The hungry gun

by David Benjamin

 “I think it would be appropriate to move the age for permitless carry to 18. There’s really no reason why a legal adult should not be able to defend themselves.”

— Rachel Malone, Gun Owners of America

 

MADISON, Wis. — An irony of the midterm election—perhaps the most ironic election season of our lifetimes—is the Republican focus on black crime (although exclusively directed at black Senatorial candidates Mandela Barnes, Cheri Beasley and Val Demings). If you look at crime statistics, they don’t seem to bear out the Apocalyptic fear-mongering of the GOP. In some places crime is up somewhat, other places it’s gone down. Either way, it’s not nearly as bad as it was twenty years ago. Ironically, if you actually read the data, you discover that the seven states that make various Top Five rankings for the highest murder rate in America are (in alphabetical order) Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina, each one a bastion of right-wing anti-crime demagoguery.

But let’s talk Texas, about which once, in a movie, Candice Bergen, said, “Of course he had a gun. This is Texas! Everybody has a gun. My florist has a gun!” Recently, one of those “florists,” carrying a concealed handgun without a permit because in Texas—and now in half the states—you don’t need a permit to pack a rod, yanked his hogleg and fired at a mugger. He missed. The bullet hit Arlene Alvarez, age nine. Killed her. Because he was within his rights to spray bullets willy-nilly in a public space, no prosecutor even pondered the silly notion of charging the Dirty Harry wannabe with Arlene’s murder. The little girl was just collateral damage. The mugger—oh, well—Disappeared without a trace.

Outside the “gun rights” lobby and the Supreme Court, most rational Americans understand that the Second Amendment right to join a militia bearing flintlock muskets has no coherent connection to random gunslinging by frightened suburbanites and barflies, or to the mass slaughter, with 21st-century combat ordnance, of little kids in school. More credibly, advocates for the unregulated proliferation of deadly force argue that a gun is an eminently practical necessity, a matter of “self-defense,” like karate or motion-activated driveway lights. It’s a tool. 

To make this case, all you need to do is change the noun in Leroy Jethro Gibbs’ Rule #9: “Never go anywhere without a knife.”

This seems like a salient point. 

In fact, except on airplanes, I never go anywhere without a knife. It’s a lovely knife, made in Thiers, with a carbon-steel blade that folds into a graceful birchwood handle. It’s tucked into my pocket along with other tools, several pens and a highlighter. As with most tools, I sometimes go days without using it. I’m not emotional about it. I never feel the urge to brandish my knife, to make other people aware that I’m “carrying.” It defines nothing about me, my manhood, my strength, my fears and my anger, my politics, my social philosophy. 

A gun—especially a handgun—is different if only because only discernible utilitarian function is to kill. People. When it’s not killing—or displayed to intimidate—other human beings, it’s useless. It’s symbolic at best and, at worst, a heartbreaking accident (e,g.,the death of Arlene Alvarez, age nine) coiling to strike.

Long before any kid, especially a boy, gets old enough to alibi a gun as a “tool,” he knows it as a toy. “Gunplay” is an American coinage. Most boys—and probably girls these days—start shooting toy guns before they go to kindergarten or—denied a cap pistol or toy revolver—they point an index finger and pretend it’s a gun. I did, you did, we all did. There’s not a boy in America who does not master, before he can read “Dick and Jane,” at least five plosive sounds that mimic the sound of a gunshot. 

Go ahead, try it. Let me count the ways.

Jean Shepherd, in stories that were stitched together into the script for A Christmas Story, captured immortally the irresistible allure of the gun—an “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time”—as fun, for kids. 

It’s fun that lots of guys never outgrow. 

I was about eleven when I graduated from toy guns to the real thing, a scope-mounted .22 caliber rifle with which, guided by my dad, I roamed the woods of Monroe County hunting squirrels. The emotional power of the gun insinuated itself without my awareness or understanding until I spotted a tiny songbird, a tufted titmouse, perched on a distant branch. I raised my .22, centered Tweety Bird in my crosshairs, squeezed the trigger and blew her to Kingdom Come.

Here’s what I wrote about that moment, in my book, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked.

For the first time clearly, I appreciated the frightening force in Dad’s scope-mounted .22. Until then, it had almost seemed a wondrous device that opened the portals of adventure and made possible my equality with the athletic genius of nature. I knew I might accidentally shoot myself with it, but I was scrupulous about gun safety and harbored no serious anxieties about any such mishap. The frightening sense that day, as I laid the dead titmouse in the dry leaves and quickly fled the scene of the crime, was that the gun had seduced me.

Tucked under my arm, warm from my body, the gun had been dormant all day. With this firearm, I knew, I was able to see more closely, to move more stealthily, to aim more keenly, to vanquish all quarry as far as my eyes could see. But only if I used it, only if I shot something. Left unfired, it was dead weight. It was unfulfilled. Lying in the crook of my arm, its sinister potential untapped, the gun was the snake in the Garden, whispering that there is more to life than strolling among the leaves, gazing at the birds, nibbling the occasional wintergreen berry. I could shatter the calm of the forest, kill those birds, show them who’s boss, express myself.

As I escaped my assassinated titmouse, hoping Dad wouldn’t come across the tiny corpse and ask me what I had done, I understood how guns alter people. Guns want to be used. Guns want.