In January 2013, President Obama announced – to predictable howls of outrage – 23 executive orders and three major initiatives intended to curb the spread of guns and stiffen penalties for illegal use and possession. King goes on to argue how profoundly our adolescent experience shapes us, something science has corroborated: Adults do not forget the horrors and shamings of their childhood, but those feelings tend to lose their immediacy (except perhaps in dreams, where even old men and women find themselves taking tests they have not studied for with no clothes on). In likening the current state of American political dialogue, including the debate on gun control, to “drunks in a barroom,” King argues the solution lies in the bursting of the “filter bubble”: If I could wave a magic wand and have one wish granted, I’d wish for an end to world hunger; the small shit could wait in line. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, gun advocates have to ask themselves if their zeal to protect even the outer limits of gun ownership has anything to do with preserving the Second Amendment as a whole, or if it's just a stubborn desire to hold on to what they have, and to hell with the collateral damage. No one really knows what the fuck is going on, but it’s exciting. No one wants to take away your shotguns. In trying to peer past the us-vs-them rhetoric of the gun control debate, King speaks to the cluster of contradictions inherent to each of us: When I think of the politically conservative gun enthusiasts who are opposed to any form of gun control, no matter how many innocents die in acts of gun violence, I remember something a Democratic member of the House of Representatives is reputed to have said about Gerald Ford: ‘If he saw a hungry child as he walked to work, he would give that child his bag lunch without hesitation, then go ahead and vote against school lunch subsidies without ever seeing the contradiction.’. You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7. Men (it's always men) who go postal and take out as many innocents as they can may be crazy, but that doesn't mean they're stupid. For nearly fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. The terrorist attack in Orlando last week sparked a … And yet, that doesn't seem to have stopped Ryan Lanza, or James Holmes, or any of the other notorious shooters of recent memory. Or so I thought. Comprehensive and universal background checks. Stephen King has argued that people who oppose gun control laws have "closed minds". Go here. Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook elementary school, died apparently in an effort to subdue Adam Lanza. I have nothing against gun owners, sport shooters, or hunters, but semi-automatic weapons have only two purposes. Stephen King Calls the Trump Presidency ‘Scarier’ Than Any of His Novels — Watch. Let’s instead stay with David Foster Wallace, who reminded us that “what we need…is seriously engaged art that can teach us again that we’re smart” and embrace E. B. White’s conviction that the role of the media is “to lift people up, not lower them down.”. People actually in touch with the culture understand that what Americans really want (besides knowing all about Princess Kate’s pregnancy) is The Lion King on Broadway, a foul-talking stuffed toy named Ted at the movies, Two and a Half Men on TV, Words with Friends on their iPads, and Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindles. Not because it was great literature — with the possible exception of Arthur Rimbaud, teenagers rarely pen great literature — but because it contained a nasty glowing center of truth that was more accessible to me as an adolescent. tags: gun-control. Too many closed minds on gun control. The final tally was 35 dead and 23 wounded. Pretty soon it’s in third place. If this labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Twentieth, there’s a killer tornado in Louisiana, or an outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast, or a celebrity dead of a drug overdose. Some back down, but when they don't, carnage follows, the kind that gives cops nightmares for years afterwards. In video gaming, shooters still top the lists, but Super Mario Brothers and Pokémon enjoy perennial success, and when it comes to Wii, the 2012 bestseller was a pop-music sweetie called Just Dance 4. Ultimately, King returns to the ethics and rationale behind his decision to revoke Rage, echoing Anaïs Nin on character and responsibility: I didn’t pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it. Nevertheless, I pulled it with real regret. King admits he is coming from the left on this one. Political discourse as it once existed in America has given way to useless screaming. Worse, far too many PROUDLY closed minds. Photograph: Getty Images. Assault weapons will remain readily available to crazy people until the powerful pro-gun forces in this country decide to do a similar turnaround. An interesting point-of-view on the gun control controversy, as Stephen King once authored a book, Rage, that inspired multiple high-school shooting incidents. Few of the trigger-pullers are middle-aged, and practically none are old. As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. No! uring my junior and senior years in high school, I wrote my first novel, then titled Getting It On. Public domain photographs via Flickr Commons. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces: More than merely resurfacing the discourse on gun control, the recent tragedy in Newtown illustrated the futile ebb-and-flow of these debates as school shooting after school shooting shakes the nation yet fails to bubble up into actionable government policy. I’m not saying they’d re-colonize the all-but-deserted middle (lot of cheap real estate there, my brothers and sisters), but they might close in on it a trifle. When I listen to gun advocates and NRA brass on this subject, I get an image of a little kid having a tantrum in the dirt, rolling around with his hands plastered over his ears. Gun owner Stephen King adds his voice to the gun control debate. We will see the BREAKING NEWS chyrons, the blurry cellphone videos of running people, the tearful relatives, the rolling hearses. Gun control activist David Hogg announces new board member for his pillow company and Twitter howls with laughter 12h. ― Stephen King, Guns. His words are intimate and create an atmosphere of unrest and wariness within the debate regarding both