Get rid of the damned things
By Roger Rosenblatt
August 2, 1999
Web posted at: 11:46 a.m. EDT (1546 GMT)
As terrible as last week's shooting in Atlanta was, as terrible as all
the gun killings of the past few months have been, one has the almost
satisfying feeling that the country is going through the literal death
throes of a barbaric era and that mercifully soon, one of these
monstrous episodes will be the last. High time. My guess, in fact, is
that the hour has come and gone--that the great majority of Americans
are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment.
Trigger locks, waiting periods, purchase limitations, which may seem
important corrections at the moment, will soon be seen as mere tinkering
with a machine that is as good as obsolete. Marshall McLuhan said that
by the time one notices a cultural phenomenon, it has already happened.
I think the country has long been ready to restrict the use of guns,
except for hunting rifles and shotguns, and now I think we're prepared
to get rid of the damned things entirely--the handguns, the semis and
the automatics.
Those who claim otherwise tend to cite America's enduring love affair
with guns, but there never was one. The image of shoot-'em-up America
was mainly the invention of gunmaker Samuel Colt, who managed to
convince a malleable 19th century public that no household was complete
without a firearm--"an armed society is a peaceful society." This
ludicrous aphorism, says historian Michael Bellesiles of Emory
University, turned 200 years of Western tradition on its ear. Until
1850, fewer than 10% of U.S. citizens had guns. Only 15% of violent
deaths between 1800 and 1845 were caused by guns. Reputedly wide-open
Western towns, such as Dodge City and Tombstone, had strict gun-control
laws; guns were confiscated at the Dodge City limits.
If the myth of a gun-loving America is merely the product of gun
salesmen, dime-store novels, movies and the National Rifle Association
(NRA)--which, incidentally, was not opposed to gun control until the
1960s, when gun buying sharply increased--it would seem that creating a
gun-free society would be fairly easy. But the culture itself has
retarded such progress by creating and embellishing an absurd though
appealing connection among guns, personal power, freedom and beauty. The
old western novels established a cowboy corollary to the Declaration of
Independence by depicting the cowboy as a moral loner who preserves the
peace and his own honor by shooting faster and surer than the
competition. The old gangster movies gave us opposite versions of the
same character. Little Caesar is simply an illegal Lone Ranger, with the
added element of success in the free market. In more recent movies, guns
are displayed as art objects, people die in balletic slow motion, and
right prevails if you own "the most powerful handgun in the world." I
doubt that any of this nonsense causes violence, but after decades of
repetition, it does invoke boredom. And while I can't prove it, I would
bet that gun-violence entertainment will soon pass too, because people
have had too much of it and because it is patently false.
Before one celebrates the prospect of disarmament, it should be
acknowledged that gun control is one of those issues that are
simultaneously both simpler and more complicated than it appears.
Advocates usually point to Britain, Australia and Japan as their models,
where guns are restricted and crime is reduced. They do not point to
Switzerland, where there is a gun in every home and crime is practically
nonexistent. Nor do they cite as sources criminology professor Gary
Kleck of Florida State University, whose studies have shown that gun
ownership reduces crime when gun owners defend themselves, or Professor
John R. Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago Law School, whose research
has indicated that gun regulation actually encourages crime.
The constitutional questions raised by gun control are serious as well.
In a way, the anti-gun movement mirrors the humanitarian movement in
international politics. Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda have suggested that
the West, the U.S. in particular, is heading toward a politics of human
rights that supersedes the politics of established frontiers and, in
some cases, laws. Substitute private property for frontiers and the
Second Amendment for laws, and one begins to see that the politics of
humanitarianism requires a trade-off involving the essential
underpinnings of American life. To tell Americans what they can or
cannot own and do in their homes is always a tricky business. As for the
Second Amendment, it may pose an inconvenience for gun-control
advocates, but no more an inconvenience than the First Amendment offers
those who blame violence on movies and television.
Gun-control forces also ought not to make reform an implicit or explicit
attack on people who like and own guns. Urban liberals ought to be
especially alert to the cultural bigotry that categorizes such people as
hicks, racists, psychotics and so forth. For one thing, a false moral
superiority is impractical and incites a backlash among people otherwise
sympathetic to sensible gun control, much like the backlash the
pro-abortion rights forces incurred once their years of political
suasion had ebbed. And the demonizing of gun owners or even the NRA is
simply wrong. The majority of gun owners are as dutiful, responsible and
sophisticated as most of their taunters.
That said, I am pleased to report that the likelihood of sweeping and
lasting changes in the matter of America and guns has never been higher.
