The Weekly Screed (#748)

Daddy-O meets Quentin Tarantino
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Guns are the thing.

As the latest massacre reports trickle in, we’re beginning to grasp the disturbing banality of  Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Yes, Tashfeen grew up in a hotbed of Muslim fundamentalism in Pakistan and pledged her troth, before pulling the trigger, to the self-proclaimed Islamic “State.”

On the other hand, Malik was a housewife with a pharmacy degree and a newborn baby — in the suburbs.

There were no red flags. They were both educated and employed. Farook was born in the USA and his young wife was jumping through the hoops requisite to becoming a naturalized citizen. They were the American dream — mosque-going, clean-cut, middle-class twenty-something newlyweds with a nice house and a granny in the attic, as normal as hummus pie. Nobody on the block thought they were especially evangelical, political or ideological. Neither had a rap sheet or record of mental illness.

What they had, stockpiled at home, was enough ordnance to turn a public building into an abbatoir. They’d bought all their weapons, ammo, and bomb materials, legally, in California, a state whose gun laws are, they say, “restrictive.” After blasting 35 unarmed people — who had done neither of them a lick of harm — Farook and Malik apparently planned to continue their spree elsewhere, slaughtering more strangers.

They’re dead now. We’ll never know why they went off on their little killing jag, or what might’ve come next. But I can’t stifle the suspicion that they just did it because they could. Their guns were easy to collect and cheap to buy — online, at Dick’s, or over at the VFW gun show. And golly, once you had ‘em, how could you resist using them?

I once recorded the sensation of hunting with my dad’s. 22 rifle: “With this gun, I knew, I was able to see more closely, to move more stealthily, to shoot more keenly, to vanquish all things as far as my eyes could see. But only if I used it, only if I shot something. Left unfired, it was dead weight; it was unfulfilled… I understood how guns alter people. Guns want to be used. Guns want.”

I’m wondering today what Farook and Malik would’ve done — anything? — if guns hadn’t been so downright handy, so widely approved, so expressive of the promise and the freedom of the American way of life, and death.

Since I often tend to interpret life through movie characters, I thought of Artie West, the high-school psychopath played by Vic Morrow in Blackboard Jungle. In that film’s climax, Artie — who, for months, has been tormenting his teacher, Mr. Dadier (Glenn Ford) — challenges “Daddy-O” to fight him, right there in class. Artie whips out a switchblade and slashes Mr. Dadier. Bleeding but unbowed, Mr. Dadier backs Artie into a corner, subdues him, shames him and wins over — at last — a roomful of erstwhile juvenile delinquents. It’s a great scene, eminently credible in 1955.

Today? If, say, Quentin Tarantino was re-making Blackboard Jungle, he would direct Artie to rise beside his desk, whip out a Glock and empty his entire 30-round clip into Daddy-O, blowing him through the blackboard and into the next classroom, after which Artie and the guys would storm out of school and head for Mr. Dadier’s apartment to gang-rape his pregnant wife (Anne Francis — who, speaking of movies, was just plain yummy in Forbidden Planet).

Back in 1955, screwed-up kids like Artie wielded blades, not guns. Even the NRA, in those days, was a little queasy about sadists with Tommy guns. Today, the Supreme Court and the Republican Party will defend to someone’s else’s death the right of of anyone at all to buy, barter and accumulate Tommy guns, grenades, cannons, shoulder-mounted missile launchers — you name it.

The thing about guns, you can’t just let ‘em sit there. They whisper to be held, oiled, loaded, fired. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, guns gotta kill.

So, I wonder. What if the ’55 American status had remained quo, and Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik weren’t able to stash an arsenal of three automatic assault guns, two semiautomatic handguns and 6,000 rounds of ammo? Would they have resorted to bombs? Could they get hold of enough smokeless powder to make the bombs at all?

Even if they could, c’mon! Bombs don’t deliver the same tactile thrill as the trigger of a nice AR-15 or AK-47. This was proven by a) the Farook/Malik pipe bomb that fizzled in San Berdoo and b) the putz in Paris who blew up near the Stade de France without killing anyone else. Just him, all by his lonesome.

Kaboom. Sad.

And then, I’m thinking, what about their clothes? Good guns need good outfits. Both Farook and Malik were wearing “commando gear.” They looked the part, they were armed to the teeth, they were ready to die and they reeked of cordite.

Artie West? He was wearing a t-shirt.

Without the guns, would Farook and Malik have done nothing at all? I mean, I’m sure they would’ve meant to do… something. They would have continued to stew and bitch about the infidel government (don’t we all?). But — absent all that convenient weaponry — life keeps getting in the way. Odd jobs around the house (cleaning out the eaves, putting up the storm windows). Maybe another baby, or two — and all that mother-in-law, parent/teacher tsuris that comes as kids keep growing. And suddenly, a few years later, you’re sitting on the back deck, having a non-alcoholic beer with the Cleavers from next door and reminiscing about your youthful dreams of jihad and martrydom, peace and love. And nobody got killed.

The NRA wants us to believe that tragedies like San Bernardino, Columbine, Colorado Springs, Sandy Hook and Newtown pose a chicken-and-egg conundrum, insisting that guns don’t make killers. These nuts would be killers anyway, they tell us, with switchblades, pipe bombs, crowbars, candlesticks in the library.

Au contraire, Daddy-O. Guns are the thing.