A Seattle artist’s paintings examine our pervasive and uncomfortable fascination with guns
How visitors to the Pipsqueak Gallery feel about Cynthia Linet’s “Gun Show” will likely depend on how they feel about guns. To gun-averse Seattleites, the reaction may be shock. Linet’s paintings of an armed population, based on photographs taken from the Internet, drive home what it means to live in the country with the highest level of civilian gun ownership in the world. There are guns in holsters, guns in garters, guns in underwear, guns held by children and youth. A little girl holds one with a “Hello Kitty” logo, a teenager wearing a hoodie covered in peace symbols fires a gun and a baby chews on the barrel of a revolver. There are images of an armed Jesus (the photo that inspired the painting was posted online with the caption “Blessed are the armed for they shall inherit the earth.”) Even pro-gun advocates might find some paintings unsettling, like the man holding a pistol behind a naked woman’s back, with the caption, “Give Your Honey a Gun for Christmas.” These — more than the paintings based on militia recruiting posters, KKK symbolism or militarized police — drive home the idea that we live in an armed society.
The number of gun deaths in the United States is quite high for an industrialized country, even when you consider the fact that a third of those deaths are suicides. But is the problem the number of guns or the culture behind that number? The number of guns and the number of deaths by guns are not particularly correlated. Switzerland has about half the number of guns per capita as the U.S. — still quite high for a developed nation — but its gun homicide rate is miniscule. There are several nations in Latin America and Eastern Europe that have much lower rates of gun ownership than the U.S. but much higher gun homicide rates per capita.
Linet is appropriately concerned with the images of children holding and shooting weapons. But at least some of those images come from the “other” side of our culture — the one that associates guns with security. I grew up in Texas and shot a pistol on a target range when I was six. I was a skilled marksman in high school, where I practiced on, yes, targets in the shapes of people. In my case, shooting at those targets did not desensitize me, as conventional liberalism might expect; instead, it contributed to my growing opposition to war. Still, I grew up thinking of a gun as a kind of tool, which could be used properly, say, to hunt deer, or improperly, say, to kill innocent people.
However, that’s as much of a distortion of the meaning of guns in our culture as the gun-averse view that simply sees guns as something evil. Guns are no more simply tools for protection or hunting than cars are simply means of transportation. Guns speak to a deep part of our psyches, and Linet in her images captures that. Guns are powerful. Guns are sexy. Guns are magic — they are the next best thing to lightning coming out of your fingers. If you believe in an avenging God rather than a pacifist one, why wouldn’t a modern Jesus have a gun?
In many people’s magical thinking, having a gun will protect them from all the dark things — and dark people, if they’re white — that the media encourages them to fear. It doesn’t matter that the odds of being in a situation where a gun provides effective protection are far less than the odds the owner will be accidentally shot by that same gun. Until we address the feelings of powerlessness and fear that move many people to buy a gun, we’re not going to move them with statistics or even outrage.