Guns (Kindle Single) (2 page)

If I could wave a magic wand and have one wish granted, I’d
wish for an end to world hunger; the small shit could wait in line. If,
however, the god or genie who bestowed the magic wand told me my one wish had
to do with American politics, I think I’d wave it and make the following
proclamation: “Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year,
and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year.”
(Middle-of-the-roaders could stick with
CSI
.)

Can you imagine what that would be like? For the first month,
the screams of “
What IS this shit
???” would echo high to the heavens.
For the next three, there would be a period of grumbling readjustment as both
sides of the political spectrum realized that, loathsome politics aside, they
were still getting the weather, the sports scores, the hard news, and the Geico
Gecko. During the next four months, viewers might begin seeing different
anchors and commentators, as each news network’s fringe bellowers attracted
increasing flak from their new captive audiences. Adamantly shrill editorial
stances would begin to modify as a result of tweets and emails saying, “Oh,
wait a minute, Slick, that’s fucking ridiculous.” Finally, the viewers
themselves might change. Not a lot; just a slide-step or two away from the
kumbayah socialists of the left and the Tea Partiers of the right. I’m not
saying they’d re-colonize the all-but-deserted middle (lot of cheap real estate
there, my brothers and sisters), but they might close in on it a trifle.

Isn’t that a lovely dream? Not up there with the dream of my
soul uncle, Martin Luther King, but still lovely. Think of the quiet that might
ensue if all that shrill rhetoric were turned down a few notches! Think of the
dinner table arguments that might not happen! There might even be (o lost and
shining city) a resumption of actual dialogue.

There’s sure none now. American politics has managed to
catch itself in one of those fiendish Chinese finger pullers we used to buy in
the dime store when we were kids, and as a result, two muscular and capable
hands can do no work. The wrangle over American fiscal policy is one example;
the wrangle over immigration is another; the argument over gun control is a
third. Political discourse as it once existed in America has given way to
useless screaming. On second thought, forget the finger pullers. We’re like
drunks in a barroom. No one’s listening because everyone is too busy thinking
about what they’re going to say next, and absolutely
prove
that the
current speaker is so full of shit he squeaks.

That makes my task in writing this essay dispiriting. Given
my liberal creds, those of a blue persuasion are already forming a choir, ready
to say
amen
and
right on, brother
, as I preach the Gospel of Gun
Control. And those of a red persuasion have already moved on (possibly to the
comforting scripture of the Rev. Rush Limbaugh), or come to this essay with
their shoulders hunched and their fists clenched, itching to begin long-winded
blogs that will explain how naïve I am, how wrong my facts are, and how I should
stick to writing books.

Drunks in a barroom.

Jesus wept.

Only I’m not a drunk, and although I’m a blue-state American
now, I was raised a red one, and I’ve spent my life with at least half of one
foot still in that camp. It gives me a certain perspective. It also allows me
to own my handguns — I have three — with a clear conscience.

Even if I were politically and philosophically open to
repealing the Second Amendment (I’m not), I don’t believe that repeal, or even
modification, would solve the problem of gun violence in America, particularly
violence of the sort that’s at the root of that problem. Although I need to add
that I also believe strict gun control would save thousands of lives. Later,
we’ll talk about Australia, where that has happened.

Pass it for now, though. Let’s talk about reality. The death
toll at the Sandy Hook school was 26, and I mourn every one of them, but the
number of homicides in Chicago last year exceeded 500. That’s 200 more than the
number of American troops killed in Afghanistan during the same period. And
let’s remember that our troops volunteered to go in harm’s way. Their bodies
come home to parades and flag-draped coffins. The dead of Chicago — 107 of them
children, some just waiting to get on the school bus — don’t get the hero
treatment, but they are just as dead. Gun control would do little to change
that situation, because the guns are already out there and the great majority
of them are being bought, sold, and carried illegally.

The best we can do for handgun violence is to impose strict
mandatory prison sentences on those who use them or carry them concealed
without a license to do so (plus background checks, which I’ll get to). Los
Angeles and New York (other cities, too) have tried the carrot as well as the
stick, in the form of gun buyback programs. Good luck to them. In LA, over
8,000 guns — and two rocket launchers — have been turned in for cash since
2009. Sound good? Maybe, until you add this: in 2012 alone, Californians bought
three-quarters of a million
rifles and handguns. Honey, that’s a lot of
firepower.

