Firearms | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The right to carry a gun, whether for purposes of self-protection or hunting animals, is an emotional issue embedded deep in the cultural consciousness of the United States. By the 1990s, after some eight decades of destruction wrought by the use of guns by organized crime, political assassins, and dangerous psychopaths, many Americans were growing disturbed by their gun heritage, but they remained in a hopeless minority when it came to effecting anti-gun legislation.

The American love of firearms probably originated in a combination of frontier actuality and propaganda coup. When English colonists and Native American cultures collided, the usual result was gunfire from the colonists, who won the Pequot and King Philip's wars and secured their toeholds in North America. When Revolutionaries created an icon of independence, it was the Minute Man, usually portrayed with plow in the background and long rifle in hand. According to Samuel Adams and the Concord Battle Monument, it was the Minute Man who defeated the British and won the Revolution. That heroic figure of the liberty-loving, citizen-soldier hovers over all twentieth-century discussions of gun control and the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, whose complete text reads, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Those individuals and organizations like the NRA (National Rifle Association) who favor individual gun ownership stress the last two phrases of the Second Amendment. Those who support gun control or elimination argue that the complete Amendment provides for police organization, not for an individual right.

In the twentieth century, certain specific weapons have achieved iconic status for Americans. In popular military imagination, there are only two American rifles. The first is the M1, or Garand Semi-Automatic Rifle, which General George S. Patton memorialized in his famous assertion, "In my opinion, the M1 rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised." The M1 is the final development of infantry doctrine which stresses target selection, accuracy, and measured fire. (The original design specifications excluded full automatic firing.) For perhaps 25 years (1944-1969), the M1 was a symbol of American might, rooted in GI grit and bravery, and reluctantly deployed in order to save the world. Some of the best movie images of M1s in skilled acting hands can be seen in William Wellman's Battleground (1949) and Samuel Fuller's Fixed Bayonets (1951).

The second legendary American military weapon is the M16 rifle. Imaginatively speaking, the M16, which can be toggled for either semi-automatic or full automatic firing, figures in the moral ambiguities of the late Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Late twentieth-century infantry doctrine takes as fundamental the statistical fact that, under fire, the majority of riflemen in World War II did not fire their weapons, and those who did tended to fire high. The M16, with its automatic-fire option and light recoil, lets a soldier "cover" a target area without particular target selection. Probability, more than aim, determines the results.

One of the most enduring and disturbing images of the M16 resides in a television interview during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The reporter questions a rifleman (Delta Company, 5th Brigade, 1st Marine Division) who repeatedly jumps into firing position, shoots a burst of automatic fire, and drops down to relative safety. He first tells the reporter, "The hardest thing is not knowing where they are." After another burst, he says, "The whole thing stinks, really."

When such confusion, which must be common to the experience of all soldiers in the field, is replayed uncensored on television, the iconography shifts from democratic Dogface to enduring but victimized Grunt, doing the will of (at best) deluded leaders. The M16 shares in this imaginative legacy of the Vietnam War, whereas M16s in the hands of young, drug-busting Colombian soldiers, or crowd-controlling Israeli soldiers are more likely to provoke sympathy for peasants and protesters than concerns for enlisted men.

The counterpart to the M16 is the Soviet AK47, which expresses the same combat doctrine. With its characteristic banana-clip and crude wooden stock and fore-piece, the AK47 has a somewhat sharper emblematic presence than the high-industrial M16, perhaps because it is associated with the uprising of the oppressed. It was the weapon of the victorious North Vietnamese Army, and figures in the artful, controlled imagery from that side of the war. In contemporary Mexico, the contrast between M16 and AK47 is stark. The army is equipped with M16s. When one of their most militant opponents, Sub-commander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, appears for photo opportunities, he does so "in full military garb with an AK47 automatic rifle strapped across his chest" according to the New York Times.

The M16 carries its ambiguous military significance into equivocal imaginations of civilian life. While there are relatively few images of the M1 deployed on American streets, the M16 figures prominently in urban American drug movies. Police SWAT teams carry the weapons in various configurations, ever more technically advanced. In such modern, nihilistic gangster movies as Michael Mann's Heat (1995),Val Kilmer's split devotion to family and to casually murderous excitement has him emptying uncounted magazines of.223 ammunition at expendable policemen, his weapon always toggled to full automatic. The camera delights in shattered windshields, while the exquisite audio-track records the counterpoint of firing with the clinking sound of spent cartridges hitting the streets and sidewalks.

Moving from long guns to hand guns, the American pistol that probably holds pride of place in twentieth-century civilian imagination is the ".45 Automatic," Colt's Model 1911, semi-automatic military side-arm whose high-caliber, relatively low-velocity cartridge was meant to knock a man down, wherever it struck him. It had a name-recognition advantage, since the other Colt.45, a six-shooter, is the favorite gun of such Western movies as High Noon (1952). A presentation-grade version of the 1911 Semi-Automatic Colt.45 appears in the movie Titanic (1997). The counter-image to the.45 automatic is the German Luger, officer issue in the German army. The pistol's narrow barrel and curved trigger-guard give it a sinuous, European quality, in contrast to the bluff (and heavy) American.45. In cinematic imagination, seductively evil men use Lugers in such movies as Clint Eastwood's Midnight in Garden of Good and Evil (1997).

The more visually and audibly stimulating weapon associated with mid-twentieth-century urban mayhem is the "Tommy gun," whose movie and comic-strip rat-a-tat-tat! lights up the seemingly countless gangster-vs.-cops movies. A Tommy gun is the.45 caliber, fully automatic Thompson sub-machine gun. The "sub" simply means that it is smaller in size and magazine capacity than a military machine-gun. There is a famous photograph of smiling John Dillinger, with a drum-magazine Tommy gun in one hand, a small Colt automatic pistol in the other. The most eroticized, cinematic realization of the Tommy gun's power is in the slow-motion shooting of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at the end of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1969).

Other handguns permeate late-twentieth-century popular culture. The James Bond novels and movies briefly popularized the Walther PPK, and Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series gave us "Go ahead, make my day," but few know the make of gun down which he speaks (it's a Smith & Wesson.44 Magnum). There are Uzis (Israeli micro sub-machine guns) and the MAC-10, but none of these weapons has the imaginative staying power of the M1, M16, AK47, Colt.45, Luger, and Tommy gun.

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