A Thing About Guns
This piece in the Awl mentioned “Vermont-style” gun control laws. Or, rather, lack of laws. Fun fact: In Vermont it is legal to have a loaded handgun in your car, but all rifles must be unloaded. This is to prevent people from shooting deer out of their truck windows. In Vermont, if you want to carry a gun you just buy one, strap it on, and you’re ready to shoot things. (Though you should know the laws for shooting are way stricter.) I grew up in Vermont, but my family never owned guns. And I never shot one until I’d moved to Portland and visited a firing range with a Green Party gubernatorial candidate.
But it is impossible to avoid guns, growing up in Vermont. There is a strong gun culture that centers around hunting but also the idea of a gun as this mystical woodsman talisman that will protect your family, save your country and improve your sperm count. Like all cultures, gun culture has its rituals. My favorite were the gun safety videos they showed us in grade-school. I used to call them “don’t shoot yourself” videos, because they had a very simple message: Don’t shoot yourself. They taught children how to avoid accidentally killing themselves and/or their best friend with the loaded handgun every father keeps poorly-hidden in his house.
A typical “don’t shoot yourself video” opened with two kids playing video games in a house. One of the kids would say something like “Do you want to see daddy’s gun?” And the other kid would be like, “Yes!” The two would drop the controllers and sprint upstairs to the master bedroom. In some videos, the gun was hidden in a shoe box on the top shelf of a closet. In others, it was nestled in between tightey-whiteys in the sock drawer. What was never explained was why the father hid his gun in porn hiding places. At the time, I was not aware of porn, so this wasn’t an issue. But looking back, it seems the situations in which a man would need porn and a loaded gun are mutually exclusive, unless he was into some really weird sex shit. Or maybe a robber came in and demanded that you hand over your porn collection. “OK, let me just get my porn collection… it’s right here in this shoebox… Reach for the sky, robber!” But, really: Find a better hiding place for your gun!
After finding the gun, the lead kid would extract it from its hiding place and immediately point it at either his or his friend’s face, just like any kid would do. If he was pointing the gun at his friend, he might say something like “Stick ‘em up!” If he was pointing the gun at his face, he just sort of stared into it like you would stare into a very deep well. Then the scene would freeze, everything would turn black-and-white and a shot would ring out. The kid was shot! All us kids watching the video would squirm a bit and there would be two or three gasps and one person (me) would start to cry a little.
That was the scary “Don’t shoot yourself” video. The nice one was the one with Eddie the Eagle. A cartoon eagle named Eddie was the mascot for not shooting yourself in the face, and he was extremely happy about it. Despite having a beak, he smiled constantly as he went around teaching small children from many cultures not to blow themselves away. But Eddie the Eagle was poorly animated and sort of flip-booked across the screen while moving his mouth at random intervals to signal he was talking. Next to McGruff, the crime-fighting dog, Eddie looked sad. But I remember thinking that it made sense that the anti-shooting yourself eagle would be shabbier than the anti-crime dog, since gun violence was just one category of all crime.
Eddie taught us what mistakes the kids in the scary video had made which ended in face-shooting. As a grade-schooler, I thought the first mistake the kids had made was playing Sega Genesis instead of Super Nintendo. No wonder they got bored and decided to play with the gun! As an adult, I now realize the first mistake the kids had made was to be inside the home of a terrible parent who left loaded handguns lying around like they were old copies of National Geographic. But according to Eddie the Eagle, the chain of errors didn’t begin until the kids had found the gun. At that point, according to the Eddie Eagle rap, they were supposed to:
STOP!
Don’t Touch!
Leave the Area!
Tell an Adult!
For weeks after the school showed us the Eddie the Eagle video, this refrain could be heard echoing through the halls, sung by dozens of high-pitched grade-schoolers. “Stop! Don’t Touch! Leave the Area! Tell an Adult!” It’s a miracle that someone didn’t go crazy and shoot up the place, what with all those guns lying around loaded in everyone’s house.
So, yeah, those were the gun safety videos. The ritual meant to instill in children a near-crippling fear of guns. (“STOP!”) And it worked, to an extent. I know exactly what I would do if I came across a loaded gun in a closet:
Poop my pants!
Begin crying!
Run away!
Cry some more!
Now somebody just needs to make a video to stop other people from shooting me.
THE END.
