There have been too many deaths lately, and the New Yorker finds in the Uvalde and Buffalo killings the opportunity to give us one of the most edifying essays ever published on the love of Americans for their guns. An arranged love, it seems. Phil Klay, the author, a former Marine deployed to Iraq, now a prestigious National Book Award-winning writer, is well-equipped to kill a myth that contributes to the sale of 20 million firearms each year in the country. . “Like automobiles, weapons have undergone constant technological progress, while being transformed into something more than simple machines, he observes; they are both tools and symbols, possessing a cultural magnetism that makes them the cornerstone of a way of life. They are tools that effectively kill while promising power, respect and equality, freedom from tyranny, crime or weakness. They are the legacy of an imagined past and represent a fantasy about protecting our future. It took almost two hundred years for the ‘guns’ become the problem they represent today.”
Two hundred years of systematic marketing by arms manufacturers, who, since the prowess of Samuel Colt, inventor of the barrel revolver and huckster of genius, have relentlessly promoted in times of peace the civilian use of weapons of war in portraying their society as a battlefield and Mr. Everyman as a brave would-be warrior. Phil Klay discusses these fashionable instruments of death. In the 19the century, farmers were offered heavy machine guns to protect themselves from “marauders” and cattle rustlers. Today, the AR15 from Buffalo and Uvalde,