Many of my fellow Americans hold in their minds
complicatedly divergent views about guns — about guns’ large presence in our
culture, about Americans’ right to own and carry guns, about guns’ generative
relationship to violent crime, about guns’ responsibility for the deaths of
children in mass killings, about accidental occurrences and suicides, and about
what it all says about us that we have so many guns but can’t
seem to exercise sane control over their use and misuse.
This is not to say that many, many good Americans don’t
believe guns are abhorrent and wouldn’t abolish them one and all from our land.
And it’s not to say that the National Rifle Association isn’t a domestic
terrorist organisation that tacitly supports the killing of children more than
it supports reasoned gun legislation. And it’s not to say I think that by
writing this now anything about guns-in-America will get better, or that our
minds and hearts will soon become less confounded by these matters. As an owner
of several guns, I, as much as anyone, hold some of these divergent views.
Therefore, what I say here is meant only to lay some certain matters bare, not
to advocate whether gun-ownership is good or bad. If I end up defending a point
of view or seeking to justify myself, I hope I’ll be responsible enough to own
up.
For starters, I don’t care to delve deeply into the matter
of whether we Americans do or don’t have a constitutional right to bear arms.
In my personal view, different from the late Justice Scalia’s “originalist”
view of our constitution, even if our founders didintend there to
be a right to hold and bear arms — in 1791 — now is a different world,
requiring different, less violent legal strategies to keep the peace. And yet.
A right to own guns has been observed by the US Supreme Court, and for the
moment is a matter of settled law. Guns of all sorts are mostly legal in the
US, whether anyone likes it or not.
For myself — again, a gun owner — I think there is some
merit to the rightwing maxim that says “when guns are outlawed, only outlaws
will have guns”. Every culture’s origin myth has in its annals many
diorama-like, near-archetypal human situations held to be
predictive and true, the violation or ignoring of which threatens the culture’s
integrity. In much of America, one bit of this primal-ness depicts some
completely innocent person being accosted in a darkened back alley by one or
more very bad people bent on mayhem, and for the good and innocent party being
fully able to defend him (or her) self. Often with a gun. Thinking about the
matter again personally, the question arises that if my or my dearest one’s
life should be put in harm’s way by just such an evildoer, would I like
to have a gun with which to defend her? And me? I think I
would.
And yet, in precisely such a hazardous confrontation — in
New Orleans, on a dark street near my house one Sunday night 10 years ago — I
was not armed when a teenage boy pointed a pistol at my wife
and me at close range and specifically threatened to kill us. Had I been armed
— and I’ve had the chance to think on this many times, since he didn’t shoot us
— the poor kid was so inept at his robbery chops, that I’d have shot him dead
as a mackerel. Which would’ve ended his young life at age 16, and ruined mine
at 62. For that reason, no matter what other qualifying things I say here, I
believe it’s far better that I didn’t have a gun that night and that I didn’t
shoot that kid — although I unquestionably would have. Of course, it’s only
dumb luck that the little bastard didn’t shoot us.
Carrying a pistol on your person — which the lad in New
Orleans was doing that night — isn’t the same as wearing a hat or not wearing a
hat. Ask a cop. When my wife was in public office in New Orleans in the
mid-1990s, it was at a time of greatly increased drug crime and gun violence in
our French Quarter neighbourhood. Our house was frequently broken into. My wife
was robbed at gunpoint in our garage. A man pulled a pistol on me in the
street. Tourists were often mugged and occasionally murdered near where we
lived. I became alarmed for my wife’s safety, since she was often away from our
house attending public meetings at night — doing her job. Admittedly, we
could’ve moved away, but we felt compelled to stay. We liked our house, our
neighbours. I therefore suggested to my wife that she obtain from the police a
permit to carry a concealed weapon — the famous “concealed-carry” — thus to arm
herself for protection. She, like me, is a lifetime quail and pheasant shooter,
is a quite good shot, and knows about guns and gun safety. This, afterwards,
she subsequently and legally did. So that for a time, when she was out alone at
night, she carried a .38 calibre 5-shot Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in
her jacket pocket. In deference to my own perceived susceptibility to becoming
a victim, I did the same. Many people we knew, people of all races and
persuasions and orientations, did. I’m sure they’re still doing it.
But what my wife and I came very quickly to experience was a
complex download of empirical and unexpected human data. For one thing, when
you’re carrying a loaded pistol — in your pocket, in a holster, or stuck under
the belt of your trousers — you’re never not thinking about it. Hats really are
different. Carried on one’s person, a gun is preoccupying and foreign. It’s
heavy. It can alter your gait. It interferes with your consciousness of your
self. You’re now dangerous. Plus, as an appendage added on to who you are as
you go into your day, a gun causes its bearer to see the world differently. A
well-lit city sidewalk full of innocent pedestrians becomes a scene —
a human grouping one of whose constituents you might need to shoot. Something
good in your self is, by this means, sacrificed. And more. In a sudden,
unwieldy hauling-out of your piece, or just by having your piece in your
pocket, you can fumble around and shoot yourself, as often happens
and isn’t at all funny. Or you might shoot some little girl on a porch across
the street or two streets away, or five streets away. Lots and lots of untoward
things can happen when you’re legally carrying a concealed firearm. One or two of
them might turn out to be beneficial — to you. But a majority are beneficial to
neither man nor beast. Boats are said, by less nautical types, always to be
seeking a place to sink. Guns — no matter who has them — are always seeking an
opportunity to go off. Anybody who says different is a fool or a liar or both.
Ultimately, and after not much time, we quit carrying a gun.
It was simply too dangerous — and too stupid.
America is getting nuttier and nuttier. Every election cycle
I notice how less governable it seems. Now the thuggish Donald Trump or the
gargoyle-ish Ted Cruz may be our next president. What’s
that about?
Congress basically doesn’t work any more. Hundreds of our citizens were killed
or wounded in mass shootings last year. Thanks to
President Barack
Obama and a lot of other right-thinking people, relations between
blacks and white Americans (frictive, violent and unjust for centuries) are now
prominently and more accurately in our view, and are improving. But white,
undereducated men (the core group of handgun owners in our country), are living
less long, are suffering increased alcoholism, drug abuse and stress. Black
Americans know this experience very well in their own history. These white men
don’t feel they’re keeping up with either their parents’ generation or with the
people they normally compare themselves to (often African-Americans). Nine per
cent of these men are unemployed. They’re cynical — with some reason — about
their government. They feel too many things in the country aren’t going their
way, and that they can’t control their lives. They fear change. Yet they sense
the change they fear may have already occurred. Crime and gun violence are
actually down in the US. But gun ownership is up. The NRA would say the latter
statistic occasions the former. Me . . . I just say it feels dangerous over
here.
I don’t cite these facts to engender undue sympathy for any
particular American demographic slice. I personally do have some empathy for
these white men, as well as for black teenagers mercilessly murdered by white
police officers. And for lots of other people, too. I’m a novelist. Empathy is
kinda my job. My version of liberty in the American republic is consonant with
the view held by the cunningly named US appellate judge Learned Hand; which is,
that the spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure it’s right.
What I feel, though, is what many Americans feel now — people I agree with and
people I decidedly don’t — namely, we sense we’re approaching a tipping point in
our liberties, a point at which good is being intolerably held hostage by not
good, a point we need to back away from while we still can.
Not long ago I was invited to deliver a (for me) highly paid
lecture at Texas A&M University, in the south of the US. I gladly agreed. I
make a bit of a living doing such things. But at almost the same time — it was
this winter — news media in the US reported that the state legislature in Texas
had just ratified a statute permitting students above the age of 21 to carry
concealed firearms on to campuses in all Texas public universities, venues that
included both college classrooms and public meeting spaces. My lecture about
writing novels would conceivably be attended by young people with loaded guns
under their letter jackets or squeezed into the waist band of their yoga
tights. I needed to give this some thought.
Of course the whack-jobs in the Texas legislature believed
they were just “protecting against” mass shootings of the sort that at least
seem, inordinately, to occur on college greens nowadays. The model for this
bold assumption is that if everybody could come to school locked and loaded,
then the outlaws wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of massacring a lot
of people. As a theory, it has a certain blunt logic, especially for people who
fantasise infantile, action-figure scenarios as their primary thinking uplink.