There comes a time in every civilization when people have had enough of
a bad thing, and the difference between this moment and previous spasms
of reform is that it springs from the grass roots and is not driven by
politicians or legal institutions. Gun-control sentiment is everywhere
in the country these days--in the White House, the presidential
campaigns, the legislatures, the law courts and the gun industry itself.
But it seems nowhere more conspicuous than in the villages, the houses
of worship and the consensus of the kitchen.
Not surprisingly, the national legislature has done the least to
represent the nation on this issue. After the passage of the 1994 crime
bill and its ban on assault weapons, the Republican Congress of 1994
nearly overturned the assault-weapons provision of the bill. Until
Columbine the issue remained moribund, and after Columbine, moribund
began to look good to the gun lobby. Thanks to an alliance of House
Republicans and a prominent Democrat, Michigan's John Dingell, the most
modest of gun-control measures, which had barely limped wounded into the
House from the Senate, was killed. "Guns have little or nothing to do
with juvenile violence," said Tom Delay of Texas. Compared with his
other assertions--that shootings are the product of day care, birth
control and the teaching of evolution--that sounded almost persuasive.
A more representative representative of public feeling on this issue is
New York's Carolyn McCarthy, whom gun violence brought into politics
when her husband was killed and her son grievously wounded by a crazed
shooter on a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993. McCarthy made an
emotional, sensible and ultimately ineffectual speech in the House in an
effort to get a stronger measure passed.
"When I gave that speech," she says, "I was talking more to the American
people than to my colleagues. I could see that most of my colleagues had
already made up their minds. I saw games being played. But this was not
a game with me. I looked up in the balcony, and I saw people who had
been with me all along on this issue. Victims and families of victims.
We're the ones who know what it's like. We're the ones who know the
pain."
Following upon Columbine, the most dramatic grass-roots effort has been
the Bell Campaign. Modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the
campaign plans to designate one day a year to toll bells all over the
country for every victim of guns during the previous year. The aim of
the Bell Campaign is to get guns off the streets and out of the hands of
just about everyone except law officers and hunters. Andrew McGuire,
executive director, whose cousin was killed by gunfire many years ago,
wants gun owners to register and reregister every year. "I used to say
that we'd get rid of most of the guns in 50 years," he tells me. "Now I
say 25. And the reason for my optimism is that until now, we've had no
grass-roots opposition to the NRA."
One must remember, however, that the NRA too is a grass-roots
organization. A great deal of money and the face and voice of its
president, Charlton Heston, may make it seem like something more grand
and monumental, but its true effectiveness exists in small local
communities where one or two thousand votes can swing an election.
People who own guns and who ordinarily might never vote at all become
convinced that their freedoms, their very being, will be jeopardized if
they do not vote Smith in and Jones out. Once convinced, these folks in
effect become the NRA in the shadows. They are the defense-oriented
"little guys" of the American people, beset by Big Government, big laws
and rich liberals who want to take away the only power they have.
They are convinced, I believe, of something wholly untrue--that the
possession of weapons gives them stature, makes them more American. This
idea too was a Colt-manufactured myth, indeed, an ad slogan: "God may
have made men, but Samuel Colt made them equal." The notion of guns as
instruments of equality ought to seem self-evidently crazy, but for a
long time Hollywood--and thus we all--lived by it. Cultural historian
Richard Slotkin of Wesleyan University debunks it forever in a recent
essay, "Equalizer: The Cult of the Colt." "If we as individuals have to
depend on our guns as equalizers," says Slotkin, "then what we will have
is not a government of laws but a government of men--armed men."
Lasting social change usually occurs when people decide to do something
they know they ought to have done long ago but have kept the knowledge
private. This, I believe, is what happened with civil rights, and it is
happening with guns. I doubt that it will be 25 years before we're rid
of the things. In 10 years, even five, we could be looking back on the
past three decades of gun violence in America the way one once looked
back upon 18th century madhouses. I think we are already doing so but
not saying so. Before Atlanta, before Columbine, at some quiet,
unspecified moment in the past few years, America decided it was time to
advance the civilization and do right by the ones who know what the
killing and wounding are like, and who know the pain.
------------------
Makes me want to puke!
I used to like some of his essays on MacNeill-Lehrer, but I'm just a hair away from sending him hate mail. He also was on the Newhour the day it happened trying to drum up support for his liberal viewpoints.
For the record, TIME has tons of anti articles listed, but no pro gun articles. Whatever happened to fairness?
The lefties get bent out of shape when someone gets a million bucks by designing and financing the better mousetrap. "It's not fair, they cry, there are homeless people and dropouts and drug addicts making minimum wage, and this rich business man has a million dollars."
Fairness is only relative, I guess.
