Stephen King
has entranced millions with tales of dread but his latest volume will
read like a horror only to the National Rifle Association and other
gun-rights advocates. The best-selling author made an unexpected charge
into the national debate on gun violence on Friday with a passionate,
angry essay pleading for reform.
King, who owns three handguns,
aimed the expletive-peppered polemic at fellow gun-owners, calling on
them to support a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons in the
wake of the December shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school which left
20 children and six adults dead.
"Autos and semi-autos are
weapons of mass destruction. When lunatics want to make war on the
unarmed and unprepared, these are the weapons they use," King wrote.
He
said blanket opposition to gun control was less about defending the
second amendment of the US constitution than "a stubborn desire to hold
onto what they have, and to hell with the collateral damage". He added:
"If that's the case, let me suggest that 'fuck you, Jack, I'm okay' is
not a tenable position, morally speaking."
King finished the 25-page essay, Guns, last Friday and wanted it published as soon as possible, given the
Obama administration's looming battle with the National Rifle Association and its allies.
It was published on Friday on Amazon's online Kindle store, price 99 cents.
The novelist, who has sold more than 350 million books, last year issued a call for
the rich, such as himself, to pay more tax.
In his latest foray into politics, he acknowledges his liberal
inclinations but stresses that he is an unapologetic gun-owner with at
least half a foot in the conservative camp of the US divide.
In
folksy, salty prose which blends policy prescription with dark humour,
King alternately cajoles, praises and insults gun advocates in what
appears to be a genuine pitch to change their minds. King kept Barack
Obama out of it.
"Here's how it shakes out," the essay begins,
before describing 22 ritual steps in which the US experiences a school
massacre. Excoriating the media and television voyeurism, he writes:
"Sixteenth, what cable news does best now begins, and will continue for
the next seventy-two hours: the slow and luxurious licking of tears from
the faces of the bereaved."
King recalls that the fictional
schoolboy killer in his 1977 novel Rage, which was published under a pen
name, Richard Bachman, resonated with several boys who subsequently
rampaged at their own schools. One, Barry Loukaitis, shot dead a teacher
and two students in Moses Lake, Washington in 1996, then quoted a line
from the novel: "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?"
King said
he did not apologise for writing Rage – "no, sir, no ma'am" – because it
told the truth about high-school alienation and spoke to troubled
adolescents who "were already broken". However, he said, he ordered his
publisher to withdraw the book because it had proved dangerous. He was
not obliged to do so by law – it was protected by the first amendment –
but it was the right thing to do. Gun advocates should do the same, he
argued.
The idea that US gun rampages stem from a culture of
violence was a "self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious
types and America's propaganda-savvy gun-pimps", he wrote. In reality
the US had a "Kardashian culture" which preferred to read and watch
comedies, romances and super-heroes, rather than stories involving gun
violence.
Much of the opposition to gun control stemmed from
paranoia about the federal government, King argued. "These guys and gals
actually believe that dictatorship will follow disarmament, with tanks
in the streets of Topeka."
He assured gun owners that no one
wanted to take away their hunting rifles, shotguns or pistols, as long
as they held no more than 10 rounds. "If you can't kill a home invader
(or your wife, up in the middle of the night to get a snack from the
fridge) with ten shots, you need to go back to the local shooting
range."
The mockery continued when he noted semi-automatics had
only two purposes: to kill people, and to let their owners go to a
shooting range, "yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire and
the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel".
King noted
that homicides by firearm declined by 60% in Australia after strict gun
controls were introduced. And that about 80 people die of gunshot
wounds daily in the US.
In a line sure to affront the
NRA,
and delight the gun-control lobby, he added : "Plenty of gun advocates
cling to their semi-automatics the way Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson
clung to the shit that was killing them."
The essay was published as a
Kindle
Single, a format launched in 2011 for pieces too long for magazines but
too short to be books. In a statement following publication, King said
every citizen needed to ponder the fact the US was awash with guns. "If
this helps provoke constructive debate," he said, "I've done my job."
Rory Carroll @
'The Guardian'