Toward a philosophy of the gun

by David Benjamin

 

“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”

—Stephen King

 

MADISON, Wis.—My gun of choice is a .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight. It’s actually the only gun I’ve ever used. It belonged to my Dad, who lent it to me for squirrel-hunting excursions in oak woods beside cornfields in Monroe County. I don’t remember the rifle’s make. It was probably a Remington but, at age twelve, I wasn’t particularly brand-conscious. 

Dad taught me to be careful with the .22, showed me how to shoot and treated the gun not as anything symbolic, iconic or Constitutional. It was a tool. 

What I learned without counsel from Dad, just by carrying the rifle, was its power. Any tool in hand—in contact with your skin, nerves, muscles and senses—a hammer, a knife, a bolt-cutter, gets into your head. You carry a steel mallet and you feel the urge to pound something. So, I noticed with Dad’s .22. Once, I succumbed to the spell of the gun and set my sights on a tiny titmouse perched on a twig, fifty yards away. A squeeze of the trigger blew it into a birdburst of blood and feathers. This pointless shot testified to my steady hand and marksmanship, but I remember it with a pang of shame I’ve never shaken, Partly, this is because I felt sorry for the bird. More important, I understood that I had betrayed my tool.

I never lamented the squirrels I shot, because we took them home and had roast rodent for dinner at Grandma’s. But you can’t eat a murdered songbird. 

Living among hunters, I knew no adult men who regarded guns as sacred vessels of their political convictions, or as blue-steel replicas of their unbending manhood. But this was also a culture steeped in gun lore. Every kid knew—often by name, specs, caliber and ammo—the guns packed by Marshall Dillon, Bat Masterson, Bret Maverick and, above all, Paladin. Although these “good men with guns” killed dozens of other men, they were true to the TV Western hero code. They never drew first and they always fired one shot at a time. The closest we saw to a machine gun on TV was Lucas McCain’s 1892 .44-40 Winchester modified with a rapid-fire ring lever (identical to John Wayne’s rifle in Stagecoach). 

For at least two decades, the ordnance we saw on television cop shows was similarly conservative. Every police detective and private eye on the tube—from Joe Friday to Lenny Briscoe—kept tucked under his armpit a snub-nosed, six-round, .38 caliber Colt Detective Special, with a barrel so short that you couldn’t count on hitting anything smaller than a bread truck beyond ten yards. 

The evolution—more accurately the glorification—of gunplay crept up gradually on those of us raised in an era when rapid-fire weapons were exclusive to war, or to Prohibition gangsters or—in the occasional Western movie—a Gatling gun fired at the good guys by outlaws who weren’t fighting fair. 

Somehow, the gore got grislier while we weren’t paying close attention. Once, when a crook ate lead onscreen, he clutched his bloodless torso, dropped to the floor and expired immediately. Later, when Broderick Crawford or Jim Rockford rolled him over, there might be a spot of Red Dye No. 1 to indicate where the bullet had entered. I’m not sure when this hygienic formula changed and the carnage escalated exponentially. Perhaps the turning point was when Arthur Penn pumped Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway full of Technicolor lead and topped the scene with medium close-up of the blood flowing down Faye’s body.

The Colt Detective Special, now more suited to “Antiques Road Show” than “Law and Order,” has been typically supplanted by a 9mm Glock semiautomatic with a 15-round magazine. While TV cops carry these heaters, they’re up against mobsters and gangbangers with Uzis, AR-15s, Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers. Blood exploding from human heads is rendered, ideally, in slow motion. 

As I follow the epidemic expansion of jump-cut butchery, it seems to me that we have altered profoundly the American philosophy of the gun. Do we even have a philosophy—beyond “Have Gun, Will Travel”? Is the gun a tool or a toy.

The Second Amendment, the grammatically fractured sutra of America’s gun cult, shines precious little light. In its reference to a “well regulated Militia,” it conveys a certain toolishness, but the militia reference also implies that “Arms” are meant for combat. War is, of course, man’s cruelest form of play.

Traditionally, the use of guns boils down to three functions, hunting, war and—in both execution and prevention—crime. Defenders of our gun culture spend little energy extolling the right to hunt and no effort at all parsing the moral, political or philosophical implications of waging war. Gun-cult dogma focuses fiercely on crime, offering no insight on the toy-vs.-tool conundrum. 

Consider, for example, the moral crisis posed in the film classic, Shane. The title character, played by Alan Ladd, is a repentant “gunslinger.” He has put away his gun and quit his vocation. Still, he can’t escape. The story’s ingenue, a boy named Joey, scurries around the family ranch going “Bang, bang!” with a toy rifle. And, when the boy begs for a tutorial, Shane can’t resist the temptation to show off to Joey how fast his draw and how keen his eye. Tool or toy?

Shane’s newfound community regards him dubiously, suspecting that he might have once been a gunslinger. The film’s main thematic thread—gunplay—comes home to roost with the arrival of Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a “hired gun” despised by everyone and regarded ambivalently even by his employer, Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer). The morally ambiguous climax is the gunning down of the unrepentant gunslinger by his tormented peer, Shane.

In this and in other Fifties movies (The Fastest Gun Alive with Glenn Ford, Winchester ’73 with James Stewart), a philosophy peeks through the gunsmoke. The settlers of the Wild West didn’t want it to stay wild. The key to becoming a tame and civilized West, from Dodge City to Tombstone, was gun control. Gunslingers—even mild-mannered, sody-pop drinkin’, guilt-ridden galoots like Alan Ladd and Glenn Ford—were a plague on the lone prairie. Peaceful folks wanted them to holster their hoglegs and mosey on, out of town. 

If there is a traditional philosopher of the gun in America, it might be Rufus Ryker. As he watched his open-range domain being nibbled to plts by an invasion of sodbusters, the gun was a tool to secure his domain. It was family protection. But he shunned the gun himself and resorted to an agent for whom gunplay was a way of life (and death). Even as he resorted to violence, Ryker wasn’t sure how he felt about guns, because they had power—more than anything else in his small world—to destroy everything they might secure.

Ever since the Revolution, Americans, unique among nations, have bounced between loving and fearing our firearms, valuing the tool, enjoying the toy and whistling past Boot Hill. As a consequence, we have conceded the high ground—on that hill—to Jack Wilson. 

In Shane, the only character without self-doubt, a man smirkingly clear in his moral vision, was the murderer who killed without compunction. Jack Wilson was cocksure in his role as the merchant of death. 

Today, America is a society frightened of crime and even more ambivalent about guns than Shane and Rufus Ryker. We live in thrall to the merchants of death. Jack Wilson’s amoral descendants are the gun industry and its unarmed hostages in Congress. Because we can’t decide between the romance of Paladin and the atrocity of Wounded Knee, we have become—against our better judgment and despite our squeamishness at the sight of dead schoolchildren—the world capital of mass murder.