By Roger Rosenblatt
August 2, 1999
Web posted at: 11:46 a.m. EDT (1546 GMT)
As terrible as last week's shooting in Atlanta was, as terrible as all
the gun killings of the past few months have been, one has the almost
satisfying feeling that the country is going through the literal death
throes of a barbaric era and that mercifully soon, one of these
monstrous episodes will be the last. High time. My guess, in fact, is
that the hour has come and gone--that the great majority of Americans
are saying they favor gun control when they really mean gun banishment.
Trigger locks, waiting periods, purchase limitations, which may seem
important corrections at the moment, will soon be seen as mere tinkering
with a machine that is as good as obsolete. Marshall McLuhan said that
by the time one notices a cultural phenomenon, it has already happened.
I think the country has long been ready to restrict the use of guns,
except for hunting rifles and shotguns, and now I think we're prepared
to get rid of the damned things entirely--the handguns, the semis and
the automatics.
Those who claim otherwise tend to cite America's enduring love affair
with guns, but there never was one. The image of shoot-'em-up America
was mainly the invention of gunmaker Samuel Colt, who managed to
convince a malleable 19th century public that no household was complete
without a firearm--"an armed society is a peaceful society." This
ludicrous aphorism, says historian Michael Bellesiles of Emory
University, turned 200 years of Western tradition on its ear. Until
1850, fewer than 10% of U.S. citizens had guns. Only 15% of violent
deaths between 1800 and 1845 were caused by guns. Reputedly wide-open
Western towns, such as Dodge City and Tombstone, had strict gun-control
laws; guns were confiscated at the Dodge City limits.
If the myth of a gun-loving America is merely the product of gun
salesmen, dime-store novels, movies and the National Rifle Association
(NRA)--which, incidentally, was not opposed to gun control until the
1960s, when gun buying sharply increased--it would seem that creating a
gun-free society would be fairly easy. But the culture itself has
retarded such progress by creating and embellishing an absurd though
appealing connection among guns, personal power, freedom and beauty. The
old western novels established a cowboy corollary to the Declaration of
Independence by depicting the cowboy as a moral loner who preserves the
peace and his own honor by shooting faster and surer than the
competition. The old gangster movies gave us opposite versions of the
same character. Little Caesar is simply an illegal Lone Ranger, with the
added element of success in the free market. In more recent movies, guns
are displayed as art objects, people die in balletic slow motion, and
right prevails if you own "the most powerful handgun in the world." I
doubt that any of this nonsense causes violence, but after decades of
repetition, it does invoke boredom. And while I can't prove it, I would
bet that gun-violence entertainment will soon pass too, because people
have had too much of it and because it is patently false.
Before one celebrates the prospect of disarmament, it should be
acknowledged that gun control is one of those issues that are
simultaneously both simpler and more complicated than it appears.
Advocates usually point to Britain, Australia and Japan as their models,
where guns are restricted and crime is reduced. They do not point to
Switzerland, where there is a gun in every home and crime is practically
nonexistent. Nor do they cite as sources criminology professor Gary
Kleck of Florida State University, whose studies have shown that gun
ownership reduces crime when gun owners defend themselves, or Professor
John R. Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago Law School, whose research
has indicated that gun regulation actually encourages crime.
The constitutional questions raised by gun control are serious as well.
In a way, the anti-gun movement mirrors the humanitarian movement in
international politics. Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda have suggested that
the West, the U.S. in particular, is heading toward a politics of human
rights that supersedes the politics of established frontiers and, in
some cases, laws. Substitute private property for frontiers and the
Second Amendment for laws, and one begins to see that the politics of
humanitarianism requires a trade-off involving the essential
underpinnings of American life. To tell Americans what they can or
cannot own and do in their homes is always a tricky business. As for the
Second Amendment, it may pose an inconvenience for gun-control
advocates, but no more an inconvenience than the First Amendment offers
those who blame violence on movies and television.
Gun-control forces also ought not to make reform an implicit or explicit
attack on people who like and own guns. Urban liberals ought to be
especially alert to the cultural bigotry that categorizes such people as
hicks, racists, psychotics and so forth. For one thing, a false moral
superiority is impractical and incites a backlash among people otherwise
sympathetic to sensible gun control, much like the backlash the
pro-abortion rights forces incurred once their years of political
suasion had ebbed. And the demonizing of gun owners or even the NRA is
simply wrong. The majority of gun owners are as dutiful, responsible and
sophisticated as most of their taunters.
That said, I am pleased to report that the likelihood of sweeping and
lasting changes in the matter of America and guns has never been higher.
