Monday, August 8, 2016
Sig Sauer P938: American Gun and Book Reviews by Professor Brian Anse Patrick
American Gun and Book Reviews
by
Professor Brian Anse
Patrick
Sig Sauer P938, 9 mm, 3-inch
barrel, 2-Tone, Army Green. Exeter, NH: Sig Sauer.
Because I consider
myself a Second Amendment Ambassador rather than a Second Amendment
Exhibitionist, there are occasions when considerable discretion must be
practiced in choosing a concealed carry firearm. Moreover, as a general rule in
civic communication, one shouldn’t needlessly frighten the midgets.
Then
of course there is the Big Tradeoff. How much adequacy in a firearm are you
willing to trade for the sake of concealability? Smallish guns tend toward marginal calibers, poor
sights, crudity of features such as trigger pull and safeties, and, too often,
mechanical reliability. A firearm, whatever it may be otherwise, must above all
go bang, and too many of the wee ones fail to do so at crucial moments. I once knew
an Italian gentleman who had stuck his .25 caliber pocket pistol “into the
teeth” of his adversary, pulled the trigger, “and the son-of-a-bitch, she just
went ‘click.’” Fortunately for Old Sunoco Joe, his adversary fainted at that
point, so the firearm produced a substantial effect, just not in the quite way intended. (Joe
reported that his adversary sickened and died soon after this instance, so
perhaps Joe voodoo-ed him to death by the means already described. Joe took his revenge on the .25 by clamping
it into a bench vice and beating it with a hammer until it was scrap
metal. While Joe was admittedly an
excitable fellow, many 25s and pocket .22s with which I have had experience
would seem to cluster similarly with Joe’s in terms of reliability.)
For general carry
I have preferred lightweight 1911s in 45 acp with excellent sights and triggers.
These guns are safe if carried in a proper holster, reasonably powerful and
reliable. When discretion demanded it, I often chose small frame revolvers,
especially the J-frame Smith and Wessons, which are supremely reliable as well
as safe, even in in a suit pocket. But even these little gems lack good sights
and trigger pulls. They do go bang, however, and there is much to be said for
that, but at 25 yards they are iffy in terms of hitability, and 7-yard groups
are far from the ragged one-hole clusters that the 1911 produces so easily. At
night the vestigial sights disappear into the gloom
But
wait! says the online/Facebook expert, most gunfights are at 3-7 yards, so this
doesn’t matter. Nonsense, I say.
Close up it’s probably
even more important that one hits precisely and stops a deadly threat. Less and
not more room exists for failure. Just as in the zombie films, the old CNSD
(central nervous system disconnect) saves the day, because it doesn’t do you
much good when someone beats you over the head with a bat, irreparably damaging
that fine brain on which so much college tuition money was spent, or shoots you
in the liver, while he exsanguinates from a cluster of your poorly grouped
bullet wounds in his torso and arms. Good sights and other grown up handgun features
enable marksmanship, a practice that is overlooked by the 3-7 yarders, who seem
to regard their totemic spatial beliefs as absolution from the obligation of learning
to shoot. We seem to be training up a generation of handgunners who have
confused the ability to manipulate a handgun in contrived short-range drills
with actual marksmanship. Ed McGivern
who shot fast and accurately used and advocated good high sights sets off with
gold bead on the front sights, even for quick aerial shooting.
Wanted
is a reasonably compact, utterly safe handgun in a serious caliber that can be
shot well under a wide variety of circumstances that define daily life: day,
night, close, far, in the twilight of the movie house or alley, subway, bus stop,
parking structure, stairwell, church or convenience store, wherever the zombies
may set upon you. The point is to have a
small gun available that gives you the most options, and not a small gun that virtually
precludes or handicaps marksmanship. The 3-7 yarders have already handicapped
themselves; there is no reason to add more difficulties for them. And handguns
by their very nature handicap a defender whom an attacker has already backed
into a corner, metaphorically speaking, and forced to respond with this little
last-ditch weapon. So it should be a good one.
