Our romance with guns runs deep

by **NewsBOT** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 1:50 pm

Our romance with guns runs deep

"Bang, Bang, you're dead!" How old was I when I called that out on Rutherford Avenue in Trenton in the late 1930s?

We were playing "guns." One side would hide and the other kids would look for him. If, before being discovered, I could jump out and point my Roy Rogers cowboy six-shooter at him and say "Bang, Bang, you're dead," I had killed him. And he had fall down, roll over, play dead.

Of course our models were the 1930s and 1940s cowboy movies where the heroes solved most of their problems by fist fights, but always carried holstered pistols and fired them in those odd encounters where blood was never spilled, where bad guys just fell off their horses or, clutching their breasts, fell over "dead" with not a speck of blood in sight. And, of course, the Lone Ranger never killed anyone. He just shot the guns out of their hands.

But we were being conditioned to love guns, see them as equalizers, the ultimate solution to a quarrel, never dealing with the reality that living beings on the screen were being "killed" for our entertainment.

Then in "The Magnificent Seven" (1972), where, for the first time, we saw bullets going into the man's chest and bursting out his back in a splash of gore, the public greeted this not as a horror, but as a thrill.

Since then the media audience has been conditioned to visualize the hand gun as an extension of the human hand. The gun is the plot solution. Settle quarrels with shootouts.

This summer I wept reading the last chapter of Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. Following the bizarre code of a "gentleman's honor," Hamilton felt obliged to accept a challenge from Aaron Burr. Like his eldest son before him, Hamilton was fatally wounded on the dueling ground in Weehawken. Someone had to die to prove a point.

In the past few weeks former football player Steve McNair's mistress bought a gun to terminate their relationship and shot them both. In Irvington an unknown person or persons "shooting like cowboys and Indians in broad daylight" shot a 10-year-old girl. In a Jersey City neighborhood where I have often biked and walked, Detective Marc Dinardo died from a shotgun blast fired by a career criminal whom he had arrested for illegal gun possession years before.

Last week the Senate narrowly defeated an amendment to the military budget that would have allowed gun owners licensed in one state to carry their concealed weapons wherever they go. At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, a senator asked her whether a citizen has a right to defend himself; his unspoken premise was that every citizen has an unquestioned right to own a gun.

Yes, I know the gun, though rarely, has a place. Our family has a gun, a 45 cal. army pistol, almost a hundred years old. My father used it when he won the Distinguished Service Cross by single-handedly wiping out a German machine gun nest during World War I. At home, my father never displayed the gun, never bragged that he had killed, and told the story only to his sons.

Today America shows no signs of outgrowing its suicidal gun-loving mentality. In street gangs, the gun, not the high school or college diploma, has become the emblem of maturity. But the spectacular funeral for Detective Denardo, with its pipes and drums and thousands of marchers and mourners paying tribute, was many things: a cry of grief, love, and compassion for a heroic young man and his family; an act of faith in his resurrection; and a statement about the place of guns in our society, which locally, becomes more perilous by the day.

Only a vast, grass-roots educational and moral effort could overcome this plague. Otherwise, we are collectively putting the gun to our heads.