Gilbert and His Guns

I don’t know how tuned in the general public is with pro basketball player Gilbert Arenas’s recent gun troubles, but in the world of sports its been the top story in recent weeks. Given the fact that no guns were actually fired and nobody was injured, in the end, it is much ado about nothing, although Arenas has pleaded guilty to felony gun possession. And, it is yet another example of a country with an unhealthy obsession with guns.

Of all the major countries in the world we are the only one who’s origin is directly tied to the gun. We are the new kid on the block. The other major nations of the world came into being well before the invention of the firearm. Battling with stones, clubs, swords, spears, and lances offered a different kind of etiquette, it made battle personal and it made your opponent human. During the heat of battle you had to look into the enemies eyes and perhaps feel the heat of his breath and hear the anguish of his pain. It required a lot of time and energy to kill your enemy. With the advent of the bow and arrow, the precursor to the gun, ranged attacking changed the dynamic of the battlefield. The living, breathing, enemy was reduced to a dehumanized target. Yet the bow, due to it’s lack of high volume ammunition, was only a supplement to the mainstay of hand to hand combat.

The creation of the modern firearm was a quantum leap. If you had the means to produce metal and powder you had the means to produce firearms and ammunition. The courage that was required to fight mano y mano on the battlefield was no longer required. Where a battle could be turned on the skill and courage of the warrior, now it was more about remote military strategist sending wave after wave of soldiers into hails of bullets. The warrior was now just cannon fodder. Warriors were no longer a special class, they were disposable conscripts. In the 21st century soldiers no longer fight soldiers. Now they are trained to fight their own protesting citizens, or citizens of other nations who have taken up arms to fight what they perceive as invading organized armies. Outside of organized armies the firearm has allowed the flourishing of mercenary forces, urban gangs, drug cartels, and provincial warlords.

It wasn’t the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that enabled us to dominate North America, it was the firearm. The gun was the enduring symbol of Manifest Destiny. Go West Young Man, and bring plenty of guns. It is our period of romance and adventure. Fighting on the frontier, it was our guns vs. the indigenous people’s bows and arrow. When the U.S. army took Los Angeles from Mexico, the Mexican army fought on horseback with lances.

Our constitution allows every citizen the right to bear arms, and unlike being in the army where your firearm is mandatory, citizens want to have guns because citizens want to be badasses. The spirit of the warrior has been replaced by the phony bravado of the gun. We live in the era of Columbine. Even our children are capable of massacres. Every disgruntled worker is a potential mass murderer. Even our higher institutions of learning are not immune as we saw decades ago at the University of Texas and more recently at Virginia Tech.

It is arguable that guns, like tobacco, are a health hazard, but we can’t do to guns what we have done to tobacco. Gun ownership is protected. Tobacco was once sexy, so sexy it was a key ingredient in advertising and movies. We’ll probably never get guns out of the movies, because violence sells. While watching the NFL playoffs today the two movies I saw advertised starring the big names of John Travolta, and Mel Gibson, were all basically films about violence with guns being featured prominently. These guys are made men in Hollywood yet they still are relying on the crutch of the gun to churn out hit movies. You probably can’t even be an actor today unless you have had gun training since it seems to be the most used prop. How many actors and directors owe their careers to the gun? Where would Scorcese and DeNiro be without the gun? How popular would Clint Eastwood be today without Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name? Denzel Washington plays a violent character in The Book of Eli but his most popular role in recent memory was playing the dirty, gun toting cop, in Training Day. Chow Yun Fat gained his fame doing ballet like gunfights in John Woo’s Hong Kong shoot em ups. George Lucas and Harrison Ford jumped started their careers with the gun toting characters in Star Wars, a spaceman shoot em up, and Raiders of the Lost Ark with the gun toting adventurer/professor Indiana Jones. Megastar Will Smith built his career on Michael Bay’s Bad Boys movies. Clive Owen first starting getting noticed after playing a government assassin in the Bourne Identity, which of course stars a gun toting Matt Damon. What would Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather and Apocalypse Now be without guns? Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone is transformed in an instant from mild mannered college boy to violent Mafia Don by shooting two of his father’s enemies at point blank range in a public restaurant. Who can forget Mo Green getting it right in the eye?

