School of Arms

I've been thinking about how to inject guns into the Pa. governor's race, and I think I've come up with something that may have legs: a proposal that all persons seeking a concealed-carry permit be required to take a firearms training course.

At present the only requirement for a concealed-carry permit is a background check. Pennsylvania is a "shall issue" state, which means the authorities are required to issue a permit to anyone who passes the background check. (If memory serves, New Jersey is a "may issue" state, which means the authorities have some discretion.)

I wouldn't mess with the "shall issue" business -- it appears to be very important to gun lovers. But who can argue with a training course, especially after the George Zimmerman fiasco down in Florida?

Such a course already exists in Pa. If you want to carry a gun in connection with your employment -- for instance, you're a rent-a-cop -- you have to take and pass a 40-hour course.

There are schools -- the whole infrastructure already exists. All we need to do is require all people who want to walk around with a pistol in their pocket to take the course.

Big Red One

There's a scene in Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, a movie about World War II, that takes place in an insane asylum. The Germans have set up an artillery observation post on the top floor of the asylum, and the ensuing artillery fire has been creating issues for the American army. For those of you who are not familiar with these issues, what happens is the observation post says, “The Americans are over there! I can see them!” And the cannons blast away, and the Americans are unhappy. All this, of course, requires much speaking in acronyms, and the relaying of map coordinates, and that sort of thing.

Anyway, Lee Marvin’s infantry squad gets the job of going into the asylum and killing the Germans. They’re not happy about this, because it means at least some of them may get killed in the process. They’re much fonder of the idea of American artillery simply blowing up the asylum, or perhaps our air force flattening it with bombs. But it appears there are public relations issues about murdering insane civilians, so in they go.

They have help from a beautiful female insider, who slits a German throat or two. The whole movie has a thing for knives. Marvin himself, playing a sergeant, carries three knives that I counted – a bayonet, a hunting knife, and a World War I trench knife, which includes brass knuckles on the handle.

Anyway, the operation soon proceeds to the noisy phase. In the refectory, the Germans and Americans battle it out over the heads of inmates who are trying to eat lunch. Finally an insane person picks up a discarded Schmeisser and starts spraying the room with 9 mm bullets, saying, in the throes of his epiphany, “I am one of you! I am sane! I am sane!”

After a while Marvin shoots him. Un-aimed fire tends to annoy sergeants.

Sam Fuller, the director, is making a point here, as only he can. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I think it has something to do with war being crazy.

However, as I was watching the movie recently, I found myself thinking about suggestible individuals and the shootings in Tucson earlier this year. At the time, there was a lot of talk about how nobody told the shooter in Tucson to shoot anyone. And I’m fine with that. But our entire culture has been suffused with violence for a long time, and in recent years our political rhetoric has been accelerating rapidly to keep pace. I’m thinking this may have something to do with the rapid decline in the number of politicians who have actually fought in a war. John McCain, God bless him, is becoming something of a relic in this regard.

There’s an old line that goes back to a senior church official in the Albigensian Crusade, which took place in southern France during the Middle Ages. He was reportedly asked what the troops should do with prisoners from a town that was about to be conquered, and according to a contemporary writer the churchman said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

As the 2012 presidential campaign gets under way, I have some advice for our current leaders: Be careful what you say. People may take you literally. They have done so in the past.

(With apologies to those who hate footnotes, I need to add one. Whether the church leader, Arnau Amalric, actually said what Caesarius of Heisterbach says he said is much in dispute. However, the massacre at the town of Béziers, in July 1209, is not in doubt. You can look it up. Arnau Amalric happily wrote to the pope that 20,000 people were killed. But it seems unlikely that there were that many people living in the town at that time. Welcome to the study of medieval history, where indisputable facts can be hard to come by.)

There: Now You’ve Got Something You Can Eat!

My cousin Butch was a few years older than me, so he was probably in high school when this story took place. Butch grew up on his parent’s dairy farm; his paternal grandparents lived on a farm less than a mile away. I don’t want to romanticize the farmer’s life, which is full of hard work in all weather and, in the case of dairy farming, involves shoveling huge amounts of cow manure. But farmers do have a lot of contact with nature, and I’m inclined to think that’s a good thing.

Butch’s father, my Uncle Ed, was a gregarious fellow who loved to tell stories, and listen to them, and who made friends easily. Among these were the hunters from Queens, in New York City, whom my brother refers to as the Woodchuck Brigade. They just showed up one day and asked Uncle Ed if they could hunt his land and possibly kill a few woodchucks. Uncle Ed was thrilled. Farmers don’t like woodchucks, by and large. Neither did Henry David Thoreau, although he puts a reasonably good face on it in Walden.

They were nice guys. They weren’t very good shots, but they became good friends and frequent visitors. Eventually Uncle Ed even encouraged them to park an old trailer in the woods behind his house, so they wouldn’t have to pay for motels.

So here’s the story. One day Butch was out walking the woods with one of the hunters, who happened to be a Sanitation Department police officer from Queens who was armed with his trusty .222 rifle with telescopic sight and also had his .38 service revolver strapped to his hip in a holster.

I’m a bit vague on how they came upon the rabbit. Butch isn’t with us anymore, and my brother says he doesn’t remember the story. Were they in a pasture or on a dirt road? Why didn’t the rabbit run away? Had it been caught in a trap, or injured by a vehicle? My brother, who has no memory of any of this, suggests that the rabbit might have been rabid, which adds self-defense to mercy killing. Then my brother did something truly useful. He suggested that I ask our cousin Mary Lyn, Butch’s sister.

So I did. She too had forgotten the story, but it came back to her. Like me she’s not certain of all the details. She thinks Butch may have been out with several hunters, and that one of them had shot at the rabbit and wounded it.

Anyway, there they were, standing around trying to figure out what to do. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to use a rifle with a telescopic sight to shoot an animal that was lying at your feet. So the Sanitation policeman drew his service revolver and prepared to put a .38 slug into the rabbit’s skull.

Clearly our hunter had seen too many movies where cowboys dispatch broken-down horses and cows with their trusty .45s. My favorite is Jack Palance, in City Slickers, who blows away an injured cow and tells an aghast Billy Crystal, “She was sufferin’.”

Rabbits are rather frail creatures compared to cows, and a .38 slug would basically cause the animal to disintegrate. So my cousin Butch intervened. He picked up the rabbit and twisted its neck until it was broken. Then he held the dead critter out to the policeman and said, “There. Now you’ve got something you can eat.”

Now that I’ve told you that story, I have to tell you that it’s only one version. Butch’s daughter Andrea, whom Mary Lyn brought into the loop (never say that email isn’t a wonderful thing) heard the story a lot more than the rest of us, and what she says makes sense. Apparently the Woodchuck Brigade managed to shoot the rabbit in the woods behind Uncle Ed’s house, but just winged him, so he fled (I envision a kind of panicked hobbling) to the dirt road in front of the house, where it seems locomotion failed him.

Meanwhile the Woodchuck Brigade was in hot pursuit. Andrea says, “Dad put extra flourishes on describing how foolish the boys looked running after the rabbit as though it had just robbed a bank.” And she reports that the hunter with the pistol (I do believe he was with the Sanitation Department) actually raised his rifle – the one with the telescopic sight – to dispatch the poor beast at a range of ten feet.

That was when Butch “stepped in front of the pointed rifle and scooped the rabbit up to twist its neck before there could have been any opportunity for debate.”

Andrea adds, “Sometimes the moral was a sort of ‘country mouse v. town mouse’ angle while other times it was more about remembering the simple solution is often the best, no sense in coveting the fancy shiny toys of others.”

Andrea adds that her father “was a man of few words, but if you knew how and when to get him started with stories it was just like putting a quarter in a jukebox.”

But back to the shiny toys – in this case the guns. I was going to say that Uncle Ed didn’t own one. Mary Lyn says he did, and would occasionally hunt woodchucks, in his own way. There was a pond near Uncle Ed’s house where the woodchucks liked to frolic, and Uncle Ed would occasionally shoot at them, as Mary Lyn says, “from the dining room window!!”

