"Yes, We Really Do Want to Take Your Guns"

"In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them."
—Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

Okay. All I've got's an antique rifle that would likely explode if fired, so no big deal to me. I would love to live in a country with far, far fewer guns. One of the reasons I think the NRA should be considered complicit with murder is their careful collusion over the last few decades with gun manufacturers to keep a flooded market profitable by using every scare tactic they could imagine to encourage people to keep buying. (I've written about all this, and other aspects of gun culture, plenty of times before.) I'm quite comfortable around guns, since I grew up with them as an everyday object (everything from .22 pistols to fully-automatic machine guns), and I have many friends who are gun owners, even gun nuts. But though I sometimes find guns attractive, even fascinating, I don't like them and I wish there were vastly fewer. The Oregon shooting happened at a place I'm familiar with, half an hour from the home of one of my best, most beloved friends. The present reality of mass shootings in the US is grotesque, and the easy availability of guns is a major part of the problem.

But I think Josh Marshall is delusional. No matter how much you wish for it, the guns in the United States are not going to be confiscated, and not just because of a lack of political will. The NRA sells the fear of confiscation to gun nuts all the time, but it is not just unlikely and not just politically difficult — given the amount of guns in the US, it is as close to impossible to achieve as any such thing could be. The horse left the barn at least forty years ago.

Certainly, it's valuable for activists to come out and say what they want rather than to lie or, at best, hedge their commentary to appear less radical. I like radicals, especially nonviolent ones, so I'm all for being openly radical. Own your radicalism!

And the idealism in Marshall's blog post is nice. I understand the feeling. But it's fairy-tale utopian. You want to think big, to be honest about your ultimate goals, and so you want to stop talking about things like universal background checks and maybe some restrictions on certain sizes of magazines and certain styles of rifles, things that might be possible to accomplish but are clearly small measures. I get it. I would like to stop talking about how I'll pay next month's bills and instead dream about winning the lottery.

But at a certain point you have to explain how you want to go about achieving your dream. What are the actual mechanics? What are the mechanisms that would bring your dream to reality? The fact is, I have a vastly better chance of winning the lottery than the US has any chance of significant gun confiscation.

Let's pretend we live in a fairy land where somehow the government would pass laws like the ones Australia famously passed. For basic background on that and how it worked, here's an overview from Vox. There are a bunch of things in there that are pretty much politically inconceivable in the US, even if they would likely survive challenge in the courts. But we're playing Let's Pretend.

Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture

When the suspect in the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina was identified, the authorities circulated a photograph of him wearing a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and post-UDI Rhodesia.

The symbolism isn't subtle. Like the confederate flag that flies over the South Carolina capitol, these are flags of explicitly white supremacist governments.

Rhodesia plays a particular role within right-wing American militia culture, linking anti-communism and white supremacy. The downfall of white Rhodesia has its own sort of lost cause mythic power not just for avowed white supremacists, but for the paramilitarist wing of gun culture generally.

Ending the World with Hope and Comfort

A friend pointed me toward Sigrid Nunez's New York Times review of Emily St. John Mandel's popular and award-winning novel Station Eleven. He said it expressed some of the reservations that caused me to stop reading the book, and it does — at the end of her piece, Nunez says exactly what I was thinking as I put the book down with, I'll confess, a certain amount of disgust:

If “Station Eleven” reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.

I don't mean this post to be about Station Eleven, because I didn't finish reading it and for all I know, if I'd finished reading it I might disagree with Nunez. I bring it up because even if, somehow, Nunez is wrong about Station Eleven, her points are important ones in this age of popular apocalypse stories.

Let me put my cards on the table. I have come to think stories that give readers hope for tolerable life after an apocalypse are not just inaccurate, but despicable.

Another Armed, Angry White Man

At the Daily Beast, Cliff Schechter has a piece titled "How the NRA Enables Massacres", which, despite some hyperbolic language, is worth reading for the general information, as is his piece on a visit to the recent NRA convention. Schechter isn't reporting anything new, and the pieces are superficial compared to some earlier writings on all this, but it's always worth reminding ourselves that gun massacres in the US are part of a culture that has been carefully manufactured, protected, nurtured, enflamed.

I've written a lot about guns and gun culture here over the past few years. Writing those posts from scratch now, I would change occasional wording in some of them, clarify a few points, etc. (the hazards of writing on the fly), but you could take almost anything I've written previously and apply it to the latest massacre.

The place of hegemonic masculinity in this type of event is especially clear this time, but it's been present before and is a common component to why this sort of thing happens. It's a racialized hegemonic masculinity, too, the deadly scream of the angry white man — a sense of entitlement thwarted. In the book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, Michael Kimmel writes: "As men experience it, masculinity may not be the experience of power. But it is the experience of entitlement to power" (185).

The NRA and the gun manufacturers have become experts at stoking that sense of entitlement and profiting off of it. At every possible moment, the NRA, the manufacturers, and their minions point out as many threats to power as they can imagine, and then they offer their commodities as tools for stabilizing and strengthening that power.

Gun Culture, USA

Another mass shooting.

And what comes then comes from my friends who love their guns? This, now making the rounds of the gun nut Facebook page nearest you:

Welcome to the world the NRA has created. Sure, some people demand that we do something!, but it's theatre. Nothing gets done. True, most of the proposals for what to do are hasty and only vaguely more informed than the above graphic. (I've long been skeptical that we can do much of anything about gun violence in the US, given the realities. Still, practical, reasonable measures could help — treat guns like cars, for instance. But such ideas are politically impossible.) The general lack of quality to our national conversation on guns is not some fluke. It was created and is sustained by wealthy interests. The NRA fundraises and fundraises, lobbies and lobbies. Their leaders will do their best to look sad and concerned and serious, but don't miss the dollar signs in their eyes. They've spent decades training a solid subset of their membership into paranoia, which for the NRA means training those people to respond to tragedies by sending money and spreading macho idiocy.

Funding for studies by the CDC of gun violence has fallen 96% since 1996. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives has been crippled by the NRA's minions in Congress. Including blackmarket weapons, there are almost certainly more guns than people in the U.S., but they're owned by a minority of the population. And only a small group of that minority buys into the paranoid ideology of the NRA. But boy do they buy into it. They buy the gear and they buy the hooks, lines, and sinkers. They buy and they buy and they buy.

Warrior Dreams and Gun Control Fantasies

Yesterday's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was the sixteenth mass shooting in the U.S. in 2012.

Looking back on my post about "Utopia and the Gun Culture" from January 2011, when Jared Loughner killed and wounded various people in Arizona, I find it still represents my feelings generally. A lot of people have died since then, killed by men with guns. I've already updated that post once before, and I could have done so many more times.

Focusing on guns is not enough. Nothing in isolation is. In addition to calls for better gun control, there have been calls for better mental health services. Certainly, we need better mental health policies, and we need to stop using prisons as our de facto mental institutions, but that's at best vaguely relevant here. Plenty of mass killers wouldn't be caught by even the most intrusive psych nets, and potential killers that were would not necessarily find any treatment helpful. Depending on the scope and nuance of the effort, there could be civil rights violations, false diagnoses, and general panic. (Are you living next door to a potential mass killer? Is your neighbor loud and aggressive? Quiet and introverted? Conspicuously normal? Beware! Better report them to the FBI...)

That said, I expect there are things that could be done, systems that could be improved, creative and useful ideas that could be implemented. I'd actually want to broaden the scope beyond just mental health and toward a strengthening of social services in general. I'm on the board of my local domestic violence/sexual assault crisis center, where demand for our services is up, but we're hurting for resources and have had to curtail and strictly prioritize some of those services. It's a story common among many of our peers not just in the world of anti-violence/abuse programs, but in the nonprofit social service sector as a whole.

What we have is a bit of a gun control problem, a bit more of a social services problem, and a lot of a cultural problem.

One of the best books I've encountered on this subject is James William Gibson's Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America. It's from 1994, but is in some ways even more relevant now.

Notes After a Viewing of Red Dawn (2012)

The question is not whether Red Dawn is a good movie. It is a bad movie. As the crazed ghost of Louis Althusser might say, it has always already been a bad movie. The question is: What kind of bad movie is it?

(Aside: The question I have received most frequently when I've told people I went to see Red Dawn was actually: "Does Chris Hemsworth take off his shirt?" The answer, I'm sorry to say, is no. All of the characters remain pretty scrupulously clothed through the film. The movie's rated PG-13, a designation significant to its predecessor, so all it can do is show a lot of carnage, not carnality. May I suggest Google Images?)

My companion and I found Red Dawn to be an entertaining bad movie. I feel no shame in admitting that the film entertained me; I'm against, in principal, the concept of "guilty pleasures" and am not much interested in shaming anybody for what are superficial, even autonomic, joys. (That doesn't mean we can't examine our joys and pleasures.) No generally-well-intentioned, "diversity"-loving, pinko commie bourgeois armchair lefty like me can go into a movie like Red Dawn and expect to see a nuanced study of geopolitics. I knew what I was in for. I got what I expected: a right-wing action-adventure movie based on a yellow peril premise. Red Dawn is an unironic remake of a 1984 movie predicated on paranoid right-wing fantasies; it's not aspiring to even the most basic Starship Troopers-levels of intertextuality and metacommentary. There's none of the winking at the audiences that fills so many other 1980s remakes and homages (e.g. Expendables 2, which relies on the audience's knowledge of its stars' greatest hits — the only convincing performance in the movie is that of Jean-Claude van Damme, who, apparently overjoyed to be released from the purgatory of straight-to-DVD movies, plays it all for real, and becomes the only element of any interest in the whole thing). The closest Red Dawn comes to acknowledging its position in the cinemasphere happens when it turns the first film's very serious male-bonding moment of drinking deer blood into a practical joke, giving the characters a few rare laughs.

What are we supposed to feel good about in this movie? The 1984 Red Dawn was not even remotely a feel-good movie, but it gave us a space in which to feel proud of an idea of America that could survive even the most devastating attack by the Soviet Union (and its Latin American minions). It made a point of showing concrete objective correlatives for the abstract idea that is "American freedom" — the one that was most impressed on me by my father when we first watched Red Dawn together was the scene where Soviet soldiers talk about going to a gun shop to collect the federal Form 4473s, and using them to track down gun owners. This, to my father and many other people, demonstrated exactly why even the most minimal type of registration of guns is not merely annoying, but a threat to freedom. I vividly remember my father saying, "If the Russians come, we burn those damn forms." Red Dawn was not merely an action movie; it was a documentary.

Utopia and Guns, Again

My post from last year on "Utopia and the Gun Culture" has gotten some attention in the wake of the horrifying shootings in Aurora, Colorado.

Most of what I have to say about guns, I said there. Here, I'll mainly link to a few recent writngs of interest and add a bit of comment at the end.

First, if you're curious to know more about the labyrinthine federal and state laws regarding firearms, the ATF has guides to federal (PDF) and state laws. (For a general overview, there's Wikipedia: federal, state.)

Here's a perfect example of useless utopian thinking: "A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths". Such articles are a waste of time.

For more on the deep issues and why utopian thinking is a waste of time, see Timothy Burke's post "Don't Bring Policy to a Culture Fight".

For a good exploration/demonstration of the difficulties of drawing any useful conclusions from statistics about guns, crime, and violence, see the discussion at Ta-Nehsisi Coates's blog on this post.

For an example of at least an attempt at some conversation without too much stereotyping, name-calling, and knee-jerking, see the comments on this Daily Kos post.

Trayvon Martin (1995-2012)

A black boy was shot dead in Florida.

His killer is known, but the police refused to arrest him.

The police said they had no probable cause to arrest the killer, who claimed self-defense.

The killer was a Neighborhood Watch volunteer. He saw a black boy walking in the rain. He called 911. The dispatcher told him not to follow the boy. But he did. He approached him. They wrestled. Witnesses called 911.

Trayvon Martin was armed with a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea.

A black boy was shot dead in Florida. His killer walks free.

More information:

• The Trayvon Martin Killing, Explained (by Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones)
• What Everyone Should Know About Trayvon Martin (by Jud Legum, ThinkProgress)
• Coverage at The Atlantic. See in particular the posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Re-Nigging on the Promises: #Justice4Trayvon (The Crunk Feminist Collective)
• UPDATE: U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and FDLE to probe Trayvon Martin killing

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Utopia and the Gun Culture

Me and a Gun

It's not Bob Dylan's best by any means, but for quite a while I've had a fondness for his little-known early folk song, "Let Me Die in My Footsteps", which I first heard in a recording by Happy Traum (with Dylan in background) from the Best of Broadside album, a marvelous collection that I gave to my mother as a Christmas present ten years ago.

When I first heard the song, this verse is one that quickly stuck in my mind, and is one that has a habit of floating through my mind's ear with some regularity:

If I had rubies and riches and crowns
I’d buy the whole world and change things around
I’d throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea
For they are mistakes of a past history

It was a constant earwig this weekend after I learned of the massacre in Arizona.

Rambo: Pope of the Church of the Holy Gun

When one of my favorites blogs, The House Next Door, began the Summer of '85 series of posts and asked for submissions, I decided to give it a try.  I looked up a list of movies that had come out that summer to see if any were ones I could write about, and lo and behold, many were major films of my childhood.  (One, Pumping Iron 2, was directed by George Butler, who lives a couple towns over from me and once took my father hunting with Arnold Schwartzenegger, or so my father claimed.)

Though I could have chosen many of the summer of '85's films to write about, one was so obvious I couldn't ignore it -- Rambo: First Blood Part II. I emailed House editor Keith Uhlich, and he said go for it.

I thought I might write 800 words or so. It got a bit longer than that. Despite the current length, the essay feels bare bones to me -- there's a lot more to say about Reagan and Rambo, about gender and masculinity, and about all four Rambo films together, because they're each quite different (First Blood is I think unquestionably the best film in terms of what most reasonable people think of as quality, and it remains utterly heartbreaking for me every time I watch it, but parts II and III are much more enjoyable, since they're closer to being superhero epics. The recent fourth part, just called Rambo, I've only watched once so far, but it didn't really do much for me -- Rambo beyond the 1980s just seems ... sad. Son of Rambow accomplished more.)

It's a thrill to see my byline on a site I read all the time and respect immensely, and I'm particularly pleased that I could appear there with this essay, which for obvious reasons for anybody who reads it means a lot to me -- it's the most personal thing I've published since the first Strange Horizons column I wrote after my father's death, a column that is also about my father and film, and mentions Rambo.

Guns, Feminism, Patriarchy, and Me

I have a new column up at Strange Horizons, "Patriarchy Studies".

There was a bunch of stuff I wanted to put into the column, but decided to save most of it for future ones, since this one was having a hard enough time cohering as it was.  And some things might have been good to have there, but seemed distracting -- for instance, I had a long footnote about the complex relationship of Isaac Asimov and feminism, but cut it out because it was tangential to the direction I was trying to go in (suffice it to say, if you're curious about the complexities, be sure to read The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction and The Secret Feminist Cabal).

Mostly, I just wanted to bring Sally Boland's name out to the public beyond our university, because she was awesome.  I knew her at the end of her life, but her influence on me was primarily through the people for whom she was a colleague and mentor, many of whom became my mentors and colleagues.  I have Sally's copy of Adrienne Rich's On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, and it's a book I treasure.

Cat and Finch

Ms. P. Martha Moog thought about reading Finch, but decided against it when she discovered that the eponymous protagonist is not, in fact, a delectable bird. She very much liked the gun on the cover, though, and so dragged the book and one of our home decorations over the couch to spend some time with them. (She fancies herself a gun moll, I'm afraid. I keep having to confiscate her collection of Derringers.)

Eric Schaller and the Art of Illustrating VanderMeer

New Hampshire is a small state, so we only have a few daily newspapers. We're most notorious for the Union Leader, but the state paper that's won a Pulitzer (among other awards) is the Concord Monitor.

And today the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit that I helped put together at Plymouth State University got a big feature story in the Monitor, with a particular focus on New Hampshire's own Eric Schaller.

The web version has the full text, but I was blown away when I opened up the paper and saw it was almost the entire front page of the arts section:

And just a reminder that Jeff and Eric will both be in Plymouth on the evening of November 23 for a reading and discussion. Huge thanks to David Beronä and Jennifer Green at Plymouth State for their work in putting the exhibit together, and special thanks to the Public Relations department at the University as well for helping it continue to get great coverage.

And if you haven't yet bought Booklife or Finch, the only acceptable excuse around these here parts is, "I'm waiting to buy them at one of Jeff's events so he'll sign them for me and they can then become treasured family heirlooms." (Except that's not an excuse, either, because you need reading copies, copies you don't mind getting all grimy on the subway or warped from reading in the bathtub. And you need copies to give away to people, because you're going to read both books and want to share them, but you're not going to want to give away your own copies. So stock up while supplies last. Remember what happened to military-style rifles when President Obama got elected? Who were the happy people then? People who had ten WASR AK-47s that they'd only paid $350 for back when demand was low. Sure, their friends said, "Why do you need ten of those damn things?! How many can you shoot at once?!?" Well, where are those friends now? That's right, mewling and puking in the gutter. And you know what? It's going to happen soon with Jeff's books. Trust me. His books are assault weapons. High-end ones, not crappy WASR AKs. And not as heavy, regulated, or expensive. At least as much bang for the buck, I guarantee you. Easier to carry onto airplanes, too. Really, in almost every way imaginable, Jeff's books are better than assault weapons. You have no excuse not to hoard them. And now that I've given you your free advice for the evening, it's time for me to go watch Project Runway...)

