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. .
. to have conversations on all of the issues . . .
Who would have thought Stephen King, master of contemporary American
horror and, some would say, gore, would so deliberately enter the American debate on gun
control?
Not only does his creatively sinister mind wage in on the issue that
has been pushed to its tipping point by the Sandy Hook tragedy last month; he
does so with precise measures of common sense and just a touch of the macabre.
It’s as if this writer of extreme fiction took the Sandy Hook Promise with one
hand placed over his heart and the other atop a copy of Carrie.
The acclaimed author of real and psychological horror does not suggest repealing the Second Amendment’s Right to Bear Arms. King's Kindle single Guns, published this month, offers a concise
rationale that boils
down the issue of gun violence and control to three “reasonable measures” that
would curb gun violence
- · Comprehensive and universal background checks
- ·
Ban the sale of clips and magazines
containing more than ten rounds
- ·
Ban the sale of assault weapons such as the
Bushmaster and the AR-15
As a longtime teacher of the argumentative essay, I’d
give King an A+ on his essay (an accolade he can add to his National Book Award
in 2003), not just because I agree with him, but because he presents his case so
well. It’s worth $.99 just to see how carefully he did his homework (research) and
structured his argument.*
Yet, it is not King’s rhetoric I am most impressed with. It
is the personal narrative that opens the piece about steps he took in the late
1990s, almost fifteen years before Sandy Hook. That was when he pulled Rage, a novel he wrote in 1977 (under the pseudonym of Richard
Bachman), out of print because it had come to be loosely connected to four
different teenagers who committed school shootings.
King addressed the difficulty
he had making this choice in a keynote address to the Vermont Library Conference in 1999, clarifying he did not feel that, just
because these troubled teenagers had copies of Rage, they committed the shootings. “My
book did not break them or turn them into killers; they found something in my
book that spoke to them because they were already broken,” King said.
King’s statement reveals what rational
Americans know: there is no simple cause and effect to maniacal acts of
violence, acts that take a greater toll when guns are accessible. Yet, even
though King believes in the First Amendment's Freedom of Speech as well as the
Second Amendment, he agreed to surrender a portion of his right to free speech, because, as he states in Guns, “I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is
why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with
firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.”
King admits regretting having to remove the
book from, essentially, the reach of deranged teens, but he goes on to say he did it
because it was the right thing to do.
Let’s look at this: In King’s case, the morally right thing for him to do was to
voluntarily give up a bit of his
First Amendment Right – Freedom of Speech – even as essential as that right is to a writer.
With King as a model of reasonable concession, it should not be too much to ask an adherent of the Second
Amendment, the Right to Bear Arms, to voluntarily give up the bit of the
arsenal that has repeatedly become the mass destroyers of innocent lives.
Innocent lives like the 20 first-grade children and six adults of Sandy Hook
Elementary School who were gunned down because of a lethal mix of mental
illness, accessible weapons, a culture’s penchant for violent entertainment,
etc., all of which King addresses in Guns - just as he is compelled to address the most real horror he has ever put to mind:
the “gore-splattered rooms and hallways (of Sandy Hook Elementary School) when
the first responders entered them."
*proceeds of King's Kindle Single Guns goes to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
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