The archetypal stories we tell ourselves about who we are, all focus on violence: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, maybe World War Two … and Westerns. Think how important the mythology of settling the frontier is to our identity … but the frontier didn't settle itself. In what other country could a lone man identify himself as "The only law west of the Pecos"? Nonviolence? Us? We're the country that coined the poker aphorism, "A Smith and Wesson beats four aces."

Or consider that the gun debate in this country never goes anywhere because the anti-gun lobby won't — can't — mention that we are the most heavily armed country in the world. And I'm talking about private weapons, not the military. What possible difference can it make to fiddle with the rules about who can buy new guns when there are so many old ones already out there? But the anti-gun lobby knows with certainty that any proposal to change that status quo is a nonstarter. It has no chance of being heard. Who does that say we are?

I'm not saying any of this is good. I totally agree with Sanders that this is not the way to improve a Congress you don't like. That's what voting is for. But I am saying that it represents a deeply held American value. Am I crazy? Or is this something that everybody knows, but nobody wants to say in public?