gun rights and gun control. On April 28, 1996, he went on a spree with an AR-15. Stephen King, of Gretna and Ashley King shop for a gun at Indian Rock Tactical in Lynchburg on November 27, 2019. In 1997, Michael Carneal, age 14, arrived at Heath high school, in Kentucky, with a Ruger MK II semi-automatic pistol in his backpack. They can weep for the dead children and bereft parents of Sandy Hook, then wipe their eyes and write to their congressmen and women about the importance of preserving the right to bear arms. The violent actions and emotions portrayed in Rage were drawn directly from the high school life I was living five days a week, nine months of the year. Because, boys and girls, that’s how it shakes out. He knows he is tilting against windmills yet lays out an emotional and cogent case that gun rights are out of control. Adamantly shrill editorial stances would begin to modify as a result of tweets and emails saying, ‘Oh, wait a minute, Slick, that’s fucking ridiculous.’ Finally, the viewers themselves might change. He argues that while the mere presence of guns may not be a direct cause of violence, access to them in a formidable enabler of existing problems and pathologies in perpetrators who might not otherwise resort to outward violence, harming many. If this labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Most anti-control firearms enthusiasts have similarly split personalities, and the slogan you sometimes see pasted to the bumpers of their station wagons, campers, and SUVs — YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS — does not make them bad people. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. The full version of this essay, Guns, was published as a Kindle Single on 25 January and is available from Amazon, The bestselling author, owner of three handguns, explains why Americans should accept controls on assault weapons, Kentucky high school students mourn classmates shot dead by Michael Carneal in 1997. Twenty-first, any bills to change existing gun laws, including those that make it possible for almost anyone in America to purchase a high-capacity assault weapon, quietly disappear into the legislative swamp. Out comes the dramatic music and the BREAKING NEWS chyrons. For the bullied underclass — the wimps, the shrimps, and the girls who are routinely referred to as scags, bags, or hos — it’s four years of misery and two kinds of hate: the kind you feel for yourself and the kind you feel for the jackwads who bump you in the halls, pull down your shorts in gym class, and pick out some charming nickname like Queerboy or Frogface that sticks to you like glue. Jan. 25, 2013 at 4:36 p.m. UTC Best-selling author Stephen King has just released a passionate call for greater gun control, titled “Guns.” In a … I list them in ascending order, from the one most likely to happen to the one least likely. I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do. The only assertion I find worrisome is the bombastic certainty with which King dismisses how the “culture of violence” dominating the media, especially entertainment media aimed at young people, affects the development of the human psyche — not so much because I happen to have logged considerable academic hours studying developmental psychology in my own ancient past and remember well Bandura’s famous behavior modeling studies of violence, but mostly because sandwiched in King’s questionably substantiated contention is an outright affront to the general public’s capacity for intellectual stimulation: The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America’s propaganda-savvy gun-pimps. He provides no new ideas but agrees that certain types of firearms should be restricted, background checks made more rigid, etc. Afterwards, the Australian government either banned or restricted automatic weapons and authorised a huge buyback that eventually netted 600,000 weapons. Like? A copy of Rage was found in his locker. Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week's most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children's books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 18, 2015. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/28/stephen-king-on-guns/ © 2013 Stephen King. In the essay, King wrote that “lunatics” use these weapons to wage war … In February 1996, a boy named Barry Loukaitis walked into his algebra class in Washington, with a .22-caliber revolver and a high-powered hunting rifle. In the wake of the Charleston shooting that left nine people dead at the hands of 21-year-old gunman Dylann Roof, who was reportedly on psychotropic medication at the time of the killings, King took to his Twitter account to denounce the “proudly closed minds” of people who are against gun control. Remember that two school shooters, Dustin Pierce and Michael Carneal, expressed incredulity at what they had done only moments later. Since 2006, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month to keep Brain Pickings going. I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do. Here's a dope for you: Martin Bryant, of Port Arthur, in Tasmania. Like “I read a jaw-dropping online defense of these weapons from a California woman recently. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than 10 rounds. The quote is from Rage. Your support makes all the difference. Iowa Rep. Steve King, ... securing the Southern U.S. border and supporting gun owners' views of the Second Amendment. They are more apt to vote for increasing law enforcement funds than they are for increasing school improvement funds, reasoning that keeping kids safe is more important than getting them new desks. I also don't believe the National Rifle Association's assertion – articulated by Wayne LaPierre, its vice-president, each time there's another mass murder by gun in a school or a shopping mall – that America's "culture of violence" plays a significant role in kid-on-kid school shootings. They’re actually the lucky ones. The cable news producers are busting their asses, trying to get some local news reporter on the phone. Here’s one kind of horror that Stephen King isn’t a fan of: The real-life horror of gun violence in America. Second, the initial TV news reports, accompanied by flourishes of music and dramatic BREAKING NEWS logos at the bottom of your screen. Privacy policy. No! Think of the dinner table arguments that might not happen! Ban the sale of clips and magazines containing more than 10 rounds. If Lanza had been reloading after shooting his way in, she might have succeeded. It gives me a certain perspective. Can't HEAR you! Your support makes all the difference. Charlie takes a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher and holds his class hostage. Need to cancel a recurring donation? You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it. Most Americans who insist upon their right to own as many guns (and of as many types) as they want are, by and large, decent citizens. This happy asshole mowed down more than a dozen people in a crowded cafe, then moved on to a gift shop and garage. This is the one that probably won't happen. This probably will happen, and not a moment too soon. The author of The Shining posted a series of tweets in the wake of the Charleston shooting. In the end, this sort of ban can be accomplished in only one way, and that's if gun advocates get behind it. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. ?’ would echo high to the heavens. They are, by and large, decent citizens who help their neighbors, do volunteer work in the community, and would not hesitate to stop and help a stranger broke down by the side of the road. First there’s the shooting. Roy Lee, Jimmy Miller and Richard P. Rubinstein will also serve as executive producers with Will Weiske serving as co-executive producer. The guns-for-everyone advocates hate that statistic, and dispute it, but as Bill Clinton likes to say, it's not opinion; it's arithmetic, honey. He used the rifle to kill instructor Leona Caires and two students. Stephen has written an essay discussing his thoughts on the gun control/gun rights issue facing the U.S., available now as a Kindle Single through Amazon.com. A year after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Stephen King penned an essay entitled Guns, which discusses gun violence.In the essay, King urged gun owners, such as himself, to support a ban on semiautomatic and automatic weapons, the Washington Times reports. Author Stephen King received swift blowback on Tuesday after he attempted to take a jab at outgoing White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany but ended up insulting several followers in the process by demeaning waitresses. Here's an example. During my junior and senior years in high school, I wrote my first novel, then titled Getting It On. While his argument bears a faint hue of apologism (one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that comes with a situation like this), King makes a lucid case for the triggers of violence, be those guns or novels, as precisely that — triggers — rather than singular causes: These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse. King also happens to lean left, but owns three handguns himself, so his perspective pulls from both sides, although he is clearly in favor of Obama's reform proposals. Until that happens, shooting sprees will continue. If, however, the god or genie who bestowed the magic wand told me my one wish had to do with American politics, I think I’d wave it and make the following proclamation: ‘Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year, and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year.’ (Middle-of-the-roaders could stick with CSI.). Guns comes as a kind of follow-up to King’s 2008 op-ed on video game violence and, at just $0.99, is well worth a read. Given a chance to think, even for 48 hours, would be enough to stop at least some of these guys. Ban the sale of assault weapons such as the Bushmaster and the AR-15. Their other use – their only other use – is to kill people. Think of the quiet that might ensue if all that shrill rhetoric were turned down a few notches! Stephen King: Gun owners should support 'responsible gun control' in wake of Charleston murders this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines. The story was about a troubled boy named Charlie Decker with a domineering father, a load of adolescent angst and a fixation on Ted Jones, the school's most popular boy. I can hear people laughing and saying pigs will whistle and horses will fly before that happens, but hey, I'm an optimist. Assault weapons will remain readily available to crazy people until the powerful pro-gun forces in this country decide to do a similar turnaround. Stephen King Calls for ‘Responsible Gun Control’ After Charleston Church Shooting Here’s one kind of horror that Stephen King isn’t a fan of: The real-life horror of gun violence in America. He leaves us with striking insight on the reception of his first novel, our culture as a whole and what may solve these problems in the future. Since then, homicides by firearm have declined almost 60% in Australia. The story was about a troubled boy named Charlie Decker with a domineering father, a load of adolescent angst and a fixation on Ted Jones, the school's most popular boy. The bestselling author, owner of three handguns, explains why Americans should accept controls on assault weapons Kentucky high school students … A shooter with only eight or 10 rounds at his disposal really might be taken down by a brave teacher or bystander. The shooting is relegated to second place. It only makes them walking contradictions, and which of us does not have a few contradictions in our personalities? Can you imagine what that would be like? They must accept responsibility, recognizing that responsibility is not the same as culpability. They seem to have been operating in a dream, two of them verbally asking themselves afterward why they did what they did. Even Stephen King admits that Rage was a part of the problem; hence, his personal sense of accountability came into play and caused him to withdraw the book. In the exclusive online extras below, King shares the horror classic his mom read to him as a child and his views on gun control, a subject he also … Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. 43 likes. A new voice has entered the national debate on gun control, best-selling author Stephen King. What they all boil down to is a trio of reasonable measures. King cites the case of his early novel Rage, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which resurfaced in the late 1980s and 1990s in four separate incidents of mass shootings, both attempted and actual, by teenagers who had read and seemingly imitated the novel. More than merely resurfacing the discourse on gun control, the recent tragedy in Newtown illustrated the futile ebb-and-flow of these debates as school shooting after school shooting shakes the nation yet fails to bubble up into actionable government policy. My book did not break [them] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. That was enough for me. Twenty-second, it happens again and the whole thing starts over. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. Although I'm a blue-state American now, I was raised a red one, and I've spent my life with at least half of one foot still in that camp. Even if I were politically and philosophically open to repealing the Second Amendment (I'm not), I don't believe that repeal, or even modification, would solve the problem of gun violence in America. The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie. Even though by the time of the fourth incident in 1997 the book was already part of an omnibus, King insisted it be pulled by the publisher. To claim that America’s ‘culture of violence’ is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer. Also, La-la-la-la, I can't HEAR you. — Most Americans who insist upon their right to own as many guns (and of as many types) as they want see themselves as independent folk who stand on their own two feet; they may send food or clothes to the victims of a natural disaster, but they sure-God don’t want charity themselves. Guns, she said, are just tools. A PE teacher, in a commendable act of heroism, charged at Loukaitis and overpowered him. Knate Lee, Jill Killington and Owen King will serve as producers. They need to say, ‘We support these measures not because the law demands we support them, but because it’s the sensible thing.’. Proposed legislation from Gov. For the next three, there would be a period of grumbling readjustment as both sides of the political spectrum realized that, loathsome politics aside, they were still getting the weather, the sports scores, the hard news, and the Geico Gecko. So argues Stephen King in Guns — a short Kindle e-book in which the celebrated novelist brings his uncompromising lens, at once passionate and rationally composed, to the issue of gun violence in America. Horror fiction master and mega-selling author Stephen King waded into the raging national debate on gun control over the weekend, publishing a personal essay supportive of the individual right to bear arms but pushing for new laws to curb mass shootings like the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. He killed three and wounded five. If you can't kill a burglar with 10 shots, you need to go back to the shooting range. 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Stephen King will write the last chapter of the series, providing a new coda that isn’t found in the book. —. Published January 28, 2013 I didn’t know what this was about before I started reading,I thought it was a typical Stephen King story but boy was I surprised to find a thought provoking, interesting and important essay on guns and gun violence in America. Author clueless liberal Stephen King Pushes Gun Control, realized his big mistake too late. Claim yours: Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its fifteenth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. I asked my publishers to pull the novel. The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an asshole with no conscience. One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal. Horror writer Stephen King published a 99-cent essay on Friday calling for greater gun control. American horror novelist Stephen King took his opinion on gun control and the opioid epidemic to Twitter this morning. The guns are already out there and the great majority of them are being bought, sold and carried illegally. Literary Productivity, Visualized, 7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated, Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman, Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman, Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts, Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts, Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton, The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks, Bandura’s famous behavior modeling studies of violence, Anaïs Nin on character and responsibility. Like spoons, she said. For one thing, it would entail a waiting period, and that alone might stop a number of would-be mass killers. You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: Partial to Bitcoin? King, famous for writing books including Misery , The Shining , It and Carrie says in Guns , which was released as a short ebook on the Kindle Singles platform, that “strict gun control would save thousands of lives.” I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. Then, waving the pistol in the air, he declared, "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?" They don't arrive at the scenes of their proposed slaughters armed with single-shot .22s or old-style six-round revolvers; they bring heavy artillery. — No! In a provocative essay entitled “Guns” King shares his personal thoughts on … There might even be (o lost and shining city) a resumption of actual dialogue. Violent emotions, especially in teenagers, are like spring tornadoes: their departure is as sudden as their violent arrival. If enough American gun owners urge Congress to do the right thing, and insist the NRA climbs aboard, the results might surprise you. You get your still photo of the location; you get your map from Google or Bing. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 19, 2015 Would you outlaw spoons simply because some people use them to eat too much? In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price. The author Stephen King today published Guns, a powerful essay about gun culture, in which he calls on gun owners to support the ban on semi-automatic weapons. There are rationalisations but very little actual discourse on the subject of banning assault weapons. No! Not a lot; just a slide-step or two away from the kumbayah socialists of the left and the Tea Partiers of the right. One is so that owners can take them to the shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapour spurting from the end of the barrel. For the first month, the screams of ‘What IS this shit?? Charlie takes a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher and holds his class hostage. For most kids, it’s a time of doubt, stress, painful self-consciousness, and unhappiness.

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