1978 - “The Deer Hunter”
In John’s Gospel, the first gift of the risen Christ to his frightened disciples was God’s peace. Christ sends us out with the gift of peace, just as he sent out our ancestors in the faith. Every one of us can be a bearer of peace in eastern Massachusetts and beyond. The violence which is everywhere in our country profoundly touches all of us. In September 2012, violence struck at the heart of our diocesan community when 19-year-old Jorge Fuentes was murdered while walking his dog outside his home in Dorchester. He was an exuberant, remarkable young man and natural leader, adored by the children he mentored at St. Stephen’s Church and St. Mary’s Church in Boston and respected by his peers. Many in our diocese knew him because he grew up and worked in the B-SAFE summer and B-READY afterschool programs and the Barbara C. Harris Camp of our diocese. Many of us will be on “Walk for Peace” this weekend, remembering Jorge, and the many other victims and families of victims affected by gun violence.
“The Deer Hunter” presents a whole culture in which guns are central…guns are for hunting, yes, but hunting is in many ways, a prelude to violence, war, and the horror of “Russian roulette.” It presents a gun culture that runs so deep that it ruins lives, while initially presenting a front of “normalcy.”
I grew up in gun country (upstate New York). It’s not Texas, or Nevada, or the deep South, but it was white, rural America.
Some of my childhood memories include being shot at by bb guns, hearing rifles go off in the woods by our house, and gun play by children (including me) of all ages and sexes (cap guns, play rifles, play machine guns, etc.) All of this took place in the shadow of the war in Vietnam, and in the glowing light of huge doses of violent television (from “Gunsmoke” to “Starsky and Hutch.”) Summer camps included courses in riflery. Both kids and adults hunted and one of my schoolmates got in a lot of trouble for bringing a couple of rifles to school and keeping them in his locker for some time. By trouble I don’t mean getting locked up, but maybe being suspended or arrested (I don’t recall).
My uncle had an extensive gun collection which he displayed with great pride in his “den.” I kind of thought it was some weird male thing but not particularly noteworthy.
When I was older and staying at a B&B in my home town, the host stepped in to warn me that he’d just bought a new automatic weapon (maybe an AK-47 or something like it) and was going to be doing some target practice in the back yard of where we were staying. Another time on vacation, someone in a car driving by shot me with an air gun. Meh.
Reality is a social construct. For me, the take-away of growing up in a culture like this was that guns were a “normal” part of life. So, despite being fairly liberal, and growing up in a bespectacled intellectual home as the daughter of an academic and a writer, for many years I scoffed at the notion that we should do away with/limit/stress out about guns. I mean should we do away with axes, in case there is a Lizzie Borden among us?
The relationship between guns and violent crime was one that I mostly saw played out in the movies. My love for gangster and spy movies was probably made possible by the fact that I never thought of myself as someone who might become a gun victim.
In my 20’s in a job in Brooklyn, we worked with a young man with intellectual disabilities from an impoverished neighborhood (more impoverished than the one I worked in, anyway.) He emptied the trash receptacles on our street as part of our “business improvement” and we’d often sit together in my office where he’d laugh at the fact that I didn’t eat the crusts on my sandwich. “You better eat that sandwich!” he’d say to me. One day, he didn’t come in. I found out he’d been a bystander in a shooting in his drug-plagued neighborhood and had been shot in the leg. He came back after a couple of weeks, but he was scared. He would sometimes talk about the shooting and a look of agony (recalling more the pain than terror) would come over his face. He was now walking with a limp.
Did that turn my point of view around? I’m sorry to say it didn’t! I still felt that violent gun play was something that was “out there.” And that guns were not the root of the problem.
The shooting at Newtown changed me. The horror of a mass shooting in which the shooter didn’t know any of his victims (unlike Columbine which to me seemed a clumsy crime which at least was predicated on relationships) was so disturbing because it made the murderer’s gun the actual murderer: basically a machine without a conscience. Seeing that crime take place in a setting so familiar to me…an elementary school, the classroom with small children, a quiet suburb, and seeing people trying to dissect the personality of the shooter while not focusing on the danger of automatic weapons, made me turn around. Since then, the Bible study group, the Christmas party for social workers, public schools, walking a dog--these have all been scenes of shootings where I can see my “self” as a possible victim.
This weekend I will “Walk for Peace.” I am walking against gun violence, and for those who have lost loved ones to violent crime. Personally, I am not necessarily walking because I see the neighborhoods most affected by gun violence to be the ones who need peace (although that is partially true). I am mostly walking against guns. I get a daily feed of gun accidents and killings that take place in white rural and suburban America. Yes, all you hunters, home protectors, first responders, I hear you. I don’t believe in taking away all our citizen’s guns. But I would like to encourage gun manufacturers to insist on responsible sales practices and to invest in potentially safer "smart gun" technology. And I would like to see some kind of ban on automatic weapons--why would you hand over your thinking to a gun when a gun essentially pulls its own trigger?
Yes, people kill people. But if guns can be characters in movies, they can be killers too. They are not just a part of the culture of the “other,” they are a part of the culture of me, and the culture of us.
����1��xS
