When I lived in North Carolina, I took a conceal/carry class in Johnson City over Memorial Day weekend. I did it for a few reasons: first, for the hell of it; second, because my dad had recently gone through the class and thought I’d find it interesting; and third, because despite growing up around guns, my parents never had firearms in the house (meaning I had no experience).
I took the 8-hour class, I shot three rounds on a colt .22, and I got certified to carry a concealed weapon that I didn’t even own.
Later that summer, I took another firearms course from the TWRA. This time, they had an assortment of firearms: .22s, .38s, a peacemaker, a glock, a 9mm beretta. They also had rifles of various calibers. I shot the rifle first. My handgun skills were mediocre, but I was a crackshot at the rifle.
Let me back up. We didn’t have serious firearms growing up, but we did have Dad’s BB gun back from the 50s. It was shaped like a rifle – about the size and even weight of a .22. When we lived in the country, Dad explained that yes, Ralphie, the gun could put your eye out. That’s why we shouldn’t shoot at each other. It probably had enough power to kill a small bird, so Atticus said that's why we shouldn’t shoot at animals. And then my father and I spent the afternoon shooting BBs straight up into the air and running from them as they fell back to earth.
(We did the same thing with a bow and arrow a year or so later. The only rule my Dad had about danger was that he wanted to be a part of it.)
We moved into the city limits when I was 7. Neighborhood watch tends to frown on blindly shooting BBs up into the sky. By this point I was old enough to be trusted with the gun – that is, to not shoot something living. It was too big, and I was too small, to worry about me going Cobain or Hemingway. So I’d go out on Saturday mornings, when the air was thick with humidity and the tall grass wet with dew, and shoot coke cans off our wooden fence. The BBs would lodge in the thin aluminum, or if I missed – which happened less and less as I got older and steadier – they’d disappear into the wood out back.
I did this a lot, growing up. That’s why, I think, when I held the rifle for the first time near twenty years later, it seemed more natural. I knew what it was to have this extension of myself. The handgun concept was still new, but this…this was familiar.
Before I left for Kentucky, my grandmother gave me my great-grandma’s .410 shotgun. I took it home and cleaned it (and cleaned it and cleaned it), and before I left, Dad and I went out to a friend’s property and fired it. It was still a good shot, so I took it back and sat it next to my bed. I like it sitting there. Partially because it belonged to Granny A-, the family matriarch I met once or twice before she died at age 104. The mother of my grandfather, a wild man who died long before I was born, but is still very much alive in my father’s stories.
And partially, because I know how to use it, if I had to.
I say all this to explain that, part of the reason I picked up Gary Paulson’s The Rifle was because of the title. Also, I’m a big fan of Paulson. I read Hatchet back as a kid, as well as Dogsong and a few others. As an adult, I’ve gone back and read over the classics, and tried to find the ones I’ve missed (because man, Paulson wrote a lot).
Paulson writes about the woods, and animals, and nature, and the man knows what he’s talking about. He lives in New Mexico and owns property in Alaska where he trains dogs for the Iditarod (which he’s raced in a number of times). He is a hunter and a trapper. He ain’t no city slicker.
And I say all this to explain that The Rifle might possibly be one of the most misunderstood books I’ve come across in recent years.
It’s a novella, basically – about 100 pages long. I read it while simmering rice to mix with some gumbo I’d made the night before. Wikipedia claims it proves the statement “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” which is wrong. Reviewers on Amazon call it “liberal propaganda,” which is wrong. It is, simply put, a depiction of the continuing life of a rifle, as well as snippets of the lives it comes into contact with.
Given that it’s just 100 pages, and that everything in the story is moving towards this one event, it’s hard to write this and not spoil the climax. But honestly, you know what’s going to happen from the “teaser” on the back. I clipped along at a steady pace, and then slowed during the last 20 pages or so…knowing what was coming, and trying to hold it off. Paulson’s good like that. His style is such that information is straight-forward and blunt. His characters – his young men – are hard. And you love them. And as though this were real, when something happens, response is such that readers are quick to blame something, someone, anything, anyone. That’s why reviewers will call this book anti-gun.
But I think they’re missing the point.
Early in the story, the narrator explains that everything is connected. One change in the past could alter a major outcome in the future. He implies importance in understanding the full picture of history, and not just “selecting” information to store away for later. Otherwise, we fail to see where we are and how we got here, and we stand to lose a lot from that ignorance.
This book is not pro- or anti-gun. But you can look at it like an allegory all the same. What’s wrong with failing to see or understand how history builds on itself? How one moment can have a dramatic effect nearly two hundred years later? The message is more about the importance of history – not just overall history, but individual as well. Which is why I see the gun in my bedroom primarily as an offshoot of my lineage…and why it always sits on its butt, opened and unloaded, and with the barrel pointed upwards.
And the ending? The ending is a reminder that not everything dies, so it’s important to pass it along with care, and knowledge.
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