Gun Play: An American Tragedy, in Three Acts

Act I.

A week after Jared Lee Loughner–accused multiple murderer and, in the words of The New York Times, “curious teenager and talented saxophonist”–went on one of those shooting sprees that Americans seem to regard as the price we pay for our god-given right to an armamentarium straight out of the NRA-wet-dream gun showroom in The Matrix, it was business as usual at the Crossroads of the West gun show at the Pima County Fairgrounds.

The seat of Pima County, as irony would have it, is Tucson, where Loughner emptied 31 rounds from his Glock semiautomatic pistol into a crowd at a political event, wounding 14 and killing six, a nine-year-old girl among them. At Crossroads of the West, 40-round magazines for AK-47s could be had for the recession-friendly sum of $19.99, because…because why?

Because our founding myth of rugged individualism demands it. As does the rough-justice ethos of our frontier heritage. And the Don’t-Tread-on-Me anti-federalism of our racist past. And the deepening distrust of Big Government, ginned up by Reagan and taken to its logical extreme by the militia movement of the ’90s and today’s Tea Partiers.

What few mainstream pundits seem willing to discuss is the role, in America’s gun violence, of the radically deregulated capitalism championed for decades by neo-liberal economists and conservative ideologues. What Ayn Rand would call the “virtuous selfishness” of winner-take-all capitalism insists on profit maximization at any cost. What better explanation for the millions the gun industry spends in lobbying, campaign contributions, and issue ads to thwart gun control in any form, from the right to own assault weapons to background checks? Isn’t it all about selling more guns in a nation where the ratio of guns to people already stands at about 85 guns for every 100 Americans?

Of course, the paranoid style in American politics is part of the psychotic equation of gun culture, too: these days, too many Tea Partiers, Palinistas, and dug-in survivalists see themselves as Armies of One–lone-man militias standing between angry white Middle America and the zombie apocalypse of Obamaniac socialism. And as everyone in Palin’s “Real America” knows, “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Did I mention that anti-Obama bumper stickers were on sale at Crossroads of the West?

Point taken that the coat-hanger antennae on Loughner’s tinfoil helmet were not, in all likelihood, receiving transmissions from some ideological NORAD in Roger Ailes’s basement. The accumulating evidence suggests the shooter was crazier than a pair of waltzing mice. A Crossroads of the West attendee was thoughtful on that point, citing scripture–the gun lobby’s bumper-sticker refrain–to argue his case: “It’s not guns that kill people,” said a 58-year-old mental health worker, “People kill people.”

Which would explain why America leads the industrialized world in gun violence, and why American children are 11 times more likely than children in other developed countries to die in a gun accident. Only a card-carrying libtard would link such stats to the fact that our gun laws are obscenely lax, as opposed to, say, Japan, whose gun laws are among the world’s strictest and whose rate of gun-related fatalities, incalculably, is among the world’s lowest: one death for every two million people, versus our 14.24 gun deaths for every 100,000.

But if it’s people who kill people, not guns, then our off-the-charts gun violence would seem to indicate that a disproportionate percentage of the planet’s people-killing people are Americans. What to do about it? The spin-alley response, in some corners of our great republic, is to lay the blame for the Tucson bloodbath on our mental-healthcare industry. Curiously, some of those eager to deflect attention away from gun regulation and onto society’s neglect of the mentally ill were decrying, not long ago, universal healthcare as a budget-busting indulgence of the Nanny State or a federalist plot to Kevork the elderly (death panels!).

Some of their number continue to insist, in a nation whose citizens are the world’s most statistically likely people to kill people, that every American should nonetheless have the right to buy an AK-47 with a 40-round magazine–preferably, without that affront to personal liberty known as a background check. You know, the bureaucratic hoop that Loughner probably would’ve failed, if he’d had to jump through it.*

After all, the Tree of Insanity must must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of innocent bystanders.

Act II.

Even so, no one can truly understand the land that inspired Dorothy Parker’s mordant one-liner “American as a sawed-off shotgun” unless he has held–ideally, fired–a gun, felt the perverse sensuality of the way it fits your grip, thrilled to the queasy buzz of knowing that a twitch of your finger can kill.

In a country where the gap between the power elite and the politically impotent million, frantically bailing out their underwater mortgages, yawns wider by the minute; a country where the consoling fiction of the level playing field and the aspirational fantasies fanned by celebrity culture parry any hint of class consciousness, owning a gun is the closest countless downwardly mobile Americans will ever come to any sense of immediate empowerment.

To be American is to feel that handgun ownership is your birthright; that you’re somehow incomplete, nagged by an itchy phantom limb, without a gun.

If you’re a boomer, growing up American meant growing up with the ricochet of gunshots–Dealey Plaza, the Audubon Ballroom, the Lorraine Motel, The Ambassador Hotel, My Lai, the Zodiac Killer, Kent State, the Freeway Killer, Son of Sam, the Dakota–as the soundtrack to your restless sleep.

Paradoxically, it also meant growing up in a country that embraces a perverse faith in “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin). In American myth, the act of pulling the trigger is reimagined as an exuberant, youthful nation’s verdict on the dead weight of the past, reinventing yourself and remaking the world in a split second. On the big screen of the American unconscious, guilt-free sociopaths like Charlie Starkweather merge with perpetual adolescents like Huckleberry Finn and Dean Moriarty, yielding the devil-may-care thrill killers of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers. Lighting out for the territories, they’re fired by a kind of joie de tuer that is a gunfighter nation’s idea of joie de vivre. “Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer,” writes J.G. Ballard, in the endless, lunatic genealogy of his “Generations of America,” a Swiftian satire of our pathological faith in the promise of violence to Make It New.