There comes a time in every civilization when people have had enough of
a bad thing, and the difference between this moment and previous spasms
of reform is that it springs from the grass roots and is not driven by
politicians or legal institutions. Gun-control sentiment is everywhere
in the country these days--in the White House, the presidential
campaigns, the legislatures, the law courts and the gun industry itself.
But it seems nowhere more conspicuous than in the villages, the houses
of worship and the consensus of the kitchen.
Not surprisingly, the national legislature has done the least to
represent the nation on this issue. After the passage of the 1994 crime
bill and its ban on assault weapons, the Republican Congress of 1994
nearly overturned the assault-weapons provision of the bill. Until
Columbine the issue remained moribund, and after Columbine, moribund
began to look good to the gun lobby. Thanks to an alliance of House
Republicans and a prominent Democrat, Michigan's John Dingell, the most
modest of gun-control measures, which had barely limped wounded into the
House from the Senate, was killed. "Guns have little or nothing to do
with juvenile violence," said Tom Delay of Texas. Compared with his
other assertions--that shootings are the product of day care, birth
control and the teaching of evolution--that sounded almost persuasive.
A more representative representative of public feeling on this issue is
New York's Carolyn McCarthy, whom gun violence brought into politics
when her husband was killed and her son grievously wounded by a crazed
shooter on a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993. McCarthy made an
emotional, sensible and ultimately ineffectual speech in the House in an
effort to get a stronger measure passed.
"When I gave that speech," she says, "I was talking more to the American
people than to my colleagues. I could see that most of my colleagues had
already made up their minds. I saw games being played. But this was not
a game with me. I looked up in the balcony, and I saw people who had
been with me all along on this issue. Victims and families of victims.
We're the ones who know what it's like. We're the ones who know the
pain."
Following upon Columbine, the most dramatic grass-roots effort has been
the Bell Campaign. Modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the
campaign plans to designate one day a year to toll bells all over the
country for every victim of guns during the previous year. The aim of
the Bell Campaign is to get guns off the streets and out of the hands of
just about everyone except law officers and hunters. Andrew McGuire,
executive director, whose cousin was killed by gunfire many years ago,
wants gun owners to register and reregister every year. "I used to say
that we'd get rid of most of the guns in 50 years," he tells me. "Now I
say 25. And the reason for my optimism is that until now, we've had no
grass-roots opposition to the NRA."
One must remember, however, that the NRA too is a grass-roots
organization. A great deal of money and the face and voice of its
president, Charlton Heston, may make it seem like something more grand
and monumental, but its true effectiveness exists in small local
communities where one or two thousand votes can swing an election.
People who own guns and who ordinarily might never vote at all become
convinced that their freedoms, their very being, will be jeopardized if
they do not vote Smith in and Jones out. Once convinced, these folks in
effect become the NRA in the shadows. They are the defense-oriented
"little guys" of the American people, beset by Big Government, big laws
and rich liberals who want to take away the only power they have.
They are convinced, I believe, of something wholly untrue--that the
possession of weapons gives them stature, makes them more American. This
idea too was a Colt-manufactured myth, indeed, an ad slogan: "God may
have made men, but Samuel Colt made them equal." The notion of guns as
instruments of equality ought to seem self-evidently crazy, but for a
long time Hollywood--and thus we all--lived by it. Cultural historian
Richard Slotkin of Wesleyan University debunks it forever in a recent
essay, "Equalizer: The Cult of the Colt." "If we as individuals have to
depend on our guns as equalizers," says Slotkin, "then what we will have
is not a government of laws but a government of men--armed men."
Lasting social change usually occurs when people decide to do something
they know they ought to have done long ago but have kept the knowledge
private. This, I believe, is what happened with civil rights, and it is
happening with guns. I doubt that it will be 25 years before we're rid
of the things. In 10 years, even five, we could be looking back on the
past three decades of gun violence in America the way one once looked
back upon 18th century madhouses. I think we are already doing so but
not saying so. Before Atlanta, before Columbine, at some quiet,
unspecified moment in the past few years, America decided it was time to
advance the civilization and do right by the ones who know what the
killing and wounding are like, and who know the pain.
------------------
Makes me want to puke!
I used to like some of his essays on MacNeill-Lehrer, but I'm just a hair away from sending him hate mail. He also was on the Newhour the day it happened trying to drum up support for his liberal viewpoints.
For the record, TIME has tons of anti articles listed, but no pro gun articles. Whatever happened to fairness?
The lefties get bent out of shape when someone gets a million bucks by designing and financing the better mousetrap. "It's not fair, they cry, there are homeless people and dropouts and drug addicts making minimum wage, and this rich business man has a million dollars."
Fairness is only relative, I guess.