But, I thought: how often do these mass campus shootings
actually happen? And how congenial is an armed student body to the larger aims
of a great multiversity? If at least one goal of a university is providing a
haven in which to learn, what about the need to keep unarmed students safe from
their armed classmates — who might not be so expert in the use of firearms? What
about the university’s goal of free and unfettered inquiry? Of critical
thinking? Of agreeing to disagree without prejudice? What could be more of a
fetter than a snarling, armed, possibly half-drunk frat-boy, sitting next to
you in your Problems in Democracy class, who doesn’t like what he’s hearing
about General Beauregard and the civil war, and suddenly needs to express
himself more vividly? Is this armed guy the problem or the solution to the
problem? And what about poor college professors (one of whom I am)? What about
their work conditions, their level of stress? Their freedom? And the janitors
and the secretaries and the co-eds enjoying their barbecue out on the college
lawn, who find themselves in the line of fire emanating from the lecture hall because
li’l Johnny-from-Lubbock just couldn’t stand this crap another minute and
happens to have the lethal and legal means to put a stop to it? What are we
encouraging here? What in the world? Somebody needs to mess with Texas. Give it
a brain transplant. It isn’t good to have students with guns on college
campuses. I own guns. I know. Regretfully I wrote a note to A & M’s
president declining to be his guest — I hope, without prejudice to myself.
The reason it’s so hard to get a straight line on Americans’
attitude toward guns — and on ourselves — is not just that we Americans don’t
do a lot of issue-related thinking over here. It’s also because we’re
accustomed to deluding ourselves and to neither hearing nor telling the truth
about many of our more important motives and interests. Probably those cultural
and national myths I mentioned are also required to contain a large amount of
untruth to remain serviceable. In the US we’re accustomed to believing we’re
“exceptional;” that our battered democracy should be a model for all other
cultures; that invading Iraq twice was a necessary and good idea for the
Iraqis; that President Obama has sold the country down the river simply by
providing healthcare for vast numbers of our citizens. There are a lot of these
“truths”. These are just some of the less zany ones.
About guns, the real truth’s even harder to sort out. The
NRA argues it’s best to arm everybody, including infants, because Americans are
always in jeopardy of having our rights and weapons taken away, Charles
II-style, so we need guns to defend ourselves — a cause proclaimed and
proclaimed and proclaimed with the force of moral self-evidence. The idealised
rationale for this argument would seem to be that in a humane world there’d be
no need for firearms at all. Only ours isn’t that way so we need to have plenty
of firepower to force people to be nice — Donald Trump’s favourite word.
What I sense, however, to be guiltily underlying this claim
for moral high-ground about owning guns is something more penile than
humanistic. Gun ownership and the intransigence with which it’s defended and
promoted in the US is just one more guise for a grab at political power. A
dubious belief that many American liberals hold about the NRA is that many,
perhaps most, NRA members are far more moderate than the organisation’s public
pronouncements make it seem. Why, liberals wonder, don’t the forces of good
just wrest control from the loonies? Better angels are once again puzzlingly
letting themselves be held hostage. Why don’t these NRA moderates just do
what’s right? It’s another of those fuzzy truths we semi-believe and console
ourselves with, and which render us strangely but self-satisfyingly passive —
and complicitous.
Americans don’t have saner gun laws because most Americans,
including those citizens who puzzle over better angels, don’t want saner gun
laws. If we wanted them enough we’d have them — like healthcare and rural
electrification. There’s something about disarming ourselves that must just
make us feel naked and impotent and in jeopardy of we know not what. That’s
part of our origin myth, too.
Me, I’m for saner gun laws. I’ve voted for saner gun laws
and will do it again. If guns were banned in the US, I’d give mine up and worry
about outlaws on a case-by-case basis. When some crazy fool walks into a public
school and shoots down a bunch of innocent children, how I feel is trapped in
my own country, like a man going down on a torpedoed ship. But when I try to
think about what I can personally do to put a stop to this lunacy, my first
thought is to take a pistol and shoot whoever’s responsible for making such
travesties acceptable. Show them the terrible error of their ways in terrible
terms they will understand. I probably won’t do that. But I think you can see
our problem now.
Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize novelist and Mellon
Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in New York City
Photographs: Getty Images; Alastair Casey
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De FINANCIAL TIMES, 19-20/03/2016
