The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor famously and emphatically rejected the idea that the host used in the Communion rite is a mere symbol. Gun owners might have a similarly negative response to New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s claim that guns “have an almost entirely symbolic function.”
“No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled [by the use of guns]; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again,” declared Gopnik in a Friday post dealing in part with this week’s murder of two TV journalists near Roanoke, Va. “The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada.”
Gopnik contended that “those who, in the face of all the evidence, still insist that guns are not the cause of the American epidemic of gun violence have decided that the deaths of...Alison Parker and Adam Ward—like those of the children at Newtown—are the cost, to be blithely endured, of the symbolic pleasures that guns provide. Since the cure is known for certain, those who refuse it can only have decided that they enjoy the disease.”
From Gopnik’s piece (bolding added):
[G]uns, for many Americans, are a sort of secondary, symbolic car: another powerful symbol of autonomy and independence. The attachment to them that so many Americans show—unique among the civilized peoples of the world, and at a cost so grave that the rest of that world often turns away, appalled—is nonetheless understandable to anyone who comes late to driving: to have potentially lethal power within your grasp is an immensely empowering drug. Cars are obviously in a different category, because their benign use is so much greater than their lethal one…
One of the last redoubts of the gun lovers—those who, despite the evidence, allow the pleasure of expressing autonomy to overwhelm all other, more reasonable evaluations—was that, even though evidence showed an overwhelming correlation between the availability of guns and the number of gun killings, there was still no evidence that American non-domestic gun massacres were directly tied to wide gun distribution. In fact, as a piece in Fusion (which generously cites this writer) details, that redoubt has now fallen to empirical investigation…
…Those who, in the face of all the evidence, still insist that guns are not the cause of the American epidemic of gun violence have decided that the deaths of…Alison Parker and Adam Ward—like those of the children at Newtown—are the cost, to be blithely endured, of the symbolic pleasures that guns provide. Since the cure is known for certain, those who refuse it can only have decided that they enjoy the disease.
For the deeper truth is that cars are not, or not only, symbols of autonomy. They are, in every sense, vehicles of it. Guns, however, have an almost entirely symbolic function. No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has been refuted again and again…The few useful social functions that guns do have—in hunting or in killing varmints, as a rural man such as my father has to do—can be preserved even with tight regulations, as in Canada. Cars have to be, and are, controlled: we license their users and insist (or should) that they regularly prove their skills; we look out for and punish drunken or reckless users. If we only achieved, in the next few years, a regulation of guns equal to that of cars, we would be moving toward the real purpose of autonomy, which is to secure the freedom from fear as much as the freedom to act. Symbols matter. Lives matter more.
In June, a few days after the Charleston church shootings, Gopnik wrote that “on most public issues, there are two reasonable views…But on gun control there aren’t. All the facts are in; all the social science is long settled; the constitutional positions are clear, if contested, and the wiser way known and shared by mankind. On one side are facts, truth, and common sense. On the other, an obsession with dark fantasies of individual autonomy and power—the sheer fetishistic thrill of owning lethal weapons.”
