[Editor’s note a propos of nothing in particular:  Because of all the heavy lifting this issue has endured, 2nd Ammend. v. gun control, yada yada, this column was a breath of pure, fresh air–an original take. That’s why, folks, Ms. H. is paid the big bux & why reprints cost 75 of ’em.

        Well, I didn’t have 75 bucks to lavish on the LaLaTimes, so at first I tried to paraphrase her.  Bad judgement call.  So I set up a link to allow others to purchase the column for a buck-fifty (that link no longer works, by the way–good reason for doing what I’m doing now.) Then the LaLaT. offered free reprints for three months.  So I set up a link to the page I’d made myself.  So now that I’m re-designing my pages, I’ve got a dandy little term handy, “Fair Use.”  Aha! & so there!

        Read this wonderful column at your leisure, then turn your friends on to the dirty little secret: that the emperor is clothed with nothing but a raging jones (yes, I know what the word means and that’s exactly what I mean) for the blued steel. Puts a real picture in your mind, don’ it?

        –Daniel]

                  When the Thrill is Gone

                  September 23, 1999 | SHAWN HUBLER

                  “I had a cousin when I was a child,” a friend, an expert in human behavior, is saying. “One day we went to visit his family and he pulled me aside. He said, ‘C’mere. I’ve got something to show you.’ And he pulled me into his bedroom and said, ‘Look.’ And he pulled out a gun.”

                  The friend’s eyes narrow for emphasis, telling the story. He leans forward, a little furtively. He is in his 60s now, but some things stay with you: The sleek weight of the metal, the curve of the trigger, the bond of that secret, almost unspeakable feeling. “The experience,” he said, “was exactly as if he’d shown me a dirty magazine.”

                  He tells the story–in this season of church shootings and hospital shootings and freeway shootings and alleged dirty cop shootings–by way of getting to a particular punch line. And to the extent that another word can be borne about firearms and those who abuse them, I believe that it’s one of the most underreported aspects of the gun debate:

                  “Guns,” he said, “are a vice. Just like liquor or pornography or tobacco.” They give people–even nice people–a kind of rush. And, with weapons, the more the person is interested in power and worried about weakness, the more intense that rush feels. This is one reason gun control continues to be an uphill battle, even in the face of relentless gun violence.

                  *

                  I share this take because I know the truth in it. I grew up around guns, in one of those oh-so-romanticized parts of the country where everyone hunts. The schools gave days off for deer and bear seasons; some boys didn’t shave until they’d shot their first buck.

                  Guns were all over, and whether it was a rifle or a shotgun or somebody’s dad’s pistol, the power of holding a loaded weapon for the first time always brought something out in people that would make them avert their eyes, or suddenly have to take aim at something invisible on the horizon, or blush and clear their throats.

                  Later, they’d go out of their way to insist that they kept guns only because beef was expensive. Or, guns were an investment. Or, they were “traditional.” Or, dope fiends might break in. But the reasons, legitimate and less so, always came later, after the sense of power and relief and security had coursed through their systems. Just as the reasons not to quit smoking always come after that first, bracing jolt of nicotine.

                  *

                  This is the underbelly of the gun issue, and it doesn’t get much exposure; the debate always hews nervously to the safe zone of the rationales. (Is the crime rate down because of guns or in spite of them? Are massacres in hospitals and churches really the price of forestalling a police state? Did the Founders intend an unconditional right to bear arms when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, or just the right to join the National Guard?)

                  Unaddressed is the less comfy question, the one that cuts through to the modern pathology of guns: Why–in a time of peace and plummeting crime rates and cheap beef and very few truly remote houses–have so many people armed themselves?

                  Never mind why a law written 200 years ago for colonial farmers would allow guns–why do people continue to crave the things? This is one of the safest, richest, most open democracies on the planet. Some 200 million guns are floating around in it. Why? What inner imperative are they addressing? What lust? What imagined inequality?

                  Why do gun owners’ claims that they’re defending the Constitution always sound so much like the protestations of those Playboy subscribers who “only buy it for the articles?” Why does it seem fitting that alcohol and tobacco should be grouped with firearms under the same federal regulatory agency? Why does the love-hate relationship between the NRA and law enforcement always bring the phrase “takes one to know one” to mind?

                  These are not idle questions. California now has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, but no one will ever accuse it of cracking down too soon. The arsenal is hip deep and–short of a repeal of the 2nd Amendment–it’s hard to imagine a solution to the public health crisis that that arsenal has created unless the thrill of guns, like the thrill of bathhouse sex or drag racing or teen smoking, is seen for what it is.

                   

                  And this fascination with guns is no mystery, really, though every shooting yields another round of speculation about “society” and “the reality of evil” and similar moral pretense. Guns hook those souls who are secretly afraid that they might be weak, and who despise weakness, and who can’t feel right without something to quell that shame-soaked sense of being lesser. Guns are a vice, and vice is its own punishment.

                  Shawn Hubler's column runs Monday and Thursday. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com. She’s a sweet person who wields a mean pen. Give her her props.

                  Illo by Daniel ben Avrám

        Well, Ms. Hubler is not stranger to this issue. It is now December 16, 2012, and Sandy Hook has just happened. Here is a column I just came across. She’s obviously been ahead of the curve for decades. And I’ll bet she’s gone, “Will I ever be able to stop writing about this shit?” Her words would certainly be less crude than mine, but I’d also be certain she would approve this message.

        All props to this prophet.

        –Daniel]

                  The Myth of Sylvan Innocence

                  May 22, 1998 | SHAWN HUBLER

                  When we were kids, we had a cousin who lived in the city, and she’d bring her friends down to visit in the summertime. They were hippies, and they’d tell us how lucky we were to be children in “the heartland.” We’d nod politely. We thought they were out of their minds.

                  The heartland. What was that? A simple, kindly place, they figured. A place as innocent as, say, the heart of a child. We were not innocent. Parochial and barefoot, yep, but innocent, hardly. The small towns and backwoods of this country never have been as gentle as city people like to imagine. Our corner of the heartland seemed a magnet for souls who couldn’t handle the world unless they hid out somewhere in the wild.

                  *

                  We knew them by their children. There was the girl in our first grade who, for show and tell, stripped to her slip the way her stepdad had taught her to do. There was the family who lived in a shanty at the bottom of an abandoned strip mine pit whose sons would boast about the way they tortured dogs. There was the boy who thought about bringing his hunting rifle to school to shoot the girl who’d rejected him, then, thankfully, changed his mind. This is not for shock value, only context. These troubled folks were a minority, but there were enough of them to persuade you that cities didn’t have the market cornered on violence.

                  *

                  On Thursday, the dark side of childhood in the heartland reared its much-underreported head. In a small, overcast town in Oregon, a teenager with a gun fixation and a serious emotional problem walked into his high school and opened fire. The act was shocking, vicious, crazy--and yet, so common that, from a distance, it felt like something out of a script. And in fact, it was a cliche of a tragic sort, the eighth schoolyard massacre in this country in five years.

                  There was plenty you could draw from a tragedy like that. You could point to the semiautomatic rifle and the two handguns this kid was carrying and note the obscene lengths to which this nation’s parents have rolled over for the gun lobby. You could wonder what it will take for us to get over our national addiction to rage. You could ask why no one took this kid seriously when he said he wanted to kill people. You could point to the makers of movies and TV shows and video games, whose reliance on violence as a hook approaches the level of pornography.

                  And you could note, as many commentators did, that all these massacres have occurred, not in the wicked cities, but in little towns with names like Springfield and Jonesboro and Amityville that are all the rage for people fed up with city life. Implicit would be the surprise that such a thing would occur among children in small-town America. As if hostility and hurt feelings were the special purview of adult city dwellers; as if the gun problem was the special purview of the urban poor.

                  In fact, it takes a lot of strength to live in a city, the kind of strength that the weakest in a society tend not to have. It is on the outskirts, the fringes, that vulnerability is left to fester, is covered up with pastoral myth.

                  *

                  When we were kids, there was a boy who lived in a trailer, all by himself with his dad. He was a thin boy and quiet, with a dirty face and a crew cut. Every night on the bus, he’d have cuss-word contests with his friends.

                  When they weren’t cussing, they were talking about firearms, and how well they could shoot, and how they would shoot to kill. One day the boy had a fight with his father. He took his gun. He came down to the bus stop with it, waved it around, went up over a hill.

                  We thought he was kidding. We were working-class kids in the heartland. Like those kids in Oregon on Thursday, we thought it was all an act. That night, they found the boy’s body in a woodland clearing, under a red oak tree. He’d fired into the air until he was down to his last bullet, then shot himself.

                  This was many years ago, and you could note that now a kid like that might get all sorts of inspiration from video games and movies and TV. There are all sorts of options now for kids who feel weak and violent, a world of lethal possibilities.

                  Those possibilities will fly right by the minds of the kids who are strong, the kids with the sophistication not to take them seriously. For the rest, the minority, it will be another matter, whether they’re in the heartland or next door to you and me.