Mary Lyn reports that Uncle Ed had also tried deer hunting once, many years before: “He had a big, beautiful buck in his sights, and then the deer turned and looked straight at him. He put his gun down and went home. He always supported his neighbors’ right to hunt for food, but couldn’t do it himself.”

Thanks, Mary Lyn and Andrea. I loved these two men, and these stories are part of the reason why.

What the Greeks Knew

Recently I was rereading the plays that Sophocles wrote about Oedipus and his family, and it struck me: This whole mess got started with a traffic dispute.

One day Oedipus was tooling down what passed for a highway in ancient Greece, and he found his way blocked by a man in a chariot who, with the help of his servants, tried to force Oedipus off the road. The charioteer may not have been entirely the pompous ass that we may think. After all, the road was probably a narrow one-lane dirt track, and it appears that Oedipus was on foot, so it would have been easy enough for him to stand aside, much as I do when I'm commuting to work and an 18-wheeler decides to change lanes.

This, however, was ancient Greece, where there were no rules of the road and, frankly, not a whole lot of common sense. So words came to blows, and Oedipus killed the charioteer (who, unbeknownst to him, was his biological father), as well as an indeterminate number of servants (Oedipus originally thinks he did them all, but apparently one escaped to tell the tale, in which Oedipus is not one man but a large band of robbers — yet another testimony to the untrustworthiness of eyewitnesses).

And so the whole sorry machine of multigenerational tragedy is set in motion, with Oedipus marrying his mother and putting his eyes out, and his two sons killing one another on the battlefield in front of Thebes in a dispute over who should be running things, and his daughter Antigone (who is also his sister) getting sentenced to death for trying to bury one of the brothers who lay dead on the battlefield.

And that's the short version. I'm very happy we have traffic lights and yield signs.

And yet anybody who drives knows that savagery of Greek proportions is never very far away from us. We are human, as they were, and we are given to fits of anger, irrational over-response (escalation, we called it, back during the Vietnam war), and masterful, ingenious self-justification.

Which brings me to the point of this little essay­­ — the issue of gun control. I have some opinions about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which I'll get to in a minute, but I do think there's a deeper issue here — human nature, and what we humans need to do to live together in peace.

Do we really want everybody to be walking around with a loaded pistol? The argument is put out that an armed society is a polite society. I'd like to see the historical evidence for that. (The situation in Iraq might make a good counterexample.) There also seems to be an unexamined assumption that law-abiding citizens will use their guns appropriately, unlike the criminals who of course have limited impulse control, are highly suggestible, and are given to fits of irrational rage.

Come to think of it, how many American motorists have I just described? So maybe we shouldn't put the guns in our cars; maybe we should just keep them in the house, for home defense. And when, while celebrating Halloween, your wife screams in terror that a goblin is at the door menacing her, are you going to get your gun out of the closet? Okay. And when the goblin keeps gesticulating because he thinks he's going to a party at your house, when the party is actually at an identical house two doors down, what are you going to do? Maybe it would have been simpler to call 911.

The Supreme Court has ruled that there is an individual right to bear arms. Whatever the legal merits of this decision, it is clearly a travesty for those who care about language or history. Still, I don't feel like refighting that battle. What I'd rather do is look at the first part of the Second Amendment, which states, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State ..."

This part of the amendment tells us something important about the world in which the Framers lived. In colonial days — Massachusetts may be the purest example — every able-bodied man was automatically in the militia and could be called to active duty at any time. The French call it levée en masse, or the nation in arms. Over the last several centuries America has moved away from the concept of universal military service, most recently by abolishing the draft.

Without the draft, I suppose we are all in that great unorganized reserve that will surely rise up to fight any foreign invader, however ineffectively. If we don't believe some fiction like that, are we not ignoring the original intent of the Framers?

So let's look at the term "well-regulated." We may not call people to active duty, but do we not, under the Second Amendment, still have a duty to train people in the use of firearms — and the consequences of their use?

As part of that training, I think people should be required to go to a big-city emergency room on a Saturday night. Just about any Saturday night will do. Stay until the bars close, and watch the gunshot victims get wheeled in — including the "unresponsive patients," aka the dead. People need to know in vivid terms what pulling a trigger is all about.