Blown Away: American Women and Guns by Caitlin Kelly

It's rare to find a book about guns in the U.S. that doesn't come across as hysterical -- either the hysteria of someone seemingly determined to live up to every possible stereotype of a "gun nut" or the hysteria of someone seemingly determined to live up to every possible stereotype of an out-of-touch wussy liberal. Caitlin Kelly's Blown Away (excerpts available here) doesn't quite live up to the claims on its front cover -- "an unbiased exploration of the right to bear arms" -- but it is certainly the most even-handed and rational book about guns and American gun culture that I've encountered.

Though Blown Away doesn't seem unbiased to me -- the tilt is definitely in favor of people's right to have access to guns -- I'm not sure what "unbiased" really would look like, or what value it would serve. What I want is for a writer to play fair, to be aware of complexities, to avoid caricaturing differing viewpoints, and Kelly does that quite well. What makes her book important, though, is not just that it doesn't seem to be written by a person with an axe to grind, but that it gives a vivid and multifaceted perspective on the intersections of violence, gender, race, class, and culture, and it does so through the testimonies of people from all around the country, of all sorts of different backgrounds, and adds context to these testimonies with a wealth of statistics. Though Kelly offers some ideas in the final chapter for what to do about problems of violence against women in the U.S., her book is at its best when it is posing questions rather than answers, because it would require many more books and much longer conversations to develop real answers to the thorniest, knottiest questions.

Kelly's statistics are what stood out to me at first -- over 200 million guns in private, legal ownership in the U.S.; 11 to 17 million guns owned by women; hundreds of thousands of women the victims of rape and sexual assault each year (and rape is the most underreported crime in the country); an estimated 17.7 million women the survivors of rape or attempted rape -- 1 out of every 5 American women; 3 out of 4 American women the victims of crime at least once in their lives; 29% of rapists armed; 17,424 Americans killed by guns in 2001 (and 43,501 in motor vehicle deaths); $21 billion spent annually to treat gunshot victims; $126,620,000 raised from federal excise taxes on long guns and ammo in 1998 and another $35,528,000 raised from an excise tax on handguns...

Blown Away starts from these statistics and then expands their context with the stories of women who have chosen or not chosen to arm themselves (including in the past -- I particularly liked the second chapter, on the history of women and guns in the U.S.), women who have suffered violence of all sorts, women who have differing views of guns, gun ownership, and violence because of their race, class, sexuality, or occupation. The writing is sometimes repetitive, some sections are far more fleshed out than others, but the overall picture is what matters, because Kelly tries to give as diverse and complex a portrait of the American landscape as she could gain access to.

My own biases may have colored some of my reading of the book -- I'm sure people who are strongly pro- or anti-gun would read it differently than I. I grew up surrounded by guns of all sorts, from Civil War antiques to military machineguns, and because they were always around, they never possessed any mystique for me. The only time I really much enjoyed the things was the day after Halloween each year when my father and I would blast our pumpkins with his pistol-grip shotgun. If ever a person was raised in an environment to become a gun nut, it was me; and yet I never had the inclination. My adolescent rebellion, such as it was, was to begin to think Ronald Reagan might be something less than holy, and I did my best to become a radical leftist, then, with time, settled into my current state of boring bourgeois liberalism.

Never, though, did I take up the anti-gun cause, because having lived amidst guns and gun culture for so long, staunchly anti-gun views seemed to me as ignorant and ridiculous as the often macho and unreasonable views of the radical pro-gunners. I couldn't ever support the NRA because of their close ties to the worst right-wing elements in the U.S. (though I still have my life membership, given to me in lieu of a baptism -- I expect I'm one of the only people ever to have been simultaneously a member of the NRA and a contributor to the War Resisters League), but it wasn't until I encountered Blown Away that I found a perspective that seemed to fit with what I know of the world, and what I know is that the two sides, pro- and anti-gun, demonize each other to no good effect except to make our laws more and more incoherent and irrational, and to distract the conversation away from the deep and complex causes of violence within our culture.