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In great stretches of the West—notably Montana, Utah, Colorado and Idaho—a standard fixture in most rural homes is the .30-30 in the corner, the universal "thutty-thutty" deer rifle. In the South and Southwest, rare is the farmer who does not keep a rifle in his pickup all the time; Lyndon Johnson used to have a deer rifle clipped under the front seat of his Lincoln while at the ranch. In Alaska, shooting is a way of life—and often of preservation.
If any weapon is likely to be outlawed entirely it is the handgun. The U.S. Mayors Conference last week recommended that its ownership be banned for all but law-enforcement officials. Japan, with 100 million people, allows only 100 of them to own pistols, for shooting matches. Britain authorizes their use on pistol ranges and almost nowhere else. But in the U.S., 70% of shooting deaths are caused by handguns. Often the weapon is a cheap, .22-cal. import. In Houston, where 244 murders were committed in 1967, a tinny .22 known as the "Saturday-night special" figures in a disproportionate number of killings. In Charlotte, N.C., foreign-made light pistols are known as "hand grenades" among police because they are likely to explode in the user's grip. Mass-stamped from light metals, they lose whatever accuracy they have after as few as five shots.
The Equalizer. With all the dangers that guns represent, why are Americans so enamored of them? For the man with a feeling of insecurity or inferiority, a pistol in his pocket is the "equalizer," the "difference." For the gang youth, it is a badge of bravery. Ernest Dichter, director of the Institute for Motivational Research at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., maintains that "we're just emerging from a brawn culture into a brain culture, and brains are not as dramatic." Guns compensate for that, Dichter adds, by serving as "a virility source. Clyde [of Bonnie and Clyde] is impotent, and he is using his gun to balance that." Indeed, Freudians point out that the gun is an obvious phallic symbol, conferring on its owner a feeling of potency and masculinity.* In a talk with French Novelist Remain Gary two weeks before he died, Robert Kennedy perceptively touched on a related aspect of the gun mystique. "I like Hemingway very much as a writer," said Kennedy, "but he was the founder of a ridiculous and dangerous myth: that of the firearm and the virile beauty of the act of killing."
Quite properly, many observers note that changing gun laws will not help much as long as people yield to the violent impulses that seize them. "Cain and not Abel, is the father of man," notes Chicago Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. Half a century ago in The Golden Bough, Anthropologist Sir James Frazer discerned "a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society, unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture." To cope with what Sir James described as this "standing menace to civilization," many authorities suggest that a way must be found to control aggression and, as Detroit Psychiatrist Bruce Danto puts it, to "detect in the early years the signs of a guy who is an accident waiting to happen."