American Gun and Book Reviews
by
Brian Anse Patrick
The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of the American Gun
Culture. Pamela Haag, New York: Basic Books, 2016, 496 pages.
This book recalled for me an incident of acute moral
posturing that I was exposed to back in graduate school at the University of
Michigan in the late 1990s.
For politeness sake I had invited a fellow Ph.D. candidate to
shoot at targets with a pistol, who declined for what he called “moral
reasons.” Apparently mere possession, touching or association with a firearm was
inherently evil. I had not known this. I was also to understand, so I gathered,
that by sheer dint of this virtuous expression this sensitive soul had
established himself as my moral superior. Forever. Absolutely. At this point in
the semiotic exchange I declined and
still do. Prissiness is not in my world an acceptable medium of exchange for moral
worth.
The parallel? From Dr. Pamela Haag’s history one gathers the
impression that Oliver Winchester and other “gun capitalists” snuck up on the
American playground in the mid-19th Century and immorally beguiled innocents
into a culture of firearm addiction. Until then, she seems to imagine, America’s
children enjoyed a largely bucolic existence, and while they might murder with ax,
fists, knife or bludgeon, they had existed in a largely gun free safe zone. The
emergent “gun capitalists” simply lacked the social conscience of more enlightened
beings; sociopathically they ignored collective moral accountability and grasped
for personal profit at human expense.
Transcending mere history to speak as the voice of anachronistic
conscience, Haag views American gun culture as somehow inorganic or unnatural,
a synthetic product or chimerical trick; it is not a true social growth but an immoral
business enterprise that created its own fog of cultural dissimulation. In
advancing this case, however, she takes some highly impressionistic flights.
A first set of fancies might be called assumptive. Haag’s
work is not the first attempt by a publisher to package a sermon on the phenomenon
of American Gun Culture as counterintuitive scholarly analysis. One is reminded
of historian Michael Bellisiles’s allegation of a rarity of guns in colonial America (Arming America, Knopf, 2000),
which was withdrawn by its embarrassed publisher after historian Clayton Cramer
showed that Bellisiles cited nonexistent sources and selectively misquoted
others (Armed America, Thomas Nelson,
2007). Early on in her book Haag makes a
crucial elementary mistake identical to Bellisiles, the assumption that because
American revolutionary armies experienced difficulties in obtaining firearms,
that guns were therefore rare in the colonies. No, there were many guns, but
the differences were immense between a ragtag collection of fowling pieces and blunderbusses
appropriate to farm life, and the uniform stands of arms necessary for a modern
colonial army. The colonies were inadequately industrialized for European style
war. This doesn’t equate that guns were unpopular or rare. Too much historical
and cultural evidence suggests otherwise, e.g., all those spent lead bullets
that litter old settlements came from somewhere. She also assumes axiomatically, that firearms
are teleologically murderous. There is little demonstrated understanding of possible
positive benefits—the firearm as a tool, a necessity, a device to liberate or
preserve self or social unit from coercion and violence. She sees Oliver
Winchester as a sociopath for all the murders/killings committed by his guns by
individuals and governments, even though his conduct suggests elsewise. In the
same way we learn as the sermon thunders up, that modern gun industrialists must be
held accountable for their lethal products. She appears to believe she has made the case to hold them accountable in
an emerging era of social collective conscience and justice.
Just an annoyance, but she repeatedly misidentifies the
Union Metallic Cartridge Company as the United Metallic Cartridge Company.
A second set of flights might be described a highly fanciful
tropes, speculative in nature. In many ways this book appears to be a fusion of
Creative Writing 101 and an initial graduate class in historical methodology. Haag
uses terms in virtually idiolectic fashions derived in creative digressions
along the way, suggesting little understanding of the conventions or mechanics
that she attempts to describe, e.g., repeatedly referring to the lever action
Winchester rifles as “semiautomatic” and even “automatic.” She uses the terms “bullets” and “ammunition”
interchangeably. She weaves a huge romantic moral tale based on pure conjecture.
Sarah Winchester, the wealthy reclusive and deeply spiritualist widow of
Oliver’s son, the tuberculin Will, whose children had died in infancy, moves to
the California coast where, provided for by the immense Winchester fortune, perpetually
builds and rebuilds a bizarre 200-room mansion with parquet floors, an organ,
blind stairways, ghost cabinets (popular with spiritualists), minarets, and with
chimneys, windows and balconies opening to nowhere. The isolated insomniac
Sarah ghostlike flits through the rooms after midnight and furiously plays the
organ, sort of, maybe, like in that old Don Knott’s film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Haag speculates that the purpose of this
incessant building was some form of spiritualistic atonement for the legions of
Winchester-manufactured ghosts. Was Sarah’s mysterious house a spirit house,
built on spiritualist principles, meant to wash away or protect herself from the
Winchester blood legacy? Pages are dedicated to an imaginary meeting between widow
Sarah and a prominent spiritualist of the era. Haag evokes the stories of
Persephone and Demeter to amplify Sarah into a tragic mythical figure.
(Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, by the
way, recommended use of such classical tales when the orator needed to amplify
or celebrate some figure about which there might not really be all that much to
say.) At some point all this becomes
absurd, although I suspect it may play well on daytime television talk shows
where it would be treated more or less as a slogan. Now, the legend of Sarah vies
with the legend of Oliver Winchester, so we are told. Yeah, right. (Nevertheless,
I would like to someday visit the mystery house of Sarah, as it still stands as
tourist amusement site, and see what the poor rich woman had built for herself.
So I am grateful to Haag for telling me
about it.)
As a scholar of propaganda, I must agree that history may
resemble creative writing more than any sort of historical reality. We live daily
with Orwellian revisionism. But just as
Haag accuses Winchester and Colt’s of manufacturing a gun culture mythos, Haag
appears to be engaged in the business of manufacturing an antipodal Sarah
mythos by the decidedly ahistorical methodology of free association.
Several excellent chapters are usefully straightforward,
informed by numerous archival sources. We learn of Winchester’s well-organized aggressive
marketing efforts; the company leaders’ realization that guns did not just sell
themselves on a civilian market; the early reliance on sales to foreign
governments that established the brand and financial footing; the
reorganizations, the overbuilding and collapse as a result of production in the
Great War, a time when Winchester officials wondered that the U.S. government
might nationalize their plant if they didn’t cooperate with demands for
armaments. Soon after the war demand
fails, the family connection in Winchester Repeating Arms Company is gone, sold
out, and the business was in receivership.
We also learn that the Wild West wasn’t all that wild; a
setting-to-rights chapter is called, “The West That Won the Gun.” Buffalo Bill
was a fraud and all that Wild West Show stuff, hokum, Hollywood westerns, too.
But I suspect everybody older than about ten years of age already knew this. I
think that the measured version of the Western hero offered in books such as The Virginian is more true to the actual
ideal of the West. And yes, the gun merchants stimulated demand, but could not
create it out of nothing. Demand was and remains real, despite “gun cranks,”
whom may fetishize firearms along any number of dimensions.
The above mentioned, well-grounded chapters read as if they
were written for a different book or occasion, for soon we are back to the heavy
handed interpretive overlay. This may have been an editorial decision: market
the book with drama. The penultimate chapter is “Merchants of Death,” wherein Haag
pulls out all the stops on her whacky organ. She even references an early
Superman comic book to support her argument. Enough said.
Haag also drags the Pope into her picture, quoting his
denunciation of those who manufacture weapons. But the Pope is surrounded by a
machine-gun toting Swiss Guard, lives in a walled city (i.e., gated community),
travels about in a bulletproof Pope-mobile, and should not be throwing stones. Others
may not be so insulated from those who would do them harm.
Haag’s imaginings run for nearly 500 pages. That’s a lot of imagining; sandwiching some good
history at times. The moral of her story is corporate accountability. She
dismisses efforts to control individuals.
Just control the manufacturers, the Evil Olivers of the world, and the
problem of American gun pathology will be solved. A chain of accountability is all we need,
manufacturer to aorta, as she quotes from a source. She has made this case, or so
she seems to think. She mentions a gun
control movement a few times, but who cares about the modern NRA and the
millions of people who comprise the new American Gun Culture social movement that
has arisen steadily since about the late 1960s? To Haag, such people apparently seem to be dupes of the
gun industry mythos-making machinery, and therefore lacking in political and mythos
validity. She has explained them away.
I suggest also she might consider taking a law class in
torts to understand, if nothing else, the notion of proximate cause.
Casting about for paradigms to support her concluding argument,
she cites Chicago as an example of a successful approach to the gun problem.
Say what? As of May 2016 Chicago police
reported that 318 shootings had occurred so far in 2016, and accounted for 317
victims, 66 of them dead. These shootings were attributed almost entirely to
gang-related violence among blacks. Corporate accountability? Whose? When? Where? How? Are the killers just victims,
too, of what Haag keeps calling an “agnostic” gun industry?
Who then is to blame for the excesses in this book?
Gutenberg seems a likely candidate, although is perhaps too remote to be
convincing. It can’t be the author, who
labors presumably under the influence of organized corporate outpourings on the
nature of books and scholarship, and is therefore a victim too. Maybe it should
be those Merchants of Books who run a publishing industry that produces luridly
simplified accounts of impossibly complicated reality in order to cater to the
ego-defense needs of people to feel smart and empowered. Or superior.
Enough. I decline
this semiotic offering.
BAP
2 June 2016
1 comment:
Ouch! That's harsh!
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