And
with that statement I arrive at the Sig Sauer P938, a gun that suits the need
for discretion, while providing some fine options. Nine millimeter is a good
caliber, usually less expensive and always more powerful than the .380, widely
available in many loadings, although I prefer simple ball ammunition, the
124-grain so-called NATO FMJ loading for the sake of functionality and
penetration (This is the bullet weight for which the caliber appears to have
been designed.) MidwayUSA’s website
lists for sale more than 150 variants of 9mm Luger ammunition (aka 9mm
Parabellum). So there are bullet weights
and configurations to suit many tastes and needs. I seek (1) reliability, as in
must go bang! (2) accuracy (CNSD capability) and (3) enough power to penetrate to
vitals.
At
the fetishized optimal 7-yard distance, the P938, operated with one hand,
shoots small walnut-sized groups that one expects of a good revolver or 1911. This
is possible not only because the gun is accurate, meaning well made, but also
because it has excellent sights and an acceptable trigger.
The
P938 is a single action self-loading pistol. There is no double action style
trigger pull. No de-cocker mechanism. No
Glock-style actuator. Instead Sig Sauer produced a longish single action
trigger pull of, I would guess, about 6-7 pounds. Other reviewers compare the
P938 to the 1911 in terms of general function, and suggest that those who like
the 1911 would also like the P938. I agree. The P938 seems designed to be
carried cocked and locked. An ambidextrous manual thumb safety disengages with a
fair amount of positive pressure, and is held in place by a detente-style
arrangement.
The safety when
engaged still allows for operation of the slide, a good feature to have when
checking for a loaded chamber, or to load the first round into the chamber, all
while the pistol remains on safe. This feature is wise because there is a dangerous
moment when one loads or unloads the usual semiautomatic handgun, when the gun
is “hot,” meaning that the action is cocked, the chamber loaded, and the safety
disengaged, an inherently dangerous situation. Police ranges often have bullet
traps (essentially barrels of sand on metal stands) so as to catch an
accidental discharge when the pistol is being loaded or unloaded. One performs
loading/unloading operations while the pistol is pointed down into the sand. Homeowners
and apartment dwellers generally don’t have such conveniences. So one must
wonder where a bullet accidentally discharged at this sensitive instant will
go, into or through the floor or walls of the bedroom, and then where? Some damages cannot be undone. By working the
slide with the safety engaged the little Sig seems to have added a layer of
protection. No safety can excuse unsafe gun handling, however, and idiots,
simply by being idiots, seem capable of achieving randomly bad things that are
beyond the imaginings of sensible people.
Nevertheless the safety seems a good idea. It also allows the pistol to
be carried cocked and locked. And while
I prefer cocked and locked as well, conditional on quality holster designed for
the gun. I would not drop this gun into
my pocket for carry. A Kramer vertical scabbard horsehide holster is on order
now for the pistol. But let me state now emphatically, I don’t yet have enough
experience with this gun to honestly make any firm recommendations re carry
options. Understanding takes times to develop and I’ve had this gun for maybe
two weeks as of this writing. I have been carrying 1911s for many years, and
trust them much more in the sense of prediction of outcomes. I carry 1911s in a high quality holsters,
designed for the gun, cocked and locked, trigger covered by the holster, well
concealed. And I am very afraid of them. I am also afraid of the P938. I regard
this as a healthy attitude. The thing that should be viscerally understood
about the Sig Sauer, 1911s and all other firearms is that they are absolutely
unforgiving of mistakes. Take heed. Beware. The ass you save may be your own.
The
P938 came with a molded plastic clip-on holster. I tried it and didn’t like it,
especially after it, gun and all, most indiscreetly fell off my belt in the
Walmart parking lot. No one noticed but my wife and me, and perhaps the security
cameras, but this is bad, bad business. The holster may work for someone of
different build than me, or maybe not. I was also wearing at the time a back
brace that seemed to interfere with the holster, but I still have grave reservations.
I await my Kramer holster.
The
pistol itself however is excellent in conception and execution. As a test of
reliability I had novice students in my concealed carry pistol class shoot it.
More than 100 rounds of ball ammo functioned without flaw for several different
shooters. Since, I have shot perhaps
another 100 rounds of ball ammunition without malfunction. My contribution to reliability was perhaps
two drops of oil to the barrel shroud. If I planned to carry this gun with some
sort of expanding or hollow pointed bullets, I would fire at least that much of
the intended ammunition to be certain of functionality. But as said, I prefer
ball and ball seems to go bang.
