A Great Gun Story From Joyce Carol Oates
If you
want to read a remarkable piece of writing which really captures what guns are
all about, see if you can pick up a
collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless, and read ‘Gunlove,’
which I read again last night. If there’s another piece of fiction out there
which brought home to me why guns are such a problematic issue in American
life, I haven’t seen it yet. And when all is really said and done, the ability
of someone with this writer’s remarkable talents to capture the most profound dimensions
of what guns represent, goes far beyond what we get from even the most
authoritative scholarly research.
The
story is narrated in first-person by a young woman who is recalling certain
events and people over the course of her life, all of which involve the use of
guns. A gun is brandished, a guns is used for self-defense, a gun is played
with, a gun is taken to a shooting range, a gun is carried around for
protection, a gun figures in a suicide or maybe it was an accident. In other
words, every vignette which together creates the story’s text, gives us a quick
portrait of all the different ways that Americans think about using guns.
And then
there are the guns themselves, described and even named: Bauer 25-caliber
pocket pistol, 12-gauge Remington shotgun, a Saturday-night special Arcadia, a
Colt 45-caliber Army gun, a Winchester 22-caliber rifle, a Sterling pistol, a
44-magnum, a Colt Detective Special, even a Glock! And the fact that the Glock
is actually an AMT pistol makes the whole thing even better because the
ditz-brain narrator of this story, who spent her college years at Vassar continuously
stoned and/or high, really didn’t know one gun from another. Which is exactly
the point. It doesn’t really matter which gun is which.
These
guns float through the life of the story’s narrator in the same quick and easy
way that her relatives, friends and lovers come and go. At one point, she
appears to be getting serious about shooting – goes to a shooting range in
Staten Island but finds it difficult to actually pull the trigger and hit the
target downrange. On the other hand, she has no trouble buying at last four
different oils and cleaning fluids, cleaning patches and rags, various gunsmith
tools and other crap. She easily spends a hundred bucks or more on this stuff,
takes it back to her apartment, but never actually cleans her gun. She’s the
type of customer that the gun business loves.
At the
end of the story, she meets up with a sometime lover who gives her a remembrance
gift because after a final embrace (in the middle of Central Park, no less)
he’s evidently going to clear out of town. She goes back to her apartment,
unwraps the package and of course it’s a gun – a 9mm Glock. She thinks for a
minute about possibly giving it up but she can’t. She ‘loves’ her gun.
Of
course the gun which she loves isn’t a Glock at all. She describes it as having
a stainless steel frame but Glock never produced any guns except with polymer
frames. So she has absolutely no idea what she is talking about but she’ll
never get rid of this gun. Perfect.
By the
end of this story, what you come to understand is that this ditz-brain has
absolutely no idea why she loves her guns. But one reason for her obsessive gun
infatuation which is never mentioned is any concern for her 2nd-Amendment
‘rights.’ She couldn’t care less about the 2nd Amendment.
And here’s the dirty, little secret about guns: Nobody else cares about the 2nd Amendment. Gun owners will tell you in no uncertain terms that they support the 2nd Amendment because otherwise they might have to admit that their decision to own this lethal consumer product has nothing to do with any kind of reality or necessity at all. They love their guns because guns are fun. And if you don’t believe me, just read this penetrating story by Joyce Carol Oates.
Download and read the story here.