Growing up in ’60s America meant reliving the tragedy of the Native-American genocide as farce while shoveling in your Swanson Salisbury Steak TV dinner: Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Death Valley Days, The Rifleman, The Virginian, The Big Valley, Branded, Have Gun–Will Travel, The High Chaparral, Rawhide, Wagon Train–the list of prime-time westerns seems endless, in hindsight. These and dozens of shows popped out of the same mold schooled Americans in the lesson that there’s no problem so complex it can’t be resolved with violence. (A lesson taken to heart by cheerleaders for American exceptionalism and architects of imaginary empire like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and William Kristol, who wrote in their manifesto for a “new American century” that the United States must assume its rightful “constabulary” role in global affairs, capable of outgunning the best-armed posse in town.) PTSD’d by race riots and Vietnam war protests, the America of the ’60s rejuvenated its dream of itself by returning nightly to a Disneyfied version of its frontier youth.

For boys–even boys like this author, whose liberal-ish parents fulminated against the soul-scarring effects of “violent toys”–growing up in that America meant dreaming of guns. Cap guns, whose sweetly acrid smell is a grace note in memories of my boyhood summers. The impressively realistic toy Peacemaker in the Sears Roebuck catalog, with the tie that lashed its holster to your thigh for gunslinger cool and those little pellets that made smoke trail convincingly from the gun’s barrel when you fired it. The Johnny Seven One-Man Army, a super-gun whose sheer overkill–it rolled a grenade launcher, anti-tank rocket, anti-bunker missile, rifle, machine gun, and automatic pistol into one mega-weapon–launched a million power fantasies, making it the best-selling boys’ toy of 1964. Daisy BB rifles, like the one my friend came within a whisker of blinding his kid brother with one languid, directionless afternoon when his parents weren’t home  (why weren’t the parents ever home, in ’60s Southern California?). And of course real guns, like the .22 my older buddies, longhaired brothers who embodied cool itself, used to obliterate beer cans. Later, when their father died by his own hand, I thought of the locked gun case in their family room, a shrine to quiet menace, and of cans lined up for execution in the summer sun, jumping to life at the instant of impact.

So constant a presence was the sound of gunplay in the dream life of that era that the image of rapt little faces, lit by the flicker of the cathode-ray tube and accompanied by the bang! zing! of gunplay, is now iconic, triggering boomer nostalgia for the days before social and technological change blew mass culture into a million little microniches– a time when America was One Nation Under Neilsen, tuning in for the same shows at the same time.

The media cut-up band Negativland captures–and critiques–the vibe of the times in its deadpan “Guns,” an eight-minute welter of dialogue and sound effects from ’60s toy-gun commercials and westerns, set against a darkly atmospheric backdrop of windswept synths and thudding electro beats. All-American tykes in wild-west outfits slap leather, fill their hands, draw a bead on outlaws. A scruffy cowpoke falls dead with his harmonica still in his mouth, a newscaster announces the death of Martin Luther King, Jack Ruby shoots Oswald live on TV. “Very good shooting,” a voice drawls, just before JFK crumples in the presidential limousine. Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer puts a pistol in his mouth and commits suicide on camera. A commercial voiceover chirps, “Quaker Puffed Rice Sparkys . . . and Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkys! Those delicious, nutritious breakfast cereals . . . shot from guns!!!”

Act III.

There is, of course, no proven link between exposure to fictional violence at a tender age and sociopathic behavior as an adult; the copycat crimes routinely cited by the shoot-your-TV school of media criticism are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Rather, as argued earlier, it’s the tidal wave of cheap, readily available guns inundating our culture that  accounts for our unenviable first-place status, among industrialized nations, in gun violence: homicides, suicides, accidental shootings.

Still, the blood tide of fantasy gunplay washing over the American mind, practically from birth, must have some effect, if only to implant in our collective consciousness the seductive lie that, if all else fails–if you’re suicidally despondent, like my friends’ father; or a demented nonentity like Mark David Chapman; or a grinning paranoiac like Jared Lee Loughner, mind swirling with the free-floating fears of the lunatic fringe–there’s always a magic bullet.

Epilogue

Leaving the house one day, I hear a voice accosting me from mid-air. It’s the neighbor boy, straddling a bough midway up the tree near our property line.

An intense kid, by turns glumly uncommunicative, then voluble, sometimes almost manic, he’s obsessed with guns, and occasionally regales me with exhaustive plot summaries of bullet-splattered action movies he’s seen. His enthusiasm for a film correlates tightly to body count. But he’s a purist: deaths inflicted by anything other than bullets are of virtually no interest. Thus, the martial-arts tour de force Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon rated a yawn because, although it includes at least six killings (one of which involves a bandit skewered on a spear, which is then yanked out of his heart, dispatching him with suitably melodramatic messiness), the movie is…gunless.

The kid’s matter-of-fact, unreflective rhapsodies about onscreen bloodbaths always leave me at a loss for words. On occasion, I’ve asked him what he thinks his monomaniacal fixation on guns means. Unsurprisingly for a grade-school kid, he just shrugs and smiles a secretive smile, the universal sign for “whatever.”

Again, the voice in the sky calls out. I look up. He’s aiming a toy gun at me. Don’t ever do that, I growl, nonplussed. He stares me dead in the eye, unblinking. Bang, he says. Bang bang. You’re dead.

* [[Author’s Note: As one commenter pointed out, Loughner didn’t fail a background check because he was never legally declared insane. My point stands that forces categorically opposed to gun regulation consistently strive to stymie legislators’ attempts at mandating stringent background checks. That said, I’m grateful for the fact-checking.]]