Grappling with Guns

1987

Killer flipped on his lights and hit the siren so it chirped twice, two short bursts or the long wail that a cop car makes while in route to an emergency. The car in front of us slowed and pulled to the curb. Our patrol car glided to a stop two and a half feet behind it and four feet from the curb, offset from the stopped car to give Killer a protected zone in which to stand while talking to the driver of the stopped car.

"How did you get your nickname?" I had asked earlier that day.

We were working the South East quadrant of the city. Killer made a right turn onto Lincoln from Duff Street. The border that divided the East and West quadrants was the train tracks one block West of this intersection. We headed toward the industrial outskirts of town.

"When I was hired the Chief asked me to do some undercover work."

He slowed the patrol car as we approached an old seedy hotel with weekly rates listed on a hand-printed sign taped inside the office window.

"A couple of coke dealers were living in here."

The hotel ran perpendicular to the road, the front office on Lincoln with the rooms behind it, opening to an alley that divided the block. We pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop.

"I spent two months living here and hanging with those guys. They were part of a ring that runs drugs across the country. Interstate 80 is the main channel."

"So they call you Killer because you arrested those guys and broke up the ring?"

Killer laughed. "No." He laughed again. "One night when I was cleaning my gun it went off. I didn’t know there was a round in the chaimber. Neighbors called the cops and they ran an investigation. No one knew I was undercover except the Chief and I wasn't going to say anything."

I looked at Killer's open, gentle, friendly face and tried to imagine him undercover hanging out with the seedy, bitter, unfriendly-looking people I'd seen coming out of that hotel.

"Was anyone hurt?" I asked.

"No, it just punched a hole in two walls and a dresser. They found the slug in the neighbor's sock drawer.”

Later I found out from the parking cop the other reason people called him Killer. He brought in the most revenue from traffic stops, sometimes hundreds of dollars per day in citations, each delivered with a smile.

"Open your door, unfasten the seatbelt, and get ready to get out," Killer said as he opened his door.

He walked with ease toward the car he had pulled over, looking to make sure the trunk was shut and locked. He peered in the back window to be sure no one was crouched down in the seat, then greeted the woman driving the car. I unfastened my seatbelt and got out of the car.

"Good afternoon. May I see your drivers license?"

"Good afternoon, officer. Did I do something wrong?"

*The driver is digging for her license. She has black hair, straight, to her shoulders. Her hair is flecked with grey. She's wearing a loosely knit sweater. She's thin like a librarian or college English teacher. Her plate number is VAL 647. I repeat the words from the phonetic alphabet I will need if I anything goes wrong and the driver decides to flee the scene: Victor Adam Lincoln 647. Victor Adam Lincoln 647.*

I shut my door and approached the car from the right side, stopping by the back right tire of the vehicle to observe.

"Did you know your registration has expired?" Killer asked her.

I hadn't ever been invited out of the patrol car on a stop before. Every sensory mechanism was on alert to tell me if something was wrong. The driver apologized in a torrent of words. Killer smiled, handed the license back through the car window and told the woman to visit the DMV to update her registration and to apply the stickers to the plates on her car as soon as possible.

He waived to the driver and we returned to the patrol car as she pulled back into traffic.
I fastened my seatbelt with the solid metal click of a 1980's seatbelt. Killer turned to me.

"What I meant when I said 'get ready to get out,' was, 'stay in the car but be prepared to run if anything happens.' You don't have a vest. I do." He was referring to the half-inch of Kevlar under his uniform that would catch a bullet, even if at the expense of cracking a rib.

"Where should I run?" I asked. I imagined Killer down and me taking two bullets in the back as I fled down the street.

"Run to a house and call 911," he said.

I imagined Killer approaching the woman with the expired plates only to hear a pop and see a puff of smoke drift calmly out of the window, Killer reeling back, his hand flailing at his holster. I imagine myself ignoring the order to run and instead unhooking the 12-gauge shotgun from its rest inside the car. I imagine leveling the gun against the door, pressing the butt of the gun into my shoulder, praying the first cartridge is a nice, light load rather than a deer slug, the recoil of which would send me backward just about as fast as it would send the ball of lead out the barrel. I imagine telling the woman to hold still, put her hands in the air. I imagine taking the radio handset and calling in the code 10-33 emergency, 10-52 ambulance needed, and because I can't remember the code for person with gun, 10-96 mental subject, the code we all laughed about, and because we laughed, we remembered. I imagine the woman crying with her hands in the air as Killer moans, sits up and pulls open his shirt to show the bullet flattened, like on TV, to his vest.

I don't imagine the PR nightmare that would result from this had the scenario ever been realized.

What is the purpose of the right to bear arms? In my opinion it is an extension of the right to self-defense which itself is an extension, or remedy in extreme circumstances, of the right to life. I don’t think that a component of the right to bear arms has to do with the “coolness” of weapons or with flippantly relating sex and violence to one another in an advertisement.

I believe it is important to critique images that promote the use of weapons for harm and especially images that imply harm to those who are often the victim of such harm.

This week Hawthorne Cutlery ran an ad in the Willamette Week that says “Give Dad what he really wants for Father’s Day.” The image behind the text shows five knives covering the pubic region of a naked young woman’s lower body. The knives are pointing upward toward her belly, as though they are thrusting up through her pubic region.

The image itself would be extremely disturbing, but with the added text the collage becomes even more disturbing. The image metaphorically expresses an extremely violent sexual act, but by saying “Give dad what he really wants,” as though what he really wants is sex (implied by the naked woman and by the implication of the phrase itself), the ad implies molestation. The image might be interpreted: “Instead of giving your father sex, give him a new knife that will then be turned against you in violence.”