The
P938 came with prominent fixed night sights in the usual dovetails. These are
of the three-dot configuration and show up well in twilight. The point of
impact was dead on elevation-wise at 7 yards and required only the slightest of
drift to the right for windage. The front sight is about 1/8 inch in width,
about the same as one would expect on a good 1911, the rear sight sufficiently
wide to make a quick sight picture. When
I raise it to shooting position I am looking down the sights, as should be. The
sights work well. The groups fired
one-handed from seven yards would fall within a silver dollar. Comparatively, a
Colt Government .380 that I had considered and rejected for discrete carry
fires groups about the size of a cantaloupe, which at 12-15 yards opened up to
basketball size, although in terms of reliability the guns compare. The Colt
.380 lacked CNSD accuracy, even though it handled well. But if you can't shoot in the first place, then what is the difference?
The
magazine that came with the P938 was of the extended type holding 7 rounds, that
provided extra length in the grip, a sort of hook on the front much like the
Wather PPK and similar pistols, that allows for an extra finger on the shooting
hand to factor into the grip. I can live without this feature, and opted for
discretion by ordering a couple of flat base magazines that held only six
rounds, but made for a shorter less elongated grip. The pistol handles well either way.
All
in all I am well pleased with the P938.
It’s too early, however, to say whether I will adopt it. I will
prudently continue to test, and await the arrival of a more suitable holster.
The
question of whether the P938 is a suitable concealed carry handgun for experienced
shooters is one thing. But would I trust it to a novice? Most of the women and many of the men in my
last CPL class had some difficulties even in physically working the slide—although
they were capable of doing so under immediate supervision with some advice. But
supervision and advice won’t always be there for them. I have doubts generally
about neophytes and self-loading pistol designs. Plus there are conditions one
hears about such as “Glock Leg.” The
whole situation makes me nervous. Few people in my experience commit themselves
sufficiently to training and practice to master basic skills, but if they are
willing, the P938 seems like a truly compact quality pistol worthy of choosing.
8 August 2016
BAP
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Professor Brian Anse Patrick on NRA and the Death of Elite Media
Good post from "Righton." Please see: https://www.righton.net/2016/07/10/the-nra-and-the-death-of-the-elite-media/
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Review of "Guns Across America"
American Gun and Book Reviews
by
Brian Anse Patrick
Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights. Robert
Spitzer, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 277 pages.
I am uncertain if this is a serious attempt at a scholarly
book, or merely a dashed off effort in the recent literary counterattack on the
successful advances of the American gun rights movement over the last several
years.
In either case we can be fairly certain that owing to its
publisher, the prestigious Oxford University Press, it will find its way onto
the shelves of academic libraries where it will serve to dis-inform many an
earnest undergraduate essay on gun control.
Professor Spitzer builds on sands of assumption with
structural materials that often appear substandard. His book is well organized
but poorly argued, his cites/sources often questionable.
An example, in a chapter on so-called Stand Your Ground
Laws, Spitzer reproduces a table from an Urban Institute blog that purports to
show patterns of racial discrimination in justifiable gun homicides in Stand
Your Ground versus Non Stand Your Ground states. Results reported in the cells
of the table are percentages. No sample or subsample sizes are reported.
Regarding operational definitions of terms, a crucial matter in social science,
there are none. It is unclear if the table includes—or not—shootings by police,
or how many shootings there may be. In other words there is no way to gain any
idea whatsoever about the magnitude of the phenomenon being alleged. Whether
Spitzer is talking about 10, 100, or 1,000 homicides is unknowable. This is not
how serious social scientific findings are reported. Generally, stand-alone
percentages signify a perceptual scam, an attempt to raise funds or alarm; if
the frequency of some phenomenon increases from one to three, then a 150
percent increase is reported.
The author also relies on sources such as the reflexively
antigun group Violence Policy Center, which is more public relations office
than research center. (In addition to sensationalistic journalism, which it
does well, VPC also frequently plays the percentages game.) To the semiotic
ingenuity of VPC staff we owe the popularization of perceptual red herrings
such as assault weapon, gun show loophole
and universal background check, terms
that seem to mark the cognitive limits of the uniformed.
Spitzer seems to treat VPC and similar organizations as
sources of revealed truth. Evidence of this slant are comments on how the “gun industry” has “poured money into NRA coffers.”