Liberals and gun control advocates (they are not exactly the
same, no matter what paranoids like Mr. Wayne LaPierre may try to tell you)
understand that a great many horses have already left the barn, and that’s one
reason why the gun control issue flares, then dies until the next high-profile
shooting. The libs think of the millions of guns already out there, and their
shoulders just slump. Even those most passionate on the subject give off a
faint what’s-the-use vibe.

You might think things would be different in Newtown,
Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook shootings took place, but it’s not; it’s
still drunks in a barroom. After all, Colt Firearms is just up the road, in
Hartford, and honey, that’s a lot of jobs. The starry blue dome marking the old
Colt factory is a city landmark for good reason.

I also don’t believe the NRA’s assertion — articulated by
Mr. LaPierre each time there’s another mass murder by gun in a school or a
shopping mall — that America’s so-called “culture of violence” plays a
significant role in kid-on-kid school shootings. That this idea has gained even
a shred of acceptance simply proves what George Orwell knew when he wrote
1984
:
if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth. Let me be frank:
The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America
exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

Of the ten most popular works of fiction published in 2012,
only two feature any kind of violence: George R.R. Martin’s
A Game of
Thrones
(no guns, just swords) and John Grisham’s
The Racketeer
(your basic chase story, no shooting necessary).
Gone Girl
, by Gillian
Flynn, is a beautifully constructed mystery. The rest of 2012’s big winners are
romances, all but one (
The Lucky One
, by Nicholas Sparks) of the
sexed-up genre now known as “mommy-porn.” There are plenty of shoot-’em-up
American novels, but they rarely make the bestseller lists, no more than
Rage
did when it was published.

 American movies have always been a violent medium —
remember James Cagney brandishing a gun atop a natural gas tank at the end of
Public
Enemy
and proclaiming, “Top of the world, Ma”? — but if you take a close
look at the dozen top-grossing films of 2012, you see an interesting thing:
only one (
Skyfall
) features gun violence. Three of the most popular were
animated cartoons, one is an R-rated comedy, and three (
The Avengers
,
The
Dark Knight Rises
, and
The Amazing Spider-Man
) are superhero films.
I think it’s important to note that Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, and others of their costumed ilk don’t carry guns; they use their
various exotic powers. When those fail, they ball up their good old
all-American fists. Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs
directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too
cowardly to fight like men.

In video gaming, shooters still top the lists, but sales of
some, including the various iterations of
Grand Theft Auto
and
Call
of Duty
, have softened by as much as 4 percent (gaming companies like
Gamasutra are notoriously coy when it comes to reporting sales figures).
There’s no doubt that teenage boys
and
girls like to blow off steam with
games like
Hitman: Absolution
, but when you look at the bestseller
lists, you find they’re also loaded with sports games like
Farza Motorsport
4
and
Madden NFL
. Old standbys like
Super Mario Brothers
and
Pokémon
enjoy perennial success. When it comes to Wii, the 2012 bestseller was a
pop-music sweetie called
Just Dance 4
. I’d be willing to bet no kid, no
matter how disturbed, was inspired to go out and shoot up a classroom by
boogeying around his living room to “Moves Like Jagger.”

There are violent programs on television —
Breaking Bad
,
Justified
, and
Boardwalk Empire
all come to mind — but the only
one that seems to appeal to teens is AMC’s
The Walking Dead
. There’s
plenty of gunplay in that one, but almost all of it is directed at people who
have already expired. The Nielsen ratings for the pre-Christmas week of 2012
shows football, football, and more football (violence, yes; guns, no). There
were also two sitcoms and three CBS detective shows, two from the
NCIS
franchise, where the emphasis is on detection.

