Guns Are Beautiful [View all]

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To stop gun violence, we need to stop fetishizing guns

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The AR-15 rifle is an object of undeniable, fascinating beauty. Force glows from its perfect black frame. Its substantial weight is more than physical; it's emotional, historical. Built in the same factory as Remington, which has been building rifles for nearly two hundred years, the Bushmaster is a quintessentially American object. Other countries tend to treat guns as tools, which policy can deal with on the level of their functionality. In America, guns are works of art. They must be treated as such.

In the crisis of conscience brought on by Newtown, many people who should have known better resumed the pathetic mid-nineties debate about the culture of violence in America. The New York Times brought up the (tepid, insubstantial) connection between video games and gun manufacturers. President Obama chimed in his support a week after the massacre. So did representatives of the NRA. They never quote any studies, for the simple reason that no serious studies support them. Young men in South Korea and in Canada play more violent games than American kids and they commit nowhere near the same num-ber of gun murders. In the largest study of the correlation between movie violence and real violence, conducted at Berkeley in 2007, the researchers found no causal link between violent movies and violence on the streets. But what they did find was that violent movies actually led to a decrease in the number of violent crimes committed nationally on the days they were shown. Only vapid, ahistorical understandings of culture believe that the culture of our own period is uniquely violent, anyway. Shakespeare competed with bearbaiting and public hangings for entertainments; King Lear has an onstage eye-gouging; Titus Andronicus reenacts cannibalism. The culture of violence is general; it belongs to all times and all places. But the culture of the gun is uniquely American and of the moment.

Guns are one of the primary avenues by which ordinary Americans experience beauty. Nobody wants to recognize this fact. Why else would Instagram be loaded on Christmas Day with people in their Christmas-morning jammies showing off the semiautomatic rifles Santa left under the tree? Why else would there be PinkGun.com (its motto: Just because it's concealed doesn't mean it has to be ugly)?

Guns have replaced cars as the American machinery fantasy of choice. Just as there is no sensible reason for owning a car with 1,001 horsepower and a top speed of 253 mph, as Jay-Z does, even the most casual examination of a gun like the AR-15 reveals its uselessness in the real world, its status as a fetish object. The .223 ammunition that Adam Lanza used to murder children isn't powerful enough to hunt deer, one reason it's illegal for hunting in some states, for humane considerations. Protection in the home? Houses with guns in them are statistically far less safe than houses without guns. As a safeguard against a tyrannical government? How long do you think the best armed militia would last against a single company of Marines?

http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/guns-are-beautiful-0313#ixzz2KnQHUZ7H