Well, to be fair, Stephen King is an acclaimed writer of horror fantasy, so he qualifies as a thoughtful authority on…wait, no he doesn’t, does he? King does live in Maine, though, so there’s that.
Here’s King’s entire opinion piece titled, “We’re Out of Things to Say.” (I’m not going to read the Times readers’ comments, because they will just send me to the wood-chipper.) as he pretends that a sloppily-conceived, virtue-signaling sigh is enlightenment:
There is no solution to the gun problem, and little more to write, because Americans are addicted to firearms.
Representative Jared Golden, from Maine’s Second Congressional District, has reversed course and says he will now support outlawing military-style semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the killing of 18 people in Lewiston this week. But neither the House nor the Senate is likely to pass such a law, and if Congress actually did, the Supreme Court, as it now exists, would almost certainly rule it unconstitutional.
Every mass shooting is a gut-punch; with every one, unimaginative people say, “I never thought it could happen here,” but such things can and will happen anywhere and everywhere in this locked-and-loaded country. The guns are available and the targets are soft.
When rapid-fire guns are difficult to get, things improve, but I see no such improvement in the future. Americans love guns, and appear willing to pay the price in blood.
Did King write that during a trip to the bathroom? Rep. Golden, showing the integrity and fortitude our elected officials are famous for, obviously changed his position because he’ll have to run for reelection next year, not out of any sudden epiphany. (Otherwise we can only assume that he finds mass shootings only intolerable when they occur in his own state.) “When rapid-fire guns are difficult to get, things improve” says King: That will be news to Israeli citizens.
But more basically, King only manages to expose his ignorance and bias in this dashed off screed. Americans aren’t addicted to firearms. They are addicted to autonomy, self-determination and the power to protect themselves and their family. No nation on earth has made better use of guns than the United States, which owes its existence to them. No nation enshrined the right to bear arms as a core and essential individual right, and it remains so despite those who believe that the abuses of core rights by the criminal, the insane and the irresponsible should forfeit them for everyone else. Americans still, despite constant propaganda pushing them not to, love the idea that they do not have to depend on the government to solve their every problem and keep them safe, especially at a time when police have been intimidated into passivity and negligence, and when the government plays favorites regarding good and bad riots and rioters.
And King is a hypocrite. His own stories and novels frequently show his protagonists resorting to firearms in order to save their own lives or welfare. I am thinking particularly on the scene in “The Body,” turned into the film “Stand By Me,” when Gordy, the young King stand-in, uses a stolen pistol to stop a threatened knife attack on himself and his friends by the juvenile delinquent Ace and his gang. Americans love scenes like that: it may be fiction, but real life versions happen all the time.
I’ll give the novelist credit for one thing: he’s correct that there is little more to write for the “Do something!” anti-gun fanatics. His lazy op-ed proves it.
Ethics Alarms 
I think the last part of what you said there is where you hit the nail right on the head. There is really nothing that the anti-gun folks can say at this point that hasn’t been said multiple times before, and not just when there is a mass shooting. The fact also is that Stephen King is not in any position to say that anyone should be unarmed. I am very certain that when he goes out in public he is accompanied by armed security as most celebrities are. This is not entirely without a realistic need, celebrities can be targets for kidnapping or just crazy fans who do crazy things. However, it gives the lie to the statement that guns simply are not necessary and without them things improve.
Things improve when there are fewer weapons in the hands of society for tyrannical government. An unarmed populace is very easy to control. Confiscation of weapons in history sometimes has a reasonable basis, such as when the government of Belgium collected civilian armed firearms prior to the German invasion in 1914 to prevent civilian resistance that was likely to be counterproductive. More often, though, collection of weapons from the populace is a prelude to tyrannical measures. It is also historical fact that the Turks collected weapons from the Armenians in World War I even to the point of confiscating large kitchen knives. They said it was to get weapons for the war effort, but we all know what followed. It was not without good reason, either, because on the rare occasion where the Armenians could fight back, like at Van, they gave the Turks a very hard time and did successfully hold them off long enough for the Russians to intervene and save them from being liquidated.
I am not saying that anyone is going to come to liquidate those of us who don’t fall right into the Democratic party line. We definitely aren’t there yet, and I really have a hard time seeing us getting there. However, I also have a hard time believing that the Nazis and the Communists did what they did, yet there is the evidence. The former turned killing into an industry, the latter made democide (a government killing its own people) national policy. Still, there are some eerie parallels: the deliberate sowing of division, the deliberate picking of winners and losers by the government, the spreading of the idea that certain people are simply uncouth and not worthy of society’s protection, the deliberate fearmongering.
The biggest parallel that I have a problem with is the deliberate lying about almost everything by the current government. If a government can lie and say that the economy is great when it isn’t, that the border is secure when it is at its most insecure, that a president who is clearly deteriorating due to age is the most vigorous president yet, and that a president who is now even less popular than his predecessor is the most popular president we’ve ever had, then really is it a far step to pointing the finger at one group and saying that all of our problems are their fault?
