Guns and Me
I'm still surprised at finding myself in political opposition to so many people and organizations I once supported. I don't know why. The evolution of a radical young man to a conservative middle-aged one is among the oldest of stories. Yet I feel neither "conservative" nor evolved. I still believe I'm upholding the values of my liberal youth, albeit in a different form. And I wasn't evolved so much as jolted, on Sept. 11, to be exact.
Yet it is possible that this is no deep matter. Still, like the aftermath of a divorce, I can't help re-examining my history on the left to look for incipient signs of a break-up.
"Gun control" is one such issue. I've never owned or fired a gun in my life. I once held my great-uncle's .22 revolver from his days as a Pennsylvania Railroad conductor, but I'm not sure that gun would even fire. I've been to a shooting range once, to cover a police contest for a newspaper.
My grandfather on my father's side was an avid hunter, as were other men on that side in the late 1800s. I have photos and illustrations of them with rifles in hand. But that never got passed down to my dad, perhaps because his own father died before he had the chance. Probably it wouldn't have mattered. In our suburban existence, nobody talked about guns. It wasn't a gun culture.
So I came of age associating firearms with Christian enthusiasm, flag-waving patriotism, fondness for the military, and other irrational fixations of the right-wing loonies in this country.
I was of the "why would you need an AK-47 to hunt a deer" school of gun control. But back in the '80s I read the Village Voice, and back there among the naughty personal ads they ran Nat Hentoff's column. I read him regularly. And here was this Jewish intellectual from the city, with no more of gun culture in him than I had, teaching me to think of the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, as a whole.
By this time, my commitment to freedom of speech was solid; up to "shouting fire in a crowded theater," I endorsed it all. So, I set myself the task of devising an argument against the Second Amendment that wouldn't also involve, and constrict, the First.
I couldn't do it, of course. They are of a piece. Would you say that the framers of the Bill of Rights never imagined the destructive power of modern weaponry? Then neither did they imagine the reach and scope of the modern media -- visual as well as printed, and all the more powerful for its pretense of unbias. Was their commitment to an armed citizenry based on an antiquated military model of a minuteman national army? Then so was their commitment to a free press based on a political system where newspapers served as the principle organs of party communications, something that hasn't been true in America since 1880 or so.
You don't need an AK-47 to shoot a white-tail deer, but neither do you need to dunk a crucifix in a piss-pot to make art. (I thought that was a brilliant demonstration of what it would have meant for a God to mantle himself in humanity, by the way, and a deeply moving religious statement.) Guns kill people -- when bad people use them for that purpose. So do words. Or were we never serious about that bit about the pen being mightier than the sword?
So I gave up, and learned to accept the idea that some people grow up with guns and they're not survivalist freaks and they're no real danger to me. The gun problem in America -- and it is real -- is largely associated with urban crime. But until you can invent one set of rules for the black inner city, and another for the deer-hunting backwoods counties, you'll not solve it. The ever-clever Ed Rendell discovered the difficulty of that as mayor of Philadelphia. No state illustrates the dilemma better than Pennsylvania.
Later I got to know people in the South, who had grown up in Atlanta suburbs that looked much like mine on the Main Line, but they had been taught to use and handle firearms, and they used them for pleasure. And I actually admired them their Sunday afternoons blasting plastic milk bottles in the back yard. It sounded like fun, rather. As for whether it would ever be a useful skill, as opposed to a passtime, that question got answered when my friend ended up working in post-war Iraq.
I've still never owned or fired a gun. Perhaps I never will. By now, for me, it would be an affectation or a dilletante experience. But I've made my peace with that strain of the American right.
Yet it is possible that this is no deep matter. Still, like the aftermath of a divorce, I can't help re-examining my history on the left to look for incipient signs of a break-up.
"Gun control" is one such issue. I've never owned or fired a gun in my life. I once held my great-uncle's .22 revolver from his days as a Pennsylvania Railroad conductor, but I'm not sure that gun would even fire. I've been to a shooting range once, to cover a police contest for a newspaper.
My grandfather on my father's side was an avid hunter, as were other men on that side in the late 1800s. I have photos and illustrations of them with rifles in hand. But that never got passed down to my dad, perhaps because his own father died before he had the chance. Probably it wouldn't have mattered. In our suburban existence, nobody talked about guns. It wasn't a gun culture.
So I came of age associating firearms with Christian enthusiasm, flag-waving patriotism, fondness for the military, and other irrational fixations of the right-wing loonies in this country.
I was of the "why would you need an AK-47 to hunt a deer" school of gun control. But back in the '80s I read the Village Voice, and back there among the naughty personal ads they ran Nat Hentoff's column. I read him regularly. And here was this Jewish intellectual from the city, with no more of gun culture in him than I had, teaching me to think of the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, as a whole.
By this time, my commitment to freedom of speech was solid; up to "shouting fire in a crowded theater," I endorsed it all. So, I set myself the task of devising an argument against the Second Amendment that wouldn't also involve, and constrict, the First.
I couldn't do it, of course. They are of a piece. Would you say that the framers of the Bill of Rights never imagined the destructive power of modern weaponry? Then neither did they imagine the reach and scope of the modern media -- visual as well as printed, and all the more powerful for its pretense of unbias. Was their commitment to an armed citizenry based on an antiquated military model of a minuteman national army? Then so was their commitment to a free press based on a political system where newspapers served as the principle organs of party communications, something that hasn't been true in America since 1880 or so.
You don't need an AK-47 to shoot a white-tail deer, but neither do you need to dunk a crucifix in a piss-pot to make art. (I thought that was a brilliant demonstration of what it would have meant for a God to mantle himself in humanity, by the way, and a deeply moving religious statement.) Guns kill people -- when bad people use them for that purpose. So do words. Or were we never serious about that bit about the pen being mightier than the sword?
So I gave up, and learned to accept the idea that some people grow up with guns and they're not survivalist freaks and they're no real danger to me. The gun problem in America -- and it is real -- is largely associated with urban crime. But until you can invent one set of rules for the black inner city, and another for the deer-hunting backwoods counties, you'll not solve it. The ever-clever Ed Rendell discovered the difficulty of that as mayor of Philadelphia. No state illustrates the dilemma better than Pennsylvania.
Later I got to know people in the South, who had grown up in Atlanta suburbs that looked much like mine on the Main Line, but they had been taught to use and handle firearms, and they used them for pleasure. And I actually admired them their Sunday afternoons blasting plastic milk bottles in the back yard. It sounded like fun, rather. As for whether it would ever be a useful skill, as opposed to a passtime, that question got answered when my friend ended up working in post-war Iraq.
I've still never owned or fired a gun. Perhaps I never will. By now, for me, it would be an affectation or a dilletante experience. But I've made my peace with that strain of the American right.