The message is clear: Americans have very little interest in
entertainment featuring gunplay. In the 1980s, filmmakers even introduced a new
ratings category, PG-13, to protect younger children from graphic violence. The
first film to be so rated was the original
Red Dawn
, and I would argue
that it and all the PG-13 shooters that have followed propagate their own form
of gun-porn by suggesting that shooting people equals wholesome adventure, and
by refusing to acknowledge what happens to people who take a bullet in the
stomach or the head. There’s little or no blood in films like
Skyfall
,
and certainly no torn flesh — show those things and you get slapped with an R,
which keeps millions of early adolescents from getting past the box office
(contrary to the belief of many conservatives who go to the movies but once a
year, exhibitors tend to be quite strict about enforcing the R rating). The
result has been action movies that hark back to the old
Hopalong Cassidy
days, where the baddie would simply clutch his chest and topple over. All very
sanitary.

As my gun-toting friends will tell you, real death by
gunshot isn’t like that. If you want to see what it
is
like, check out
Sam Peckinpah’s Western,
The Wild Bunch
. Peckinpah shows more realistic
consequences of gun violence. It’s not pretty, and that’s putting it mildly. A
large-caliber gunshot wound is horrifying. If you think the outcry against guns
was loud following Sandy Hook, imagine what it would have been like had the
public been exposed to pictures of what those gore-splattered rooms and
hallways looked like when the first responders entered them.

The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it
daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and
America’s propaganda-savvy gun-pimps. It’s believed by people who don’t read
novels, play video games, or go to many movies. People actually in touch with
the culture understand that what Americans
really
want (besides knowing
all about Princess Kate’s pregnancy) is
The Lion King
on Broadway, a
foul-talking stuffed toy named Ted at the movies,
Two and a Half Men
on
TV,
Words with Friends
on their iPads, and
Fifty Shades of Grey
on their Kindles. To claim that America’s “culture of violence” is responsible
for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring
that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.

When I think of the politically conservative gun enthusiasts
who are opposed to any form of gun control, no matter how many innocents die in
acts of gun violence, I remember something a Democratic member of the House of
Representatives is reputed to have said about Gerald Ford: “If he saw a hungry
child as he walked to work, he would give that child his bag lunch without
hesitation, then go ahead and vote against school lunch subsidies without ever
seeing the contradiction.”

Most anti-control firearms enthusiasts have similarly split
personalities, and the slogan you sometimes see pasted to the bumpers of their
station wagons, campers, and SUVs — YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM
MY COLD DEAD HANDS — does not make them bad people. It only makes them walking
contradictions, and which of us does not have a few contradictions in our
personalities?

Most Americans who insist upon their right to own as many guns
(and of as many types) as they want see themselves as independent folk who
stand on their own two feet; they may send food or clothes to the victims of a
natural disaster, but they sure-God don’t want charity themselves. They are, by
and large, decent citizens who help their neighbors, do volunteer work in the
community, and would not hesitate to stop and help a stranger broke down by the
side of the road. They are more apt to vote for increasing law enforcement
funds than they are for increasing school improvement funds, reasoning (and not
without some logic) that keeping kids safe is more important than getting them
new desks. They have no problem with drug and alcohol recovery centers … as
long as they are in someone else’s neighborhood. They can weep for the dead
children and bereft parents of Sandy Hook, then wipe their eyes and write their
congressmen and women about the importance of preserving the right to bear
arms.

They declare they must keep those arms — not excluding those
of the semi-automatic type — for home defense. They’re plenty worried about
home defense. They see the world as a fundamentally dangerous place and their
homes as castles that crazy people of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
type
may try to invade at any time. Ask them if they have ever actually been a
victim of a home invasion, and most will say no. And yet all of them
know
of someone who has been thus victimized.
If only they’d had a gun
,
they’re apt to mourn.

Sometimes they do. In late 1959, two drifters, Dick Hickok
and Perry Smith, invaded the Kansas home of farmer Herbert Clutter, looking for
money they believed Clutter kept in a safe. They killed Clutter, his wife, and
the two Clutter children still living at home. Clutter had guns, but was unable
to get to them; so far as we know, he never even tried. Most home invasion
victims with arms find themselves in Herbert Clutter’s position: surprised and
overwhelmed. Unless you sleep with your .45 auto fully loaded and under your
pillow, you’re apt to find yourself in the same position if the bad guys ever
should show up in your bedroom, enquiring as to the location of your safe.