And, “NRA sealed its decades–long political hold on the gun industry when it
spearheaded enactment of national legislation that provided the gun industry
with unique protection from lawsuits, the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005.” But Spitzer doesn’t quite get it. Sure, the
gun industry gives money to NRA, but NRA’s finances derive largely from its
five million members. NRA is not a corporate lobby, but a citizens group. NRA
is not the gun industry, which has its own lobby. The 2005 Act was created more
to protect would be gun owners when anti-gun groups adopted a strategy of
frivolous (but expensive) lawsuits in an attempt to bankrupt the industry, and
destroy Second Amendment rights from the supply side. Spitzer seems to confound
these things, although appears unaware of the latter facts. Myself, I use VPC’s
polemical analyses as examples of equivocal language, tendentiously selected
data and ill-defined terms when I teach propaganda/persuasion classes. They
provide excellent examples of bad.
Spitzer also seems to misapprehend the nature and origins of
Stand Your Ground laws, even while discussing them at length. In his chapter,
“How Did We Get From Self Defense to Shoot First?” he seems to think that these
laws mean that anyone who feels threatened can kill someone. No, absolutely
not. The recent stand your ground laws have changed nothing in basic
self-defense law. Commensurate force is justified only when a serious imminent threat to life or person exists, and
the person defending himself must be in a place or situation in which he has a
right to be, e.g., an armed robber cannot claim he shot his victim in
self-defense because the victim resisted. The standard applied is that of the reasonable person, i.e., what would a
reasonable person do under the same circumstances? This does not equate with
“shoot first.” There is also room for reasonable error, e.g., a lethal response
to a realistic toy gun. Spitzer correctly understands that the George
Zimmerman/ Trayvon Martin case was not an incident of SYG, although he quotes a
vacuous comment by President Barack Obama about how if Zimmerman stood his
ground then Martin also stood his, which suggests that Spitzer stands not alone
in his misapprehensions. This homicide was justified on the grounds that Martin,
who was physically larger and more powerful than the diminutive and apparently
idiotic Zimmerman, was pounding Zimmerman’s head against concrete while
smashing in his face. I have seen photographs showing Zimmerman’s damages. This
seems to be reasonable self-defense; at least it did to an impartial jury.
Spitzer seems indignant that stand your ground laws shield
self-defense shooters from investigation. (They don’t.) But he doesn’t get it.
Apparently he thinks the legislators who passed these things in so many states
are homicide enablers. What SYG does is (1) shield citizens from overzealous
and ruinous prosecutions, and (2) removes a burden of proof that had been
placed upon a citizen in some states to prove that she had attempted to retreat
before shooting. SYG laws were designed to prevent the horror situation where a
homeowner shoots in self-defense, and then is immediately jailed for weeks or
months, interrogated, losing job and home (signed over to defense attorneys)
because she cannot prove she attempted to retreat. Prosecutors have power to
destroy the powerless. SYG is meant as a shield to honest folk. Spitzer then cites as an example of the evils
of SYG law a Montana case where a homeowner trapped (apparently baited) a
burglarious young person and killed him in a garage. But the homeowner was
convicted in the killing, a result that points in the opposite direction than
Spitzer’s conclusion of the uncivilized nature of SYG laws. The fact that
Spitzer uses what is really a counterexample to his point suggests his
fundamental confusion over SYG and self-defense law. Murder is murder and
remains so under SYG.
The big thesis/assumption of the book is based on a
historical argument against the straw man of Second Amendment absolutism.
Spitzer cites 20 pages of old gun laws dating back to colonial times proving,
he says, that the Second Amendment is not and was never regarded as absolute.
Therefore modern gun advocates have no case and must take whatever restrictive
legislation is imposed upon them. Thus, according to the book’s after-the-colon
title, gun rights are reconciled with rules governing ownership and use.
But who ever said the Second Amendment was absolute? No one
I ever met throughout gun culture, and I have known many from high to low, ever
stated such a thing. Spitzer has confused slogans with doctrine. Felons may not
bear arms. Guns should not be used to threaten or coerce people, not fired in
the town square, or randomly distributed to infants, children and the mentally
feeble. These are undisputed norms. In some places and times restrictions
extended to Catholics (in England), Blacks and slaves. New York’s 1911 Sullivan
law that restricted concealed carry and gun purchases was aimed almost entirely
at Italians and Southeast Europeans. A Florida law that barred possession of
Winchester repeating rifles was intended to prevent Blacks from having these
useful weapons, the assault rifles of their time; the law was never intended to
apply to white people, said a Florida judge, and would have been deemed
unconstitutional if such had been attempted. Many laws prevented hunting on the
Sabbath. Game laws affected magazine capacity and gun types, e.g., no punt guns
for duck hunting. Many post-bellum laws were aimed against free blacks; the
Fourteenth Amendment was necessary to correct this and other rights abuses.
