Guns (Kindle Single)

by Stephen King

I. The Shake

Twenty-second, it happens again and the whole thing starts over. That’s how it shakes out.

II. Rage

Getting It On concerned a troubled boy named Charlie Decker with a domineering father, a load of adolescent angst, and a fixation on Ted Jones, the school’s most popular boy. Charlie takes a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher, and holds his class hostage.

Ten years later, after the first half-dozen of my books had become bestsellers, I revisited Getting It On, rewrote it, and submitted it to my paperback publisher under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. It was published as Rage, sold a few thousand copies, and disappeared from view. Or so I thought.

According to The Copycat Effect, written by Loren Coleman (Simon and Schuster, 2004), I also apologized for writing Rage. No, sir, no ma’am, I never did and never would.

Charlie had to go. He was dangerous. And in more ways than one.

III. Drunks in a Barroom

American politics has managed to catch itself in one of those fiendish Chinese finger pullers we used to buy in the dime store when we were kids, and as a result, two muscular and capable hands can do no work.

On second thought, forget the finger pullers. We’re like drunks in a barroom. No one’s listening because everyone is too busy thinking about what they’re going to say next, and absolutely prove that the current speaker is so full of shit he squeaks.

The death toll at the Sandy Hook school was 26, and I mourn every one of them, but the number of homicides in Chicago last year exceeded 500. That’s 200 more than the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan during the same period. And let’s remember that our troops volunteered to go in harm’s way. Their bodies come home to parades and flag-draped coffins. The dead of Chicago — 107 of them children, some just waiting to get on the school bus — don’t get the hero treatment, but they are just as dead. Gun control would do little to change that situation, because the guns are already out there and the great majority of them are being bought, sold, and carried illegally.

The starry blue dome marking the old Colt factory is a city landmark for good reason.

IV. Culture of Violence

Let me be frank: The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.

Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.

Americans have very little interest in entertainment featuring gunplay. In the 1980s, filmmakers even introduced a new ratings category, PG-13, to protect younger children from graphic violence.

The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America’s propaganda-savvy gun-pimps. It’s believed by people who don’t read novels, play video games, or go to many movies. People actually in touch with the culture understand that what Americans really want (besides knowing all about Princess Kate’s pregnancy) is The Lion King on Broadway, a foul-talking stuffed toy named Ted at the movies, Two and a Half Men on TV, Words with Friends on their iPads, and Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles. To claim that America’s “culture of violence” is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.

V. From My Cold Dead Hands

I guess the question is, how paranoid do you want to be? How many guns does it take to make you feel safe? And how do you simultaneously keep them loaded and close at hand, but still out of reach of your inquisitive children or grandchildren? Are you sure you wouldn’t do better with a really good burglar alarm? It’s true you have to remember to set the darn thing before you go to bed, but think of this — if you happened to mistake your wife or live-in partner for a crazed drug addict, you couldn’t shoot her with a burglar alarm.

These guys and gals actually believe that dictatorship will follow disarmament, with tanks in the streets of Topeka and armed security guards in metro airports. (Oops, forgot — we already have those, and most gun advocates are in favor.) “Take away the people’s right to bear arms and totalitarianism follows!” these Jeremiahs cry. “Look what happened in Germany!”

By 1938, when Hitler was riding high, those laws were pretty much the same as American gun laws today (although I will admit American gun laws vary wildly from state to state): you needed a permit to acquire and carry a handgun, but you could have as many rifles as you wanted. Unless you were a Jew, of course, but that was the annoying thing about the Nazis, wasn’t it? They killed lots of Jews, and they didn’t need restrictive gun legislation to do it; it was the government that armed the killers.

No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten rounds. If you can’t kill a home invader (or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting range.