Men own guns at nearly twice the rate of women, and within all of this there is something deeply pathetic about the state of American manhood. Gun culture reveals the centrality of violence to American conceptions of manhood – a violence which ultimately harms rather than protects Sometimes, they are the lives of small children, innocent to the ways of a world which has allowed them to die. The pleasure derived from guns, the sense of participation in America’s deepest myths about itself which they might foster, come at the expense of tens of thousands of lives a year. Their choices make society less safe, not more. But everyone else who defends their own right to possess a gun, who lauds guns as the bringers of peace and order, is guilty too. Mass shooters may be, as the writer John Ganz put it, the “ nightmare obverse” of the ideal of the lone frontiersman. Such reasoning responds to a deep-seated American historical myth, and allows the speaker to imagine themselves as the hero.īut they are not heroes – far from it. It’s no coincidence that whenever a horrific mass shooting occurs, those in favor of guns respond by claiming that the solution to the guns of the bad guys is more guns in the hands of the good guys. The country has long valorized masculine heroes – the cowboy, the frontiersman, the patriotic soldier – who impose their will on the community’s enemies with violence. The gun is the great symbol, and poisonous offshoot, of American individualism. What is at issue here is something more foundational, and more difficult to change: American culture itself. But the constitution can be changed or reinterpreted, and special interest groups can be vanquished. And it’s also true that the NRA is a malign force in American politics.
It’s true that gun-rights advocates rely on a surely mistaken reading of the constitution to justify arming themselves to the teeth. But neither of these things really get to the root of the pathology. Critics of the sickness which is America’s obsession with guns often focus their fire on the second amendment, or the perverse political influence of the National Rifle Association. What cultural value, what material interest, could be worth this? It must be something that its defenders consider supremely important. When a gunman murdered dozens of elementary-age schoolchildren, leaving their bodies in such a state that parents had to give up DNA samples for them to be identified, it was one such day.
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What we learned about how to live through a pandemic and how to solve a murder.S ome days it feels like guns are such a foundational part of American identity that the country would have to cease to be itself before it would give them up. Justin hands over the season to Francis at Parc de L'Espoir, the memorial to people who died from HIV/AIDS in Montreal's gay village. Le Village : meurtres, combats, fierté, a French language sister podcast, is available now on OHdio. Produced by Francis Plourde, Carrie Haber and Michelle Gagnon.
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While the city's police force dithers over the presence of a serial killer, a group of queer activists starts making connections, and rises up to start a movement that would end up changing thousands of lives. But when they start turning up dead in hotel rooms, beaten lifeless in city parks, and violently murdered in their own homes, the queer community has more to fear than the disease. In the early 1990s, as AIDS tightens its grip on major cities around the world, the relative safety of Montreal's nightlife becomes a magnet for gay men.