So-called time, place and manner restrictions abounded and still do, e.g., no
guns in schools, which has not prevented murderous deviants with guns from
killing schoolchildren. Many of these past laws were obviously
unconstitutional, others not. Many were unchallenged, many obsolete, lapsed or
superseded. NRA has for many years attempted to shame governments into
enforcing existing gun laws instead of passing new ineffective ones.
Spitzer’s argument is absurd despite its great length. A
parallel: do past laws against libel, counterfeiting and pornography mean that
the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and press is somehow invalid or
should not broadly apply? Of course
not! Free speech and expression are not,
were never, absolute, but remain rigorously protected. The 1798 Alien and
Sedition Act criminalized expressions that criticized the government, obviously
an unconstitutional law at odds with any kind of absolutist or liberal
interpretation of the First Amendment, but was passed by Congress. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime to
undermine the US war effort via criticism and also empowered censorship; so
many people were jailed that the ACLU formed as a result. I understand that
Spitzer is attempting to debunk historical arguments that favor the Second
Amendment, but his method does not convince.
Interestingly Spitzer seems to think he discovered something
new with the existence of these past laws. He crows about it, claiming that
some old magazine capacity laws are reported in his book for the first time
anywhere. Maybe the latter is true, but NRA has been reporting for decades the
existence of some 20,000-gun laws in the US.
And Spitzer just discovered that such things existed? He also seems oblivious to work by scholars
whose approach and conclusions fall outside of the narrow waveband of VPC
approval. Many scholars have discussed these laws, but he cites scholars financed
by anti-gun money. I suggest that Spitzer read St. George Tucker’s original
commentaries on the US constitution instead of relying on interpretations as
promulgated in work that came out of the now defunct (no longer funded by the
anti-gun Joyce Foundation) Second Amendment Research Center at Ohio State
University. Spitzer might also try Fordham Law Professor Nick Johnson’s volume,
Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition
of Arms, because Spitzer doesn’t really seems to know all that much about
guns and their history.
Why do I say this? Because Spitzer in his apparent
astonishment over all these laws resembles exactly the kind of person I often
meet in academia, who has no clue that any guns laws exist at all. Seemingly
informed by hysterical editorials in the New
York Times and television news, they are misled by the cognitive red
herrings mentioned above. After the recent Orlando murders some of my academic
colleagues were surprised to learn that no automatic weapon (machine gun) was
involved, the shooter had passed an FBI background check done by all licensed
firearms dealers on all sales, and that one cannot just buy assault weapons (or
any other firearm) online.
Spitzer ties up with a chapter on how he built a gun, an
AR-15, which must have really wowed the editors at Oxford University Press, and
also acquired a gun permit to purchase a handgun in New York State. For only
$160 he was able to acquire what he calls the “Legos–like” items to complete
the lower receiver which he had to purchase through a federal firearms licensed
dealer. Spitzer leaves it at that, but this amount may be misleading, because
the rest of the gun, upper receiver and so on, costs a great deal more—maybe
$600 additional—so one cannot put together an AR-15 for $160. With help, he
makes a New York compliant AR-15 that holds only 7 rounds. His gun permit
allows him to purchase a pistol that he may keep in his home and is not a carry
permit. If he want to learn the meaning of the word “no,” I suggest that he
apply for a New York concealed pistol license. Even though New York’s
relatively tough laws seem to be no more effective at what he calls “lax” gun
laws in other parts of the country Spitzer concludes that the New York SAFE gun
law, hurriedly passed in the days after the Sandy Hook murders, are “feasible” because
they are clear and therefore compliance is easy. This standard, like his other
arguments, also seems absurd to me. Is this how we formulate just and
reasonable laws? Whatever seems feasible may fly? God help us if this is
intended as a serious policy proposal.
Oxford University Press must be using the same standard
these days to evaluate new book proposals.
BAP
28 June 2016
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Review of "The Gunning of America"
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
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