A response to John Donegen’s gun article on July 14.
As a teenager in south Texas in the early 1950s, I grew up among guns. They were just a natural part of things. Every household seemed to have some. Our kitchen pantry, for example, housed a .30-06 deer rifle because my old man had once hunted deer. We also had a semiautomatic .22 caliber pistol for emergencies, such as rabid possums or visiting rattlesnakes. These firearms just sat there quietly. They were definitely not play toys or artifacts for big-boy military dress-up. They were considered killing tools, no more and no less. In addition, my three brothers and I wouldn’t think of hunting deer because we’d seen Disney’s movie Bambi at a very impressionable age in the late ’40s and had never gotten over the terror involved in the opening scene.
There was, however, a definite fascination with the different forms and history of guns. For example, many handguns were brought to school to be shown around and traded during recess. There were small muzzle-loading derringers—tiny, cute things that could fit in a woman’s purse. There were exotic pin-fired French revolvers from the turn of the century, evoking movies involving the French Foreign Legion. There were even pearl-inlayed flintlock dueling pistols. It was amazing how many historical guns were available to 16-year-old males in this rural setting.
Our high school was a pretty tough place, yet for all this, it never crossed our minds to actually point these weapons at anyone, much less load and shoot at a person. So, what changed? Well, three things changed!
First change: massive technological development. The Cold War between the USSR and the USA resulted in massive efforts to improve killing power from nukes all the way down to armament of individual soldiers. The difference between World War II weapons and the Cold War version was like the difference between a Ford Model T and a Tesla Model 3. World War II machine gun squads of three to five soldiers had less firepower than a single soldier with a lightweight air-cooled assault weapon and very efficient ammunition clips. The result in increased firepower was such that an untrained 18-year-old could hold off a whole town’s police department while systematically slaughtering their children, as happened in Uvalde, Texas (about 70 miles from my old high school).
Second change: Personal firearms started becoming fetishes. Many people don’t understand what a fetish is so here’s the dictionary definition.
Fe-tish: 1. a material, commonly an inanimate object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent sprit, or having magic potency. 2. Any object of blind reverence or devotion.
I’m not saying we didn’t have our own teen fetishes in 1951, but it was certainly not related to guns and death. It was more related to sex, or more often, hoped-for sex.
We lived at large distances, a double date might require hundreds of miles of travel. Our closest thing to fetishes was the hot car. My old man’s Oldsmobile Rocket 98 would often travel hundreds of miles on a typical Saturday double date. (Gasoline cost about 25 cents per gallon.) The car was also capable of taking on anybody in the occasional drag race, sometimes part of the dating scene. In addition, it was large enough to provide roomy luxury for the hoped-for submarine races occurring at drive-in movie theaters or open fields during a successful date.
Third change: Personal guns progressively became a highly organized money-making industry. A very peculiar aspect of our capitalist system is that it is OK to sell products openly that are unhealthy as long as enough “freedom” is applied to the equation.
In the early ’50s, tobacco smoking filled this perverse niche in our economic system. My father, for example, was a chain smoker of Chesterfields. It probably shortened his and my mother’s lives. (It was obnoxious enough that my brothers and I avoided cigarettes like the plague.) Millions of early deaths were the result of this cynical situation.
Personal guns are essentially the new tobacco industry, cynically making gobs of money on supplying technically sophisticated fetishes to unsophisticated impressionable youth in the name of freedom.
If this little spiel annoys any reader, I’m sorry. But I think a 70-year romp through small-town American history, where we call a spade a spade, can help illuminate the very difficult situation in which we now find ourselves. Δ
Retired Cal Poly professor Ken Haggard is also a retired U.S. Army Reserve captain and a retired architect. Send a response for publication to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in 55 Fiction 2022.
As a geezer of similar vintage, I enjoyed Mr. Haggard’s trip down. memory lane and agree with his observations about the era. I have to wonder, though, whether he ever advocated banning the Olds Rocket 98, since high-powered cars were implicated in drag racing and the numerous deaths of teenagers during the era. Indeed, teenage traffic deaths became a staple of the crooners of the era, as they lamented young love lost in tragic wrecks. I’d hate to support that sort of thing.
About the technology, though. None of the guns legally available has the firepower of the fully automatic rifles Mr. Haggard mentions. Today’s guns are semi-automatic, just like almost all of the rifles issued to soldiers in WWII, which were mainly the M1 carbine and the M1 Garand. These guns were, and remain, widely available to civilian buyers, yet havi g wood stocks, don’t seem to inspire the same panic in the gun control forces.
“I have to wonder, though, whether he ever advocated banning the Olds Rocket 98, since high-powered cars were implicated in drag racing and the numerous deaths of teenagers during the era. Indeed, teenage traffic deaths became a staple of the crooners of the era, as they lamented young love lost in tragic wrecks. I’d hate to support that sort of thing.”
I’ll take Bad Analogies for $1,000, Alex. 55,000 Americans are killed by guns every year. I would guess drag racing accounted for less than 100 deaths in that era.
As for the second argument. So what? Do we really want teenage incels, such as Kyle Rittenhouse and the shooters in Highland and Uvalde running around with these battlefield weapons. At least the 18-year olds during WWII had supervision, and, more importantly, connections at home and good jobs to come home to. 40 years of neo-liberal economics have, unfortunately, left these uneducated young men with very little to look forward to. Decent factory jobs or affordable education are simply not available.
It ain’t your grandpappy’s world anymore.
Bad analogy? How so? Both are potentially dangerous instrumentalities, harmless by themselves but deadly when misused. Cars kill far more innocent people than guns. And, of course, the largest part of the gun deaths are suicides, while almost all car deaths are involuntary. Apples and oranges. Of course, the REAL difference is that liberals own cars themselves, and find it far more fun to do their virtue-signaling by forcing OTHERS to make sacrifices, instead
of burdening themselves.
Leftists like Prof. Haggard inevitably overlook the real source of gun violence, democrat run cities. American cities have been turned into “slaughter alleys” of gun violence after nearly 6 decades of democrat mismanagement. Maybe socialist/democrat/leftists should focus where the real problem of gun violence is, instead of trying to get the already over-regulated citizens to give up their guns. But I digress, hoping for “sanity” from the left is a lost cause!!