January 31st, 2013
Forget the Obama interview–go straight to Walter Kirn’s piece on guns. It’s a brilliant piece of writing:
I also know the opposite feeling, of outmanning someone else, because I pulled a gun on a guy once. It happened outside of the building where I live in downtown Livingston, Montana, a town of 7,000 that I moved to from New York City 23 years ago, back when New York was still considered dangerous. I was in the cab of my Ford pickup after a trip to a mini-storage locker with my two children, who were nine and six. Right across the street was the Mint Bar, a cavernous old brick hideout for midday tipplers in front of which was standing a lean young man who’d glared at me with a manic, feral focus the moment I’d parked and opened the truck door. He seemed high, not just drunk, with that toxic aura of meth, and when our eyes met, he bared his teeth and hissed that he was going to kill me, that I was dead, shifting his weight toward the curb at the same time. Somehow my kids didn’t hear him as they climbed out, nor did they see my reaction to his threat: I opened the glove compartment and removed a long-barreled .22 target pistol that was there by chance, as part of the move. Its rubber grip met my hand and melded with it in a smooth, reflexive motion. I held the gun across my belt line, displaying its silver profile as I turned. The scary young man was about ten yards away by then, but when he saw the gun, his body rocked backward as though in a cartoon. I watched his flushed face drain pale as he backed off, one shoe untied and dragging a long, loose lace. He vanished around the bar’s corner, a full retreat that left me presiding over a total victory that no one, because the street was empty, had witnessed.
A single win is not a streak. It may, in fact, be a basis for self-delusion. Statistics on the dangers guns pose to the health of their owners and those who live with them suggest that I’d be safer selling my guns than reserving them for Tombstone II. Trouble is, in an armed showdown, statistics tend to lose. In those who’ve learned to imagine assailants everywhere and may even have faced a real assailant, guns encourage a sense of personal exceptionalism. It’s the essence of their magnetism. Firearms exist to manage situations where rationality has failed, so thinking rationally about them can be hard.
Kirn’s stuff is so good right now that he might resurrect TNR all on his own.
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Jonathan, brother, this is how Yankees talk about guns. The stories always involve a charming old single-shot bird shotgun great-grandpappy kept in his Vermont fishing cabin. Southerners, and our more-like minded brothers and sisters of the rocky mountain states, live an understanding of the psychology Mr. Kirn tries to describe that is much lighter on nostalgia and much heavier on reality.
If I might, I think I can tie this into your expertise on demographics…
The typical American Idol-viewing American, born after 1945, and I will assert large majority swathes of those a part of the cultural northeast, can be nearly instantly identified by a posture that self-reassures the United States is somehow exempt from world history. A world history, I should point out, that is nearly universal in its narrative: mass starvation, oppression, conscription, or exploitation of the peasant classes. It could never happen here. not in America. Not now. Not ever.
When it comes to our gentle friends from up north, this vacation from history has manifested itself most acutely in the personal assertion among young couples that future soldiers, taxpayers, inventors, caregivers, farmers, and teachers (babies) just really aren’t worth the time they take away from fitness vacations to the Poconos or wine tastings in Napa.
So too this mindset carries over into guns and, since Green Mountain Grandpappy never had an AR-15 at his fishing lodge, especially so-called “assault weapons.” Who needs them ?? The Yankee mind wanders and settles where it usually does when it comes to rural southerners: condescending. They (we) must have some deep-seeded insecurities about personal empowerment, or must want to feel knit together with like-minded hicks in the face of mass persecution, or both.
Admiral Yamamoto, though an enemy, was a titan of wisdom the more you read from him and about him. He is often quoted as discouraging Emperor Hirohito of a ground invasion of California or Oregon because “there would be a gun behind every blade of grass.” This is actually a misquote because the Admiral actually said “rifle” instead of “gun.” Rifles (“assault” if you must call them that) are the backbone of our well-regulated citizen militia. We used rifles to throw off the red-coats twice, intimidate the Japanese once, and only an American Idol historian could dismiss the possibility another invader might one day need to be thrown off again. AR-15’s (or AR-10’s if you eat your Wheaties) are the cornerstone of this type of widespread citizen preparedness.
Stick a fork in the idea Americans might one day need to resist a tyrannical federal government. It’s not a madman’s notion like Piers Morgan would persuade us, but forget about that for now.
Currently-embattled Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, and the President who nominated him, have openly called on the United States to disarm most or all of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. Only someone who barely glossed over World War I in high school history could cherish the idea of going back to purely conventional warfare. But let’s say the world, or at least the U.S., is taken back to that pre-Manhattan-Project world. Is it so far-fetched to think my sons, or maybe my great-great grandsons, might have to discourage or resist a foreign invader.
So, blue staters like Mr. Kirn (has become?) are leading the charge, through personal choice and public debate, to convince the rest of us babies and assault rifles aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Frankly, they’re both quite unnecessary.
Blame reconstruction, missing teeth, or NASCAR, but I choose not to feign vacation from the evils and oppression that line the pages of my history books. I choose to stand with the millions of my countrymen; whose familial and cultural choice to peacefully maintain and possess assault rifles helps protect our women and children from being thrust back into their normal role in the history book: victim statistic.
Sam B February 3, 2013 at 11:52 pm
“Kirn’s stuff is so good right now…”
Oh dear lord, get some standards! You mean, as good as:
“Trouble is, in an armed showdown, statistics tend to lose.”
This is a sentence without meaning.
Try, “Trouble is, when you mistakenly shoot your own daughter in the face and kill her, goofy macho rhetoric tends to seem pretty stupid.”
It’s an equally unfair sentence, but it’s more likely to apply to Mr Kirn than his adolescent “armed showdown” fantasy.
How do we know? Oh yeah! STATISTICS! But of course they lose in armed showdowns. Unh, whatever.