Michael's essay — America's self-destructive love affair with guns
Last Sunday, I spent much of the first hour of the program talking to Kurt Andersen about his new book Fantasyland.
The book is an exploration of the strange longing Americans have for irrationality, myths, bizarre religious practices and nutty conspiracies going back 200 years or more.
- The Sunday Edition: Why gun control always loses, even after a bloody massacre
We ran out of time before he and I could talk about the most salient and defining characteristic of Fantasyland — the American obsession with guns.
And, of course, last Sunday night a heavily-armed lunatic named Stephen Paddock killed 58 Las Vegas music fans, including four Canadians, and wounded more than 520.
There are an estimated 300 million guns in the United States.
In his chapter called Gun Crazy, Kurt Andersen outlines how the love of guns has become a fetish, an obsession among Americans.
He writes: "Very, very few of the guns in America are used for hunting. Americans who own guns today keep arsenals in a way that people did not 40 years ago. It seems plain to me that that's because they have given themselves over to fantasies."
The gun fetish grew out of and is fed by a host of myths: the settling of the Wild West, the lone cowboy with his Colt Peacemaker, taming the frontier.
The maddening infatuation with individualism over community feeds the myth of the lone and armed hero.
State gun laws such as Stand Your Ground and Concealed Carry, have been driven, Andersen says "much more by fantasy and hysteria than by reason and prudence."
The result of all this fantasizing is a record of home-grown violence unheard of in other industrialized societies.
Fully half of the world's deadliest killings in the last fifty years, have occurred in the United States. Some 30 Americans a day are murdered by guns.-
There have been at least two mass shootings a month in the US for the past eight years.
The gun fantasies are fueled by the five-million member National Rifle Association and its CEO Wayne LaPierre.
Having escaped the grip of reason decades ago, Mr. LaPierre operates perhaps the most effective lobby in Washington.
Senators and member of Congress especially those seeking re-election money, are terrified of Mr. LaPierre and the NRA.
And from his fever dreams, he insistently warns his members and other Americans time and again that a coalition of "anarchists, Marxists, Communists, and the whole rest of the left-wing Socialist brigade" are preparing an all-out physical assault on gun owners.
Everyone thought that after the mass slaughter of 20 school children at Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, things would change.
The only thing that changed is that gun sales went up.
Even as authorities and relatives in Las Vegas counted the dead and wounded, the United States Congress was looking at a bill to make pistol silencers and suppressors legal. Mid-week, the House postponed the debate.
The bill has a good chance of passing.
Most Americans want some kind of sensible gun law. But they will go on hoping in vain.
More children will be slaughtered, young men and women, the old, will die because Americans have sworn unbending allegiance to a few lines written more than 200 years ago by some slave owners in Philadelphia.
The death carousel in Fantasyland goes round and round and never stops.
Click 'listen' above to hear the essay.