I guess the question is, how paranoid do you want to be? How
many guns does it take to make you feel safe? And how do you simultaneously
keep them loaded and close at hand, but still out of reach of your inquisitive children
or grandchildren? Are you sure you wouldn’t do better with a really good
burglar alarm? It’s true you have to remember to set the darn thing before you
go to bed, but think of this — if you happened to mistake your wife or live-in
partner for a crazed drug addict, you couldn’t shoot her with a burglar alarm.

Exactly this sort of accident took the life of Sacramento
resident Desire Miller in October 2012, when she was mistaken for a home invader
by her boyfriend and fatally shot in the stomach. In the same month, retired
Chicago policeman James Griffith mistook his son Michael for a burglar and
killed him with a shot to the head. In New Orleans, a month earlier, Charles
Williams was shot to death by his wife, who mistook him for a burglar.

These are three of hundreds in the last four years.

Those who stand firmly, even hysterically, against any kind
of gun control love their neighbors and their communities, but harbor a
distrust of the federal government so deep it borders on paranoia (and in some
cases passes that border without so much as a howdy-do at the checkpoint). They
see
any control at all
imposed on the sale and possession of firearms as
the first move in a sinister plot to disarm the American public and render it
defenseless to a government takeover; accidental shooting deaths, they argue,
are just part of the price we pay for freedom … and besides, that sort of thing
would never happen to
me;
I’m too cool-headed. These guys and gals
actually believe that dictatorship will follow disarmament, with tanks in the
streets of Topeka and armed security guards in metro airports. (Oops, forgot —
we already have those, and most gun advocates are in favor.) “Take away the
people’s right to bear arms and totalitarianism follows!” these Jeremiahs cry.
“Look what happened in Germany!”

No, no, no, no.

It’s true there were strict gun laws in Germany immediately
following the end of World War I because, ahem,
they lost
. German gun
laws had been relaxed considerably ten years after the war ended. By 1938, when
Hitler was riding high, those laws were pretty much the same as American gun
laws today (although I will admit American gun laws vary wildly from state to
state): you needed a permit to acquire and carry a handgun, but you could have
as many rifles as you wanted. Unless you were a Jew, of course, but that was
the annoying thing about the Nazis, wasn’t it? They killed lots of Jews, and
they didn’t need restrictive gun legislation to do it; it was the government
that armed the killers.

Guys, gals, now hear this: No one wants to take away your
hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take
away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as
long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can’t kill a home
invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the
fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range.

Men (it’s always men) who go postal and take out as many
innocents as they can may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. They
don’t arrive at the scenes of their proposed slaughters armed with single-shot
.22s or old-style six-round revolvers of the sort Jimmy Cagney was waving around
at the end of
Public Enemy
; they bring heavy artillery to the gig. Some
back down, but when they don’t, carnage follows, the kind that gives cops and
EMTs nightmares for years afterward. One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA
board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would
be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood,
the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of
half-digested food that were some innocent bystander’s last meal.

Jeff Cox — one of those who had a moment of clarity and
backed down — was carrying a .223 assault rifle, probably a Daewoo with a
thirty-round capacity.

Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, carried a Glock 19
with a mag capacity of fifteen rounds. He had nineteen clips for it. In
addition, he carried a Walther P22 with a ten-shot mag. In all, he was carrying
four hundred rounds of ammo. He killed thirty-two students and wounded
seventeen more before killing himself.

Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine shooters, carried an
Intratec DC9M machine-pistol, more commonly called a Tec-9. With an extended
box-type magazine, the Tec-9 can fire up to fifty rounds without reloading.
Harris and Klebold killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one.

Like Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Loughner carried a Glock 19. He
killed six, including a child of 9, and wounded fourteen. According to one
witness to the event that seriously wounded Congressman Gabby Giffords,
Loughner was able to fire so fast that the killing was over before many of the
horrified onlookers realized what was happening and opened their mouths to
scream.

James Holmes, who killed twelve and wounded fifty-eight in
an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, was carrying an M-16 rifle (thirty-round
capacity) and a .40 caliber Glock, with a clip that can hold up to seventeen
rounds.

In addition to the Glock 10 Adam Lanza used to kill himself,
he carried a Bushmaster AR-15, a light, easily handled, pistol-gripped
semiautomatic rifle that can fire thirty rounds in under a minute. In his war
against the first grade, Lanza fired multiple thirty-round clips.

As for the Glock: it was pried from his cold dead hands.