It’s clearly not a step too far to point the finger at the previous president and say that he is not just the source of all of our problems but the greatest danger. What’s worse, is that people drink the Kool-Aid and happily nod right along and say lock him up, the very words that they said he must never say. Somehow it never seems to occur to them that a government who targets someone you don’t like today for locking up could target you tomorrow as soon as you become a problem or even as soon as you become less useful.
I’m sure Stephen King would be horrified if he was told that he could not publish any more of his horrific writings and that that would be a serious violation of the First Amendment. However, he has no problem with stripping others of their rights. Those who advocate for the stripping of rights from those who have not abused them really have no standing to complain when they themselves are stripped of rights..
Your point is well made, though King would likely counter that Gordy does not use a rapid-fire weapon on Ace and his statement singled out rapid-fire weapons.
We know that the endgame is that every firearm will be taken away eventually.
Gordy would certainly have been better off with a rapid fire piece, though. When Ace asks him if he’s going to shoot all of the gang, Gordy replies, “No, just you, Ace,” because he has no other choice. With an AK-47, he would have said, “Sure!”
That weapon is indeed the same type King is talking about.
It’s a government issue Colt 1911. Same as this one: https://youtu.be/Bp-HFVG_c4Q?t=410
How many cultural literacy points should Jack lose for not knowing the possibly most iconic American handgun? 😉
I want to ask the anti-gun zealots if they have a solution for why people commit acts of violence in the first place. We do not have a problem with gun violence we have a problem with human violence. Are our schools turning out people unable to cope with life’s difficulties? Is it because we have laws or social constructs that protect one group at the expense of another? or is it that some people are inherently evil and should we as a society put those people away or execute them when exhibit signs of violence such as writing about ax murders or something similar?
So, if we take away the guns how will that stop someone with the intent to do evil from running a bunch of grandmothers over with a truck during a parade? Will we have to ban the sale of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate to prevent the creation of a bomb?
Evil will find a way and until we stop talking about this being a problem of gun violence and start talking about the problem of evil in our society (which we too often glorify) then you will not even begin to solve the problem. By trying to excuse away evil in humans by using societal reasons for the crime or by eliminating or reducing mandatory minimum sentences for using weapons during crime Criminal Justice reformers have effectively made the use of weapons more likely to be used. When you smack the hands firmly the first time the behavior is exhibited it is less likely to be repeated.
Never forget.
The same side calling for decarceration, the same side calling for defunding the police, the same side that accuses the police of habitually hunting down and gunning down unarmed Black men, the same side that accuses the criminla justice system of being systemically racist…
…is the same side calling for stricter gun control laws which would be enforced by these <i.very same police in this very same system.
I am still trying to process what happened in Lewiston – a place in which I spent as little time as possible during the many years I lived in Maine. The town is gritty, an ex-mill town, and I rarely there unless I had business. In my last eight or ten years in Maine, I lived about 30 miles down the road.
Between 1977 and 2017, with a year or a season off elsewhere, I lived in northern New England – specifically, Vermont and Maine. I moved to Vermont in the autumn of 1977 and, with the exception of a year in France in the early 1980s, lived there until 1987, when I moved to Maine. And I lived in Maine far longer than I have lived anywhere else.
In 1983, when I was still living in a tiny town in Vermont, there was a murder. In a town of several hundred, in a state of less than a million, this was shocking news that stayed in the headlines for a week. The victim was a young woman. She was a sweetheart, had a Russian accent, and she and her common-law husband, ran the local gas station/convenience store. He was an Iranian immigrant, gruff and taciturn, but capable of great kindness, which I witnessed more than once. I liked them both very much.
He wasn’t there the morning that Bill Harvey walked into the store and shot her point blank. I knew Bill, too. He was quiet and mousy and shy; he was the guy who serviced the gas equipment at the area restaurants I worked in. He was odd, but he did know his trade; he brought more than one expensive piece of kit back to life over the several years I watched him work.
Apparently, Bill got the idea that Zaid was a threat owing to the Beirut embassy bombing, which happened around then, and decided to off Tanya to protect the United States. Or to take revenge. Or something. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.
I write this in remembrance of the fact that Vermont was heavily armed at the time. Virtually every pickup truck you saw had rifle and a shotgun mounted behind the driver’s seat, and nearly everyone drove trucks – at least in the area in which I lived. Kids were taken on their first hunts as early as five or six; got their first .22s at seven or eight, shot their first deer a few years later. It wasn’t all that unusual, back then, to see someone carrying a sidearm, though it never made much sense to me given how quiet and safe the state was then. The reaction to the murder was straightforward: This sort of thing doesn’t happen here. We know it happens elsewhere, but it doesn’t happen here.
When I moved to Maine in 1987, it was much the same: hunting was simply a way of life, hunting requires guns, everyone who hunted had several – after all, deer, ducks, moose and partridge require different gear. For larger game such as deer, semi-automatics have long been the way to go; a gun that fires faster greatly reduces the likelihood that the deer you just gut-shot wouldn’t run off while you were working the bolt and re-aiming, thence to die horribly from sepsis, instead of taking a sudden fatal shot half a second later.
