My entire adult life has been in the era of mass shootings. Columbine happened when I was seventeen, a junior in high school, and now at forty, teaching college for a living, I can’t keep track of when other spectacular gun massacres occurred, indelible as they always seem at the time.
With schools so often being attacked, I wonder now if someone is going to kill me at work, or hurt my students. It’s not impossible. Course schedules are public. Our classrooms usually have one door. Most of their windows don’t open. Help would take time to arrive. If anything violent happens when we’re in class, it will be bad.
In Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism (1977), which laces field interviews and Gornick’s own narrative voice into a poetic, recursive, impressionistic history, there’s a phrase of hers I can’t forget: “the incomparable risk of shared existence.”1 One of those lines you encounter and keep hearing, the words becoming part of your mind.
For the Communists that Gornick interviews, “risk” means opening yourself to solidarity with other people in a shared lifeworld, with all that it entails to perceive and be perceived, and with all the miraculous payoff of really knowing (and fighting alongside) someone else. A collective existence that contrasts vividly with the alienation and isolation produced by capitalism.
But now, in the wolf years of the gun, “the incomparable risk of shared existence” can be read another way: the risk that a stranger could murder you.
Guns turn sociability into risk, exposure, fear, paranoia, anomie. They dissolve bonds and destroy collective environments. We have flooded the social world—which should be nourishing and beautiful for all of us—with machines designed to kill. It’s profitable though, at least sometimes, for some stakeholders, including the right-wing terrorists whose stochastic attacks further destabilize reality.
I was planning to hedge at the end here, like so: I say all this as someone who grew up in the rural South, around guns, with guns in the house, in the family, grew up shooting at squirrels and beer cans. I used to think guns were cool. I still kind of do. But I don’t know how to live with them. But really, who cares? Who needs my meditations on the aesthetics and affect of guns, when the fact is that they are terrible now, embedded in this reality, the United States in the 2020s, and that as such we should ban assault rifles and institute buyback programs to take weapons out of circulation as quickly as possible. This would perhaps stop the bleeding and allow us to build a less murderous, less anxious, less riven society. Somehow.
Americans are lonely. Guns and their psycho-libertarian culture are a cruel solvent, wrecking the possibilities of love. They seem to offer strength but isolate us even more, and that is a reason to not want them around in such terrible abundance ever again. I’m tired of fear.
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977), p. 17 (Verso paperback reissue, 2020).
Guns went from being a tool to fight against an organized state to a tool used to destabilize interior affiliations. Not sure if the transition is rooted more in the prevalence of handguns or the spike in individual rifle lethality (compare the rate of fire of a standard-issue WW1 rifle with a modern semi-auto magazine-fed rifle), but gun technology advanced to the point where they no longer require masses of armed people to be effective, but rather a single one can be used against a mass of people quite effectively. Maybe the most effective thing is to ban all magazines?