Jamelle Bouie asks what freedom means in a country the fetishizes guns:
In Anthony Mann’s 1950 western “Winchester ’73,” a rare and much-desired Winchester rifle brings misery and death to the unlucky souls who manage to bring it into their possession. In the West as brought to you by Mann — and his star, a troubled and morally ambiguous Jimmy Stewart — the gun isn’t a symbol of freedom as much as it is a curse, destined to ruin everyone who covets its power.
It was a theme echoed that year in the Joseph H. Lewis noir “Gun Crazy,” a take of sorts on the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Our protagonists in this film are two young people so enamored of the power of guns — and the freedom they seem to provide — that they go on a wanton spree of theft and murder. It ends, predictably, with their own deaths.
In both films, guns become truly dangerous when they become a fetish: an object worshiped for its supposed power and symbolic meaning. Guns, Mann and Lewis seem to say, aren’t actually totems of freedom or liberty or youth; they are instruments of death and should be treated accordingly.
I thought of both movies last week during the manhunt for Robert Card, the 40-year-old suspect in a mass shooting that killed 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.
For nearly two days after the shooting, no one knew where Card was. He was armed and dangerous and on the run. To prevent any more loss of life, law enforcement authorities urged tens of thousands of residents of Southern Maine to shelter in place with their doors locked. He was found on Friday night, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.
Card is believed to have used an AR-15-style rifle in the shootings. Introduced to civilian buyers in 1964, the Armalite Rifle 15 Sporter and its offspring are now some of the most popular rifles in the United States and a potent symbol of what guns mean to tens of millions of Americans. “It’s an icon,” one owner told The New York Times in a 2018 feature on the AR-15 and similar weapons. “It’s a symbol of freedom. To me, it is America’s rifle.”
That, in fact, is how gun manufacturers have promoted the rifle — not as a tool for hobbyists and sportsmen but as a lifestyle accessory that stands for freedom, individualism and masculine self-sufficiency. “Stand out and blend in all at the same time,” reads one 2011 advertisement for a camouflage-finished assault-style rifle.
It’s not just about the AR-15, of course. For many Americans, the right to own a gun is liberty itself — the very definition of what it means to live in a free country. But the question raised by the Maine shooting, and especially the lockdown that followed, is just how free that freedom is.
How free are you really when you know that a trip to the grocery store or a morning in prayer or a day at school or a night at the movies can end in your death at the hands of a gun? How free are you really when you protest on behalf of a cause you believe in and are met on the street by armed counterdemonstrators? How free are you really when state authorities have to lock down a city so that they can stop a mass shooter from striking again?
You are not free at all. Your speech certainly isn’t free when it means that any nut with a gun can point it at you and tell you to shut up. Your freedom of assembly isn’t free when you go to a protest and a bunch of gun-wielding zealots is standing to the side menacing you. Your aren’t free to exercise your religion when bigots and crazy men can enter your house of worship and gun you down. And you also aren’t free when you can’t go to school or a bowling alley or a nightclub or a movie theater or a grocery story without looking over your shoulder and being prepared to run and hide when you hear a loud pop because some insane person with a semi-automatic weapon might have decided that he needed to express his fealty to the constitution that day. That’s a funny definition of freedom.
This is not normal, people. The whole country is living in a state of subliminal terror all the time because greedy gun manufacturers and stupid asses with insecurities are holding us hostage with their need for dominance.