[This book, says reviewer Dunbar-Ortiz, "contains a passionate
narrative" by Paul Auster, a poet and novelist, alongside "stark and
somber black-and-white photographs of sites of mass shootings" by
Spencer Ostrander.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

A NATION OF GUNS  
[[link removed]]


 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
October 1, 2023
Monthly Review
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This book, says reviewer Dunbar-Ortiz, "contains a passionate
narrative" by Paul Auster, a poet and novelist, alongside "stark and
somber black-and-white photographs of sites of mass shootings" by
Spencer Ostrander. _

,

 

Bloodbath Nation
Paul Auster, photographs by Spencer Ostrander
Grove Press
ISBN-13 978-0-8021-6077-5

Mass shootings, particularly school shootings like the ones at
Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, and many others, are horrific
tragedies for the families and communities traumatized by senseless
violence and loss, and for the nation as a whole. Yet, what has
resulted from each one of these terrible events is not a turn away
from guns, but just the opposite: an immediate spike in gun sales,
often with some states enacting more pro-gun rights legislation making
it yet easier to purchase and own guns. The sole ideas floated by gun
enthusiasts in the wake of school shootings are to arm teachers and
staff, hire more police, and “harden” schools, creating a
prison-like setting. In contrast, gun control advocates—who
represent the majority in nationwide polls—point to the
proliferation of firearms, with nearly four hundred million in
circulation, more than the population of the United States itself.

Congress passed some minor gun control measures in the wake of two
mass shootings in May 2022—one by a young, self-described white
nationalist who targeted the Black community in Buffalo, New York, and
the other by a young man who did not appear to have an ideology,
massacring nineteen fourth graders at an elementary school in Uvalde,
Texas. Yet, despite the fact that both shooters were barely 18 years
old, the Republican cosponsors of a bipartisan bill refused to require
that the age for acquiring an AR-15 style rifle be raised to 21 years.
Around the same time, the Supreme Court struck down a New York state
law that required a prospective gun buyer to document cause in order
to be licensed for a concealed weapon; the decision applied to five
other states that have similar restrictions.

The national grief and soul-searching that ensue after these massacres
look for an answer to the question of: _Why is this happening?_ But
some very basic, painful truths are consistently avoided in these
discussions, and it may be exactly in what is not being talked about
that the key to an understanding, if not an actual solution, can be
found. The U.S. crisis of mass shootings, the phenomenon of gun
hoarding, and the commercial popularity of military-style firearms
with unlimited magazine capacity are not incomprehensible. What is
required is an understanding of the actual origins and meaning of the
Second Amendment and the role that firearms have played in the forming
of the U.S. nation-state and white national identity. In my book
_Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment_, I traced that
history.

Now we have a new book, _Bloodbath Nation_, that transcends all
previous handwringing on the matter of guns in the United States,
where a third of all gun suicides in the world take place. The
147-page book contains a passionate narrative by celebrated poet and
novelist Paul Auster. The text is accompanied by stark and somber
black-and-white photographs of sites of mass shootings taken during a
two-year period by Spencer Ostrander. The photographer shared the
images with his friend Auster, who offered to write captions for the
photographs and compile a book. These captions turned into five deeply
felt essays. Auster brilliantly interprets the photographs, calling
them “gravestones of our collective grief” and “photographs of
silence.”

There are no people or cars in the photos, all taken at dusk and dark,
listing only the sites, the locations, the dates of the shooting, and
the number of people killed and injured: a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona;
a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs; a Macy’s department
store in Washington state; the City Hall of Kirkwood, Missouri; a
Lockheed Martin plant in Mississippi; three photos of the Walmart in
El Paso; and the school shootings in Parkland, Florida; Roseburg,
Oregon; Isla Vista, California; an Amish school house in Pennsylvania.
Then there are the houses of worship: the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in
Oak Creek; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in
Charleston, South Carolina; the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh;
and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. We see
social sites like the packed Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida;
another nightclub in Columbus, Ohio; a movie theater in Aurora,
Colorado; bars in Dayton, Ohio, and Thousand Oaks, California; and, to
date, the location with the largest number of people killed,
sixty-one, in Paradise, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, where the
gunman rented the top floor in a high-rise hotel and, with a scoped
automatic rifle, fired into an outdoor crowd enjoying a live country
music concert. The shooter shot himself as police approached the
source of the slaughter, leaving no clues or explanations, his only
motive apparently being to use some of the more than fifty
high-powered rifles and sidearms that he had stored in a number of
houses he owned. Every one of the firearms had been purchased legally
at a number of different gun stores in several states.

