A Reflection on Guns and Golden Calves

Abstract

A Reflection on Guns and Golden Calves Stephanie Y. Mitchem The perpetrator of mass murder, Dylan Roof, sat for about an hour in a Bible study before he pulled out a gun and killed nine people on June 17, 2015. Roof reportedly stated: “I have to do this.” This is obviously an abbreviated version of the horrific murders in a black Charleston, South Carolina church, but I want to sharply focus on that churched hour with the victims informed by the compulsion to “do this” with a gun. The Charleston occurrence is a uniquely United States’ incident on several levels, particularly in the contexts of guns. Those contexts are critically important; it is not just this gun or this person or this event. Reducing complex, lived realities and social theories into single anecdotes is, at best, anti‐intellectual. However, the reductions of our realities happen everyday, between hearsay and the many forms of media. We become used to the quick and easy answer that resolves nothing. Such reductions also assisted in constructing the formational environment that nurtured a Dylan Roof. And the guns I reference are not those needed for farming or hunting or wanted for sport, like various rifles. Instead, the guns of cities, of high‐density population areas, are handguns and assault weapons, turning war against other humans into a new pastime. These pastime guns can be seen as a contemporary, falsely worshipped, golden calf of the United States. The “golden calf” I reference is from the decades‐old Cecil B. DeMille production of The Ten Commandments. That old movie version of a biblical story is fully Americanized and commercialized, fitting our capitalistic framework very well. The movie not only creates a version of the Bible, but it creates a version of Jews—Hollywood Hebrews—whose identity revolved around being the oppressed others and being slaves for the Glam Egyptians (Yul Brynner!), with a bit of religion thrown in. The villain was Edward G. Robinson who strutted about in full gangster mode; the Robinson character (no, such is not in the Bible) was the genius promoter of the golden calf, while Moses (aka Charlton Heston) was busy talking to God. The calf was composed of everybody's gold melted down (Slaves with a bunch of gold? A smelter in the desert?) The “worship” was complete with dancing girls in scanty costumes not meant for rough desert climes but well suited to a Vegas hotel. The glitzy DeMille version detracts from the message that the real evil is found in people who want to create their own version of god, a version that is a controllable thing bringing comfort to the delusions of any who believed. I contend that guns have become like a golden calf, a version of religion in many places in the United States. Guns are commercialized, given justification through laws and blessed with an idea of “rights.” At the back end, the truth is: Guns define power as the real god, one that is controllable of other people's bodies and thinking, deluding the believer into a sense of self‐righteousness. Lest you think I am just hateful about guns, I need to state here that I was raised in a household with guns. My mother was a police officer in the former Women's Division in the city of Detroit. She taught her kids solid rules for handling guns. (The cop mom with the revolutionary daughter is a different story for another day.) The photograph above is from a 1971 Detroit Free Press article, “When There Are Posies on the Pistol.” It was my mother's weapon. Women's Divisions had been established to “handle” crimes involving women and children. These old divisions ultimately were found by the courts to discriminate against the women police officers because of different pay and different entrance requirements. But having a division that focused on women and children could have made a difference in the lives of today's 12‐year‐old Tamar Rice playing in a park in Cleveland, OH, with a toy gun or the 14‐year‐old girl slammed to the ground by a white officer for suspiciously attending a pool party in McKinney, Texas...