I posted this .gif on Twitter because it perfectly captures something we hear whenever the subject of guns and ‘murka and murkan guns comes up.
That’s from one of the many hilarious dream sequences in A Christmas Story, and it’s worth re-watching the entire scene from the weird and wonderful mind of Jean Shepherd (this version has the DVD commentary with, I think, Darren McGavin and director Bob Clark):
(Side note: Comment threads on anything involving guns can quickly get overheated, so if you’d like an alternative here, feel free to discuss how amazingly perfect McGavin and Melinda Dillon were in that movie.)
It’s a funny scene for what it is — a child’s childish fantasy of the swaggering hero he wishes/imagines he will be transformed into thanks to the purchase of a product (that product being, of course, an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock).
But it’s not so funny when alleged adults — people of the legal age to be considered “grown-ups” — repeat this exact fantasy as the basis for public policy or the lack thereof.
And that’s what happens every time anyone, anywhere in America tries to discuss our epidemic of gun violence, which has claimed more American lives in my lifetime than have been lost in all the wars ever fought by this country. Some variation of this fantasy will be invoked, directly or indirectly, as the reason why our chaotic, lethal, more-guns-than-people status quo is the only acceptable way to live.
Quite often, this fantasy is invoked as an accusation and almost a threat. You dirty hippies think there ought to be some kind of regulation or insurance requirement for gun owners? Then you deserve what’s coming to you and your defenseless family when Black Bart and his gang show up at your door.
Usually, of course, this invocation of the fantasy doesn’t directly mention A Christmas Story, and thus doesn’t specify that the “bad guy with a gun” will be named Bart.
But in almost every variation of this fantasy, that bad guy is still definitely black. And that’s a big part of why any meaningful conversation about guns is so difficult to achieve — because much of what we’re really talking about isn’t about guns at all.
It’s tempting, when I hear someone invoking this fantasy to defend unregulated gun ownership, or when they allude to it to hypothetically threaten my family, to respond to them the same way everyone does to little Ralphie: “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” That’s certainly what such childish fantasists deserve.
But I like to think that maybe it’s still possible, maybe someday, to achieve a meaningful conversation about guns among the 90 percent or so of Americans — probably including the less-vocal majority of gun-owners — who aren’t racist ammosexual fantasists.
I sometimes have this fantasy of organizing weekend hunting trips that would bring together pro-gun politicians with urban clergy, police, and mayors. That setting, I think, might create a space where they could discuss the very different meanings of that word “gun” in those very different settings. It might give those pastors and cops and mayors a chance to be believed when they repeat that they really don’t want to confiscate every deer hunter’s rifle in rural America — they just want to de-escalate the arms race on their streets. (And, while I wouldn’t say this outright, I also think providing the gun guys a “home turf” advantage in which they’d get to offer advice and demonstrate their experience might stroke their fragile masculinity enough to enable them to actually listen for a change.)
That conversation shouldn’t be impossible. Right now it seems to be, because every attempt to have that conversation gets drowned out by a thousand little Ralphies fantasizing that they can purchase a product that will transform them into the manly men they’re afraid they’ll never be.
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