I love movies but I really I’m getting tired of movies with guns. Two of my favorite actors are Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and part of the reason is they both have been making movies for decades yet it is hard to picture them with guns in their hands. The roles they are most known for have nothing to do with guns. It’s not like guns can not play a dramatic role in a film, I just think that the use has become exploitive. My first ever significant moment while watching a movie is the first time I saw West Side Story when Tony gets shot and a crying Natalie Wood as Maria picks up the gun and points it at all the gang members, uttering the words, “…now I have hate too!” Even though I was just a kid it was a very powerful moment for me and it was just one gun and one gunshot. The irony is the two warring gangs, at their war council, agreed not to use guns and to fight like warriors, hand to hand, up close and personal. The agreement is violated which leads to the shooting of Tony, who is unarmed and gets shot in the back. Shooting someone in the back is the ultimate coward move. In many ways, West Side Story was way ahead of its time in its views on guns and violence. It may well be the first major anti gun movie made in Hollywood.

It is not easy to not be seduced by guns in our culture. I played guns and robbers and loved watching violent gun play in movies when I was a kid. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I used to love drawing guns. One of the first things I ever saved up money to buy was a blank gun that looked like a real .38 special, it was plastic but it had a metal revolver. I was very proud of that gun. In my neighborhood, every year the most coveted item was a bb gun. We used to wear thick jackets and put on football helmets and have bb gun shoot outs in the neighborhood. My dad kept his hunting rifles in his bedroom closet and every now and then my brothers and I would go into the closet to look at them, to see the real thing. BB guns were one thing but a real gun was cold and intimidating.

My first experience shooting a real gun was completely negative. On a hunting trip with my Dad at about age 10 I shot my father’s shotgun. Being a naïve kid who had only seen guns shot in movies I held the butt of the gun on my bicep instead of my shoulder just like they do in the movies. The kick of the shotgun bucked against my bicep so hard it caused me to fall to the ground writhing in pain and shedding buckets of tears. My dad thought it was funny. I didn’t. I was done for the day and vowed I would never go hunting again. I didn’t touch a gun again until I went on a four day backpacking trip in the San Gabriel mountains when I was in my mid twenties. I borrowed my Dad’s ancient Winchester .22 rifle. I told people I was taking it for protection but that was basically a line of BS. I was really taking it because I romanticized myself as being a frontiersman in the wilderness. During the hunting trip I only used the rifle once, to shoot at a quail. To my shock and amazement I actually hit the darn thing. I am a horrible shot and never ever expected to hit the bird but I did and I felt terrible. My buddy Craig Catimon, my partner on the trip, spent an hour consoling me.

By the time I was in my twenties I had lost my naivete about guns and gun violence, although I still enjoyed them as part of popular entertainment. One of my favorite comics as an adult was the 1990 comic Hard Boiled by Geoff Darrow and Frank Miller. The violence in Miller/Darrow’s comic was so over the top there was no way it could taken seriously. It was black comedy, it was a darkly satirical statement against guns and violence. Nixon, the violent protagonist of the ultra violent world of Hard Boiled is an android death machine in the disguise of a tax collector who is married and has a family. Nixon malfunctions and goes on a killing spree. Miller’s writing is thin, it is Darrow’s incredibly detailed graphics that bring the story home.

This was where I had gravitated to in terms of my view of guns. In the 80’s I witnessed the transformation of South Central LA as a place where I used to go to visit relatives and play on front lawns to a shooting gallery like war zone. I was active in a college groups working with refugees from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Lebanon and experienced first hand accounts of the gun violence happening in those countries. It brought back memories I had as a child of the gun violence in the 60’s assassinations of Civil Rights leaders, the Kennedy’s, and the National Guard shooting students on college campuses during protests against the Vietnam war. As an adult, I definitely identified as anti gun.

I’ve been tracking homicide rates in major cities since I moved to San Francisco in 1991. Mostly because of the disturbing number of gun homicides that I would read about in Oakland and Richmond. After two decades the numbers have not abated. Baltimore, DC, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, and some other cities have gun homicide rates in the 300 plus range annually. That is obscene. Although I enjoyed the HBO series The Wire, I didn’t find it to be eye opening as many other people did who liked the show. To me it seemed like a lot of people who think the show is brilliant had no idea of what goes on in the inner cities, like it was something new. It’s not new, it has been going on for decades and for a person to have just discovered this violent world through a television show and think it is something new and revolutionary is ludicrous.

So that brings us back to Gilbert Arenas. He is a self certified goof ball who calls himself Agent Zero. He thought he could use his unloaded guns as a joke on one of his teammates. It is a sad affair if it represents how the younger generations view guns. Arenas is not a thug, he grew up middle class and attended college like many of today’s athletes. Yet there are too many stories that involve athletes and guns. Plaxico Burress has a Super Bowl ring from two years ago but now he is serving time in jail for shooting himself in the leg at a nightclub. Arenas already had a gun violation from his rookie year. It is not enough for some of these guys to have the bling, they need to have a gun too. Everybody wants to be a badass these days and it’s not just rich, young athletes. Some people want to make it into a racial thing and that is just ridiculous. That is just the myopia that chooses to ignore the biggest gun backers in the country, the NRA and the many other parts of the country and people who covet guns as shown in Michael Moore’s, Bowling for Columbine. Is it any accident that the most ardent and visible spokesperson for the NRA is an actor? Alzheimer’s be damned! Who will ever forget his famous speech at the 2000 NRA National Convention:

“From my cold dead hands”

This in reference to Al Gore saying it was the only way he would be able to take away his Second Amendment Rights. Guns are now sexy in the way tobacco once was. There is even a reality show on tv now about people and their guns. Some people see owning their guns as a God given right which I find very interesting. In this Christian country, where would Jesus stand on guns?

I haven’t touched a gun in years, but at the same time I have never voted against or aided any movement that sought to deny people the right to own a gun. I think all the legislation involving guns is a waste of time. If we allow people to have guns we will continue to have people getting killed by them no matter how many laws you make. Why? Because the purpose of a gun is to kill people! To think otherwise is pure folly. That is why I do not have a gun. It is not my intention to kill any other human being on this planet. I believe it comes down to how you carry yourself in this world. I have no fear of other people or bad neighborhoods. I have ridden my bike through the worst areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond without fear. I know that I am not bullet proof but I don’t expect anyone to start shooting at me. That’s just how I carry myself. I know I could be robbed but that’s not how I see other people. Am I the one living in a fantasy world? Maybe I am, but so far it’s working for me.

Besides, most gun homicides are not committed by strangers during the course of a crime, the majority are crimes of passion. About four years ago one of my best friends in San Francisco had a tragic event happen in her family. She is from Redding, CA. which is in the far north of the state where it is still rural and conservative and hunting is very popular. Definitely a part of the state where gun ownership is very popular. When we were roommates I would always look forward to my friend bringing back fresh venison in the fall after visiting her family. They were nice friendly people. I met the entire family when I went to her wedding in Redding. During a domestic dispute her father and her only brother were victims of a double homicide. They killed each other. During an alleged argument over access to the family guns the son stabbed the father in the chest. The father managed to get a gun before he bled to death and he shot the son who died of the gun shot wound. I was stunned when she told me the news. There are no proper words to console a friend when a tragedy like this occurs. Like I said, they were regular folks and nice people. If she hadn’t told me herself I would have never believed it.

None of us is going to live forever. If my time is to come by way of the bullet then so be it. It is not a strong enough belief for me to change how I am about guns. My power as a human being can never be measured by a gun. It can only be measured by what I action I take in this world to either contribute to making it better or making it worse.