The woman in the picture is the person I would hope can get self-defense training (through firearms training or other means, should she be uncomfortable with firearms) so that should a weapon be used against her, such as the knives depicted in this ad, she could act quickly and decisively to protect her body, her psyche and her life.

I believe the commercial was designed by unskilled designers and that it likely doesn’t express the intentions of the shop owner. If you go to their website http://www.hawthornecutlery.com/ you can see that they don’t have any other similar aesthetics. Most of the aesthetics are in a Japanese theme, which is admittedly quite a misogynist culture, but Japanese motifs themselves do not necessarily carry discriminatory cultural practices. In America these designs most often represent the kind of calm that Zen Buddhism promises.

Often the arts use weapons to help develop a story. A character is forced out of his or her usual lifestyle by hoodlums who chase and try to kill the main character, but he or she ultimately prevails through prowess, mental agility, strength or chance. This use of weapons and violence is part of a kind of cathartic storytelling, but it is myth. It is not related to the use of actual tools and weapons in every-day life. A story closes at the end, so the reader or viewer puts down the book or walks out of the theater with closure. One thing that is disturbing about the ad is that I think the designer is trying to draw on the myth and storytelling tradition, but the call to action the ad makes is for viewers to buy these particular knives. Rather than offering closure it calls the viewer to enter the world of the violent story rather than showing that the particular knife is a well-crafted tool for use by ordinary people.

I do believe it is worth sending the shop owner an email to indicate that the designer that put together the image is being offensive rather than edgy.

Here's the ad:

I may be able to start my first category on grapplingwithguns.com. A lot of what I've been addressing has to do with myth versus reality. This is a difficult area to address in relations to any designed object, much less firearms.

A couple of years ago I took a class at the Dharma Rain Zen center on Nagarjuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Nagarjuna walks through hundreds of things, identifying their "emptiness." In this case, emptiness means that, to paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, the thing is empty of "separate self." The thing is related and connected to all things. If we were to describe a revolver in Nagarjuna's terms we might ask, "What is a revolver?" We could describe its parts - it has a barrel, a frame, a grip, three or four screws, some springs, a hammer, a cylinder, an extractor, a thingy to stop the calendar so that the bullet is lined up with the barrel, a front and back sight, and, hopefully, a light coating of a high quality gun oil. If we have all of these things we may or may not have a gun. The parts could, as one architectural design student did, be formed into a sculpture in response to a design assignment. (Luckily the instructor didn't freak out when the girl turned in her project.) However, for legal purposes, we may as a society agree that if a person has all of these parts they do in fact have a gun. Imagine the happy felon arrested for illegally having a firearm arguing, "But your honor, it's not a gun, it's a pile of parts!"

Nagarjuna is making the point that in the universal sense, any object is nothing special - it is both it's universal sense (parts - minerals, metals, the heat and energy expended to create the form) and what we make of it in a conventional sense. A couch is a "couch" because we sit (or lounge) on it instead of use it for kindling in the fireplace. Universally a couch contains many kinds of potential, some good and some bad.

In many of my posts I've pointed out myths and delusions people use in their relationship with weapons, some of mine included. My posts about the Police Explorers show many of my youthful ideas about what policing is like, and I show my own fantasies giving way to realities. The comments made on advertising have pointed to how images can be slippery, implying harm through fantasy.

To me, this is where the discussion about guns gets interesting. People have heated up an ethical issue, but haven't dealt with it well in many instances. I'm looking forward to continued work with this area of the gun debate.

When being interviewed about an undercover operation to get exeutives out of occupied Kuait just prior to the first Gulf War, an operative describes choosing not to carry.

“If you somehow get stopped uh by a security person as an example and you’ve got a weapon, immediately there is the implication that there is something wrong.
The one time in Beruit (referring to an earlier operation) that we had weapons with us, they were silent weapons, ironically… uh, we pulled them. And uh fortunately it was an instance where we didn’t have to use them, but it just highlighted once again that if you have a weapon what you might do in a normal situation if it gets dicey and you don’t have a weapon you think of a way to get out and if you do have a weapon you’ll pull your weapon and uh right away you’ve raised your profile.”*

Here's to creativity over lowest common denominators.

*From Silent Warriors: 2 Escape from Saddam on the Discovery Channel
http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10000&catalogId=10000&langId=-1&productId=30403&partnumber=672808

Spade addressed Gutman: "I hope you're not letting yourself be influenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving."

Spade said: "I've practiced taking them away from both of them, so there'll be no trouble there."

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

When I joined the Ames Police Explorers in eighth grade I had several reasons. First, after my parent’s divorced my mother wanted me to have strong male role models. This meant the Boy Scouts, where the play of Cub Scouts turned to discipline and discipline turned to manhood.

I hated the repetition and mental bluntness of the Boy Scouts. Reciting, marching, standing in neat rows and saluting, sitting through boring meetings in the stagnant air of the Kiwanis’s club and working for merit badges alone with no father to guide, only increased my awareness of the separation Mother wanted the activities to fix..

The Explorers was different. Here was an opportunity, I thought, to really help people. I could learn to be a stabilizing force in an unstable world. I could walk the line between the good guys and the bad guys, and not only that, but I could do it with a gun at my side, itself a symbol of security and enforcement to those whose flaws didn’t contain the taint of criminality.

It was an easy solution in my mind, and it gave me an out with my mother. I could quit the Boy Scouts.