In Anthony Mann’s 1950 Western “Winchester ‘73,” a rare and much-desired Winchester rifle brings misery and death to the unlucky souls who manage to bring it into their possession.
In the West as brought to you by Mann — and his star, a troubled and morally ambiguous Jimmy Stewart — the gun isn’t a symbol of freedom as much as it is a curse, destined to ruin everyone who covets its power.
I thought of both movies last week during the search for Robert Card, the 40-year-old suspect in a mass shooting that killed 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine. That, in fact, is how gun manufacturers have promoted the rifle, not as a tool for hobbyists and sportsmen, but as a lifestyle accessory that stands for freedom, individualism and masculine self-sufficiency. “Stand out and blend in all at the same time,” reads one 2011 advertisement for a camouflage-finished assault-style rifle.
I have written about the fiction that an “armed society is a polite society,” an aphorism taken from science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s novel “Beyond This Horizon,” where men carry weapons and duel with one another over perceived slights and insults. An armed society, I argued, is a society in which fear and suspicion replace trust and equal regard. And in that society, democracy cannot work.
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