The number of deaths in these frequent mass shootings pale in
comparison with the number of gun deaths—nearly forty thousand each
year, more than half of them by suicide. Among the nations of the
world, these numbers, and the nearly four hundred million guns in
circulation, are unique to the United States, with its ignored, echoed
gunshots, every man a soldier in the taking of the continent and the
control of enslaved people.

In addition, guns and the ease of obtaining them also signal a severe
mental and physical health crisis in the present. Auster interviewed
Frank Huyler, an emergency room doctor at the University of New Mexico
Hospital, who describes in hideous detail what a bullet does to the
body and the gross numbers of torn up and bloody bodies that are
brought to the ER. Huyler details the nature of different kinds of
bullet wounds, something we rarely see photographs of, except in
B-movies that glorify gun play with blood and gore. As psychoanalyst
and medical doctor Ravi Chandra wrote in the wake of the Marjorie
Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland: “The steel
of a gun is the coldest thing in the world. Even when silent it shouts
a threat. But it has never been silent, never in the history of the
United States But there are other voices. There are the screams of
millions dead. More have died by gunshot than in all our country’s
wars combined.”1
[[link removed]]

What is different about Auster’s slim book that makes it so
compelling? Although Auster has published other nonfiction books and
articles, he is primarily a poet and best-selling novelist with an eye
for cultural and psychological aspects and the depths of tragedy,
violent history, and paranoia. Mainly, though, it is the first
literary work on U.S. gun violence and gun proliferation reflecting
the power of words, as Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote:

Between my finger and my thumb

the squat pen rests, smug as a gun.

Somehow, Auster’s words and Ostrander’s bleak photographs capture
that power of words.

The text of _Bloodbath Nation_ begins with Auster’s own relationship
with guns, writing, “I have never owned a gun,” explaining that no
one in his immediate family had any interest in guns. But, like most
boys in the mid-twentieth century, he soaked up movies and television
shows—he wore a cowboy hat and a cheap toy pistol, mimicking his
heroes Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, and other heroes in Western
B-movies—writing that “Everyone carried a gun in those stories,
both heroes and villains alike, but only the hero’s gun was an
instrument of righteousness and justice, and because I did not imagine
myself to be a villain but a hero, the toy six-shooter strapped to my
waist was a sign of my own goodness and virtue, tangible proof of my
idealistic, make-believe manhood. Without the gun, I wouldn’t have
been a hero but a no one, a mere kid.” This suggests that part of
growing up is to put away childish things, but for those millions of
owners of multiple guns, such as the Las Vegas shooter, gun hoarding
is arrested development.

As an example, a boys’ summer camp that Auster attended in the New
Hampshire woods featured swimming, baseball, canoeing, tennis,
archery, horseback riding—and also target practice. Auster writes
that the boys learned to handle and shoot a .22 caliber rifle at paper
targets, an aim at which he excelled. But, for Auster, that was it, as
the next year his parents sent him to a camp closer to home that did
not have target shooting. However, to this day, he marvels that he
vividly remembers how good he felt shooting, and as with baseball, it
created a sense of connection between himself and something a great
distance away—with firing a bullet and hitting the target comes a
feeling of satisfaction and achievement. Auster tells of one other
experience with a gun when, at fifteen, he was invited by a schoolmate
for a weekend of skeet shooting with the friend’s father. Now, he
had a more powerful weapon cradled in his arm, a double-barreled
shotgun. He was a natural, the first shot hitting the clay disc, but
he never had the desire for a repeat performance.

Why, with those positive experiences of great satisfaction, did Auster
have no interest in guns as he became an adult? He guesses that
because, as part of extended urban family, he had no past experience
with gun culture, through neither anyone in his family nor in his
Brooklyn community. He writes that “even though stories about
gangland murders filled the newspapers of the 1950s, I don’t recall
a single instance when a person in my town brought up the subject of
guns.” In the era of societal concern about so-called juvenile
delinquency in urban areas across the country, the chosen weapon was a
knife or fists, not guns. However, an event haunted his
family—mysterious to him growing up—that involved a shooting. Only
when he was older did he learn from a relative that his paternal
grandmother had shot and killed his grandfather, making gun violence
personal.