This is part of what drives me nuts about the entire “assault rifle” debate: the ignorance, carefully crafted by people who should (and don’t always) know better. Other than the cosmetics, there’s functionally no difference between a semi-automatic deer rifle and an AR-15-style weapon, other than its appearance and fact most deer hunters prefer a bigger slug. In fact, some states actually require a minimum of a .243 (6mm) caliber. Most ARs shoot .223 (5.56mm), although some are chambered to accept larger rounds.
As in Vermont, the area of rural Maine in which I lived was home to many an avid hunter, many a pickup truck, many a gun rack behind the seat. Kids drove to high school with their rifles in their hand-me-down trucks. The bottom line is that any time you went to the local lumberyard or supermarket, there was enough weaponry in the parking lot to sustain a serious firefight, if anyone was so inclined. But nobody was.
Then there’s the fact that despite all the headlines, the vast majority of mass shootings are carried out with handguns, not rifles of any sort, be they semi-automatic or plain-old-plain-old. That’s from FBI statistics.
Simply put: it’s not the weaponry. We’ve long had the capability to create untold carnage in our everyday lives, and up until comparatively recently we’ve not done so. There’s something else going on – some THINGS, more likely.
We live in a time when there’s a mood of anger and fear in our culture. To me, it seems cultivated – by news media that wants to sell our eyeballs; by politicians who know it’s easier to stoke anger and envy than kindness and cooperation; by schools that prefer indoctrination to critical thinking; by tech companies that will do anything for a buck, and probably dozens of other players.
It all seems to be linked to a simple desire: a hunger for power.
In that environment, when it’s so hard to trust, I don’t find it surprising that so many Americans are armed. Those problems exist elsewhere, of course – but here in the United States, we have a right to arm and defend ourselves – even if many only have a vague inkling of the threats we’re defending ourselves against. And yes, crazy people can and do slip through the cracks.
One of the great pities of what happened in Lewiston – and there are many – is that apparently nobody at either scene was carrying. That’s legal in Maine, or at least, it is currently. I suspect a lot more people in the state will be packing going forward.
Speaking of facile morons, here’s one thinking he’s making two points in one:
Why do Palestinians have a right to bear arms? Isn’t that wrong?
Every single human being on this planet has a right to bear arms.
It’s just unfortunate that most governments squash that right.
And that so many Americans can’t grasp that simple construct…
Why isn’t anyone talking about how this shooting is another failure of the government to protect its citizens? This was a man with severe mental health issues (how many times has that come up in mass shootings) that authorities ignored. He was hospitalized for mental illness recently, the military warned them, the family warned them. How many mass shooters are mentally ill? Most of them seem to be. I do feel better knowing that sane people don’t commit mass shootings.
There was an even worse example in Utah recently. In March 2020, a man (James Howard Klein) suspiciously shoplifting and trying to purchase a large amount of ammunition with two other sketchy people (I am assuming obvious drug users) in Minnesota. The man had just gotten out of prison for counterfeiting, illegal possession of a firearm, and possession of drugs with intent to distribute (he served less than a year). When the police showed up, he ran and fired on them from between the cars of the parking lot and tried to carjack a person. He was charged with first degree assault, 2nd degree assault, possession of a firearm by a felon, and first degree robbery, He posted bail. In May 2021 (while out on bail), he was pulled over by police in Utah with an illegal handgun and 9 lbs of meth in the trunk. He then stole a police car, fired on police officers, shot some people he tried to carjack, etc. He did this with the police officer’s rifle. He also had an illegally obtained handgun (boy, that gun control really works). For this encounter, after being convicted of multiple counts of attempted murder, and everything else, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Now, Larry Vickers was just sentenced to 25 years in prison for working for a company that obtained plans to build AK-47’s, even though Larry Vickers has an FFL and is licensed as an SOT and can legally produce machine guns. When law-abiding people are convicted of ‘carelessness’ or accidental violations of gun laws, they are routinely sentenced to 10 years in prison. An example of an ‘accidental’ violation of gun laws is a man who loaned a rifle to someone to use in a match. A part broke in the rifle and it ‘doubled’ (firing 2 rounds with 1 trigger pull). The man was convicted of transferring an illegal machine gun to another person and sentenced to 10 years in prison. That was upheld on appeal.
The government can’t protect you, it doesn’t even try to protect you. The Utah incident was at least the 3rd time police had caught this guy in illegal possession of a firearm. He was convicted of a felony and then he was caught 3 more times! How many of the mass shooters had been previously reported to the FBI or police and they did nothing about it? Most of them? It is no wonder that there are so many conspiracy theories that the police are actually grooming mass shootings and facilitating them (like the 2015 Draw Mohammed Day shooting in Garland, Texas).
Here is a quote from Paul Harding.
https://www.quora.com/Wont-curbs-on-gun-ownership-make-police-work-safer-in-the-US/answer/Paul-Harding-14