Goodness, y’all! What happened in Tucson last weekend has aged Larry McMurtry by many years! The novelist and screenwriter who brought us Tommy Lee Jones in a chalky beard was tasked by the New York Review of Books with writing an elegy for the rampage that killed some and wounded many last weekend.
I have read better elegies on tumblr.
To wit:
Ours is a culture in which shooting sprees have become almost commonplace. Hearing that the site and surrounding area was entirely sealed off I elected to try to learn about it by watching television. The people who were trapped at site stood around in small clumps, subdued; no doubt they were feeling lucky not to be on stretchers or in ambulances. Probably they were oppressed by the randomness of it all: a deranged kid walks up and blasts twenty people. Hello. The novelist Theodore Dreiser would have known how to handle such a scene.
Elsewhere in the piece, McMurtry commends the reactions he witnessed on the picture box:
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, elected eight times, spoke with considerable dignity, mentioning that in his view, there had been excessive language used in Arizona, both on radio and television. It may be free speech, he said, but it has consequences.
Several references were made to an ad placed by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, in which crosshairs targeted, among others, Congresswoman Giffords’s district. (Sarah Palin has sent Congresswoman Giffords a letter of sympathy, and the crosshairs have now been removed.)
And it was reassuring to see that young Luke Russert, reporting on the scene as a correspondent for NBC, has the journalistic poise inherited from both his parents.
Meanwhile, the dead are dead, the wounded are wounded, and except for twenty families, some of them now broken, the violent stream of American life goes on absolutely unchanged. Arizona and indeed America continue to be packed with guns. I own several myself (none of them semi-automatic) and I have no intention of disposing of them, although I don’t feel I should conceal them and walk down urban streets.
Oh, Larry.
Lo and Behold, James McMurtry takes to the comments section to counter his papa:
We don’t have a gun problem per se, we have a violence problem. There are indeed cases where guns don’t help. Here, I’ll give the anti gun crowd a bit of ammo. Restricting handguns could save some lives, the lives of those shot on impulse in heated domestic squabbles and drunken fights gone too far. But no gun law will prevent random mass killings. The worst such killing committed by an American in recent years was carried out with a truck load of fertilizer, not a gun.