With Auster’s narrative of his own rather intense (but not lasting)
relationship with guns, he captures what is not much discussed in
arguments and writing about guns: Culture is a key factor. I know
this, having grown up in rural Oklahoma where everyone had at least a
.22 rifle and/or shotgun; some, like my father, also had a deer rifle
with a scope. I have a pleasant scent memory of gun oil and, visually,
of my father and my two brothers oiling and cleaning the rifles. I was
ultra-aware of the guns, because my mother—unlike other women in our
rural community, who took firearms for granted and, in some cases,
even used them—hated guns and was terrified of them. She would not
touch a gun, nor would she allow my older sister and myself to touch
the family guns. She insisted they be hung high on the wall, out of
the reach of children.

Auster sees two U.S. cultures in pro-gun and anti-gun circles, which
reflect deep divides, historical and current, in the broader culture.
He writes, “Germans have faced up to the barbarism and inhumanity of
the Nazi regime, but Americans still hoist Confederate battle flags
throughout the south and elsewhere and commemorate the Lost Cause with
hundreds of statues glorifying the traitorous generals and politicians
who ripped the Union apart and turned the United States into two
countries.” Having grown up rural and living my adult life in
cities, I know the difference, and guns are a deadly symbol of the
country’s divide. Unlike me, most of the friends and relatives I had
who moved to cities to work maintain the rural mindset. Then there are
those, many of them politicians, who pretend to be good ol’ country
boys, borrowing from the church of the Second Amendment, the National
Rifle Association, who pretend that guns do not kill people; rather,
people kill people. To that, Auster responds: “To say that guns do
not cause gun violence is no less ludicrous than saying that cars do
not cause car crashes or that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer.”

Auster observes that the

toll of gun violence goes far beyond the pierced and bloodied bodies
of the victims themselves, spilling out into the devastations visited
upon their immediate families, their extended families, their friends,
their fellow workers, the people of their neighborhoods, their
schools, their churches, their softball teams, and communities at
large—the vast brigade of lives touched by the presence of a single
person who lives or has lived among them—meaning that the number of
Americans directly or indirectly marked by gun violence every year
must be tallied in the millions.

Obviously, widespread gun violence constitutes a serious health
crisis, both physical and mental; ask any emergency room doctor, as
Auster did, or listen to families of survivors of gun violence,
including suicide. Even still, state or federally funded health
studies related to gun violence are opposed by the gun rights industry
and the politicians aligned with it.

In the final essay, Auster argues that nothing will change until there
is a general understanding of the source: the history of violence in
the founding of the colonies and of the United States, drenched in
blood and deep divisions, including a horrific civil war over the
enslavement of Black people followed by a century of codified
segregation. “Peace will break out,” he writes, “only when both
sides want it, and in order for that to happen, we would first have to
conduct an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we are and who we
want to be as a people going forward into the future, which
necessarily would have to begin with an honest gut-wrenching
examination of who we have been in the past.”

Like Auster, I find it disturbing that most social justice activists
avoid the issue of guns. From my own experience as an activist in the
1960s, I understand the romanticization of firearms, recalling the
valiant armed struggles for freedom in Vietnam and in Africa and Latin
America, our heroes Che Guevara, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense,
the Red Army faction, Palestinians, and the AK-47 as a symbol of
freedom. All of this creates a kind of gun fetishism at worst, and a
sincere defense of gun rights as a tool of liberation at best. It was
not until I was invited to write a short book on the Second Amendment
that I grasped the horrors of gun proliferation, the lack of gun
restrictions, and especially the history of the Second Amendment as a
tool of white settler control over enslaved Africans and of the
genocide of Native American nations and communities. Had Auster’s
book been available when I decided to write _Loaded_, I would have
felt no need to take it on. Auster tells it all and more.

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]]
Ravi Chandra, Guns Are Not Our God! The NRA Is Not Our Church! (San
Francisco: Pacific Heart, 2018).

* gun violence
[[link removed]]
* mass shootings
[[link removed]]
* Photography
[[link removed]]
* literature
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]