THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510050492
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Seeking to minimize the considerable danger implicit in the very presence of a firearm, some pistol-packing genius came up with the following rather numbing reassurance:
``Guns don't kill people - people kill people.''
Presumably sharp knives don't kill people, either, or blunt instruments or heat-seeking missiles. See, it isn't the fragmentation letter bomb we need to worry about. It's the crazed bozo mailing it.
It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.
Excuse me if I find miniscule comfort in this. And I suspect I'm not alone. With the carnage mounting on the streets all around us - and in the schools and homes as well - perhaps it's time to dispense with the mythic and traditionally macho idea of small arms as essential equalizers.
At least one unfooled writer for young people has come forward with a powerful, acute indictment of the notion that guns don't kill people. Gary Paulsen is a three-time Newbery Award winner who resides with his painter wife, Ruth Wright, on a ranch in New Mexico. His carefully crafted new book carries the disturbing surmise of an instant classic.
The Rifle (Harcourt Brace, 112 pp., $16) begins as many a young-adult period piece has before it, with an unappreciated apprentice pursuing his craft shortly before the American Revolution. But Cornish McManus, scoffed at for his obsessive artistry by lesser hands, becomes a Pennsylvania gunsmith in his own right. And his abilities express themselves in the creation of a dream gun, a ``sweet'' rifle:
What made such a rifle, a sweet rifle, so rare is that even if a gunsmith made one, achieved such a pinnacle of art, there was absolutely no guarantee that he would ever be able to do it again. It was said that a bad gunsmith could never make a sweet rifle but that even a great smith might make only one in his life.
Paulsen approaches his prose with the same intensity that his character brings to the crafting of a weapon. No words are wasted. Yet in describing the process of creation, he makes the complex thing clear, the involved method alive and inevitable:
He used finely polished brass for the butt plate - ornately curved to cup his shoulder - and the patch box on the side of the butt and on the keys that held the barrel to the wood as well as the cap at the end of the wood and the barrel to join them with an opening for the hole that ran beneath the barrel groove to hold the hickory ramrod. When it was all fitted and joined, he spent a month of nights smoothing the wood to a marble finish and polishing the brass until it shone like gold, and finally he rubbed warmed beeswax into the wood of the stock until the grain and the bird's eyes seemed to jump out of the wood.
So do the words, emberlike, fairly pop from the page. And, in so doing, they take an abrupt turn from the familiar tale of earnest artist pursuing his ambition. The rifle, not McManus, becomes the protagonist, and we follow it through the progress of the war and through the hands of successive owners over time.
Inevitably, it reaches the collection of a modern militia type named Tim Harrow, hair cut very short under a baseball cap with an NRA emblem on it:
Staggering amounts of information concerning weapons and their use swirled through his head, and with it there was a confusing mishmash of politics and attempts to understand certain aspects of the Constitution and history and a large measure of Christ and Christianity as he thought of it so that it all rolled into one lump in some way he could not define but knew, was absolutely certain, was the only right way to view things.
It was, for instance, entirely possible and in his own mind completely logical for Tim to equate killing an intruder - he would call it ``using justifiable force'' - with freedom of speech, Christ's teachings and an understanding of the technical aspects of the weapon being used to kill the intruder, including where the bullet would hit and what the effect (the ``hydraulic shock'') of impact would be, mixed in with a dose of lifted and largely out-of-context sentences from the Constitution pertaining to rights to privacy and the right to keep and bear arms.
But the story does not end with Harrow. It ends in the household of a nice, responsible, middle American family at Christmastime. Explosively.
The Rifle is more than a cautionary tale. It is an important American parable. Because guns do kill people, particularly here, and all our illusions of care and competence and professional training cannot mitigate that fact. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB