“I have never owned a gun.”
Paul Auster begins this…not quite polemic…with a story of being given a toy six shooter and watching tv and doing the kinds of things kids did (especially boys) in the US for the longest of times. I imagine it still happens, but not as much. Later he describes being involved in camp or 4-H level shooting competitions. This is a pretty regular way that a lot of American people have guns in their lives in early years. The most prominent secondary way would be through hunting, which Paul Auster happened to not be involved in as a child. At some point, he mentions, he stopped shooting anything or anywhere. He later realized there was some kind omerta in his family regarding his grandfather’s death. He recalls being told three distinct stories of his early death, none much alike, and when he asked his siblings and cousins about it, they all told different versions of the same stories. It’s only years later that he learned, quite by accident, that one day his grandmother shot and killed his grandmother, and basically it was never spoken of again.
From there, he talks about meeting a man when they were both in the merchant marines who confessed to dark and violent thoughts, entrenched racism, and admitted to sometimes killing animals. He only knew him briefly, but had been shocked by how normal the guy had seemed.
It’s this image that he spends the most of the rest of the book with, not the crazed psychopaths that mass murderers appear to be when they go on killing sprees, but the otherwise not crazed psychopaths they seem be when they’re not. And he makes the point of course, that lots of people harbor lots of thoughts that they never act on. This point of course is salient to the question of what kinds of access are we providing.
The essay avoids falling into familiar tropes. It’s not an anti-gun rant, and I imagine not because Paul Auster has mixed feelings about guns, but because Auster is trying to get at what he thinks is the complicating factors of the problem, that we have a cultural problem, and one that can’t be solved purely with legal, extralegal, or judicial means. He suggests the only way to resolve the situation is through a national coming to terms with what got us here, and of course, they doesn’t seem especially likely, especially given the way the gun debate has become so entrenched and politicized. I recall a moment where I made a flippant remark about guns in the presence of someone with more conservative that he was either boiling with rage and trying to contain it or was on the verge of tears, either reaction being not conducive to rational discourse.
The book is about recognizing the complexity of the problem and reckoning with that enormity, rather than simple solutions.
For me, it’s a good primer on the longview of the cultural problem. For more, I would recommend Richard Slotkin’s three volume history: Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation; Richard Drinnon’s Facing West; and Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth.