ON THE LOVE OF GUNS
REFLECTIONS ON A DARK TIME
The Browning .380 semi-automatic pistol.
In an earlier posting, I mentioned having recently rediscovered a file of miscellaneous journalism and correspondence, in some cases more than thirty years ago, and lost since then in the Sargasso Sea of my hard drive. Most of the pieces have dated, sometimes terminally, but a few offer a window onto my preoccupations at the time.
The following was written in the ‘seventies, when I was teaching at a small college in Virginia - the buckle, as they say, on the American gun belt. Yet another school slaughter inspired me to reflect on my experience of briefly owning a gun. You may find it depressing, as I do, to consider how little has changed. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past….
Over lunch this week with a fellow Man of the World, we got to talking, as Men of the World do, about the experience of Being Served; ie, presented by a process server with a summons to appear in court.
We agreed that, as with many experiences, one never forgets the first time. In my case, it took place in the college parking lot just outside my office. To the bored young statie who did the deed, it was just another chore, though I like to think he’d have been impressed by the sums involved, running as they did into the mid-millions. They certainly impressed me.
That the summons wasn’t unexpected didn’t reduce the sense of foreboding it induced. It ranked me in an instant with legions of the emperiled: Billy Bones in Treasure Island, slipped the Black Spot by Blind Pew, or the victim of the diabolical Karswell in M.R. James’ Casting the Runes. Marked. Cursed.
It wasn’t entirely because of this sense of threat that I decided to buy a gun. I’d been intending to do so anyway, as research for the book I was writing, about Americans and their love of firearms. But as precipitating events go, the writ was persuasive.
The documentatrion required by my local Kmart to complete as part of the purchase was hardly challenging. Was I a convicted felon, clinically insane, or intending to overthrow the government of the United States? Three negative responses and a Browning .380 auto pistol was mine.
“Waal, awl rahrt,” beamed the avuncular merchant of death. “and y’all have a nice day, y’heah?”
At the check-out, however, my reception was more frosty. “You wanna pay by cheque? This a local cheque? You got photo ID? Look straight at the camera, please.” A gun was only a gun, but money was…well, money.
Aligned now with the forces of law and order, I was welcomed by the local police captain, who led me into the station house basement, walls lined with pigeon holes, each containing a confiscated hand-gun. Anything larger – swords, machetes, and an assegai – went into a tea chest, from which he extracted a double-barrelled shotgun, sawn off at barrel and stock.
“Just look at this,” he said in disgust.
“Awful.” I could visualise the spread of shot, the terrible impact….
“What kind of damn fool,” he went on, “would mutilate a beautiful Purdey over-and-under 12-bore like that?”
The captain was, naturally, a stalwart of the National Rifle Association. Likewise the medical examiner, a scholarly man who collected Lugers. With their recommendation, I had no problem getting an interview with a senior officer at the NRA’s Washington DC office.
Armfuls of literature were pressed on me - I particularly enjoyed the Christmas cards, with a jolly Winchester-toting Santa, and halls decked with festive artillery. Tentatively I raised the question of gun control, about which Senator Ted Kennedy was particularly vociferous that year. My host sneered and, from a locked cabinet, produced a fat file marked Kennedy. A black and white glossy showed a grinning Teddy on the campaign trail, flourishing a pair of .45s.
“I happen to know,” he said, with relish, “that Jack and Bobby would go out on the Potomac in the Honey Fitz and plink bottles and cans with a .22.”
He selected another document. “This might interest you.”
The letter from then-junior congressman John F. Kennedy explained that he’d been invited to go hunting with senator Lyndon Johnson on his ranch, but lacked a weapon. As a veteran, he was entitled, he understood, to a free rifle from the stock of retired weapons in the national armory, and wished to exercise this right.
“We cleaned one up for him,” said my new friend, “and got a sharpshooter to sight it in specially. But imagine…a guy like Kennedy. With all that money. They’re like that, though - millionaires. Cheap.”
Proponents of gun ownership tell you it has no more effect on one’s character than being able to ride a bike. That wasn’t my experience. Taken with the looming reality of the lawsuit, having the power or life and death skewed my perceptions. The notional was no longer simply speculative; for the first time, one could ponder the unthinkable. Not far beneath the surface of my character – and, I suspect, of many of us – was an intense anger; the accumulated resentment at every slight, the sting of every failure, the detestation of every indignity. To be made aware of this was alarming; to know that, in the right circumstances, one could redress such offences, exhilarating.
The police let me cruise with them, and observe as they cleaned up after the killings that gave our town the eleventh highest per capita murder rate in the country. Weekends, I drove an old Ford Fairlane, haunting the seedier drive-in cinemas on Saturday nights, where my student girlfriend and I made out in the back seat, watching slasher and biker movies as rats scuttled across the potholed asphalt, sending empty beer cans rattling as they scavenged for pizza scraps and popcorn.
And, in defiance of my lawyers’ advice, I went to New York, where I risked exacerbating the threat of the suit with my presence. I’d met a nurse who could give me entrée to its hospitals, and the temptation of all that blood and panic was just too great. We checked into motels under assumed names – you could still do it back then, if you were careful, and paid cash.If you want to see the American love affair with the handgun at its most intimate, let me recommend a busy Saturday night in the emergency room at Brooklyn’s Kings County.
But then the lawsuit was dismissed. I was able once more to travel freely. And overnight, life lost some of its savour. I even abandoned the gun book and took up projects less likely to end with me face down in a gutter.
But if I were able to live a second life, it would be that persona I’d inhabit. I visualise my rage as a suit of clothes. It is hanging still in the wardrobe. All it would take is the will to slip it on. Already I feel the satisfaction of slipping on that jacket, the comforting weight of my Browning in the inside pocket. Then I’d walk the streets of some city, a person reborn, anonymous, without scruples, and with – since I am my own creation - nothing to fear nor lose.
Hello, I’m Ted Bundy. I’m Jeffrey Dahmer. I’m the Zodiac Killer and the Son of Sam. I’m Jack the Ripper. Who are you?