How Can We Reduce Gun Violence?

Apropos of what happened at that Christian school in Madison, WI last week, want to read the best book ever written about guns and gun violence? Try What I Lived For, a novel written by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1995.

I won’t go into any description of the plot, or the characters portrayed in this work because I don’t want to spoil the pleasure you’ll get from reading this finely detailed text. But I will insert here some lines she has written which describe what the main character — a guy named Corky — was thinking when he got himself a gun: “Fuck the NRA. Fuck that crap about citizens bearing arms, that’s a red herring set up by the firearms manufacturers, simple as ABC. But, living in Union City, like any big American city, you’re crazy not to be realistic.”

So, here’s a guy who decides that reality requires him to keep a gun, which of course will later get picked up by someone else and you can figure out the rest.

I’m sure that the man in Wisconsin this week who took his young, teen-age daughter out to a shooting range and taught her how to shoot his assault rifle made a point of instructing her how to behave safely with a gun. It never occurred to him that his daughter would respond properly to everything he told her about using the gun safely and then one day would take the gun into her school and shoot the place up.