Get to work! New non-fiction books: Paul Auster: “A gun ban would be ineffective”

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Colorful feather headdresses or a cool Colt – this was the question I had in my childhood, when we were still carefreely playing “Indians and Cowboys” in the garden. My godfather gave me a wigwam tent because I liked the indigenous peoples of North America better. But there was also a shiny silver pistol. Later, as a teenager, I scored two or three goals in a boys’ shooting competition, which was enough to win consolation prizes. Since then I have never touched a weapon.

“I have never owned a firearm,” writes award-winning American writer Paul Auster (77) in a recently published essay. – At least not the real one. Because as soon as he ran out of diapers, he walked around with a revolver on his hip for two or three years. “I was a Texan, although I lived in the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey, because in the early 1950s the Wild West was everywhere.” He soon replaced the shooting iron with writing pens.

In this book, Auster speaks out against the shooting madness of his compatriots: “In the United States, with a population of 331 million people, there are about 400 million firearms – more than one per man, woman and child. About 40,000 people die from bullets every year – that’s more than 100 a day. “On each of these average days, about 200 people are injured by gunfire,” Oster estimates, “which amounts to 80,000 a year.”

Traffic accidents also kill 40,000 people in the United States. But when it comes to mass shootings, people always say they confuse individual perpetrators. Oster: “To say that guns themselves have nothing to do with it is no less grotesque than to say that cars have nothing to do with car accidents (…).” However, there is a fundamental difference: “Guns exist solely to destroy lives, while cars are designed to transport living people from one place to another.”

Why are there so many gun enthusiasts living in the United States, why is the country structured so differently than the rest of the world? Oster explains this historically: “The United States was created by violence, but it also has a history of 180 years of continuous war with the indigenous peoples of the land we took from them, and the continuous oppression of our enslaved minority.” Two sins for which the country has not yet paid.

Do intellectuals living in New York today see a gun ban as the solution? Surprisingly not: “Gun owners in this country would disagree,” Oster writes. “Prohibition would be as ineffective as the alcohol ban introduced in 1919.” But only a minority of bad people may have to be expropriated. “If the bad guys didn’t have guns, why would the good guys need them?” – asks Oster.

Source: Blick