Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [25]
One case merged present and past, myth and reality. In the autumn of 1979, a young woman named Kelly Nix set out from Phoenix, Arizona, and headed for Tombstone to take part in the city’s annual “Helldorado Days,” a celebration of the city’s history. She was accompanied by her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. They stopped at a motel in Tucson. The boyfriend had brought his Ruger single-action revolver—the early version without the new safety device—and for reasons no one can explain was carrying the gun by the holster belt inside the motel room. The gun fell from its holster just as Nix emerged from the bathroom. The gun fired; the bullet struck her heart and killed her.
Ruger continues to introduce new guns intended for the same Wild West market. In 1993, for example, Ruger introduced the Ruger Vaquero, a single-action revolver resembling the Colt Peacemaker. Its 1993 catalog said the gun was “sure to be a hit with traditionalists and participants in Old West action shoots.”
Practicing for these action shoots can be profoundly hazardous. A report in Ruger’s product-liability log captures in a few terse words a lethal side effect of frontier mythology. A Canadian man had shot himself to death with a Ruger frontier-style revolver while twirling the gun and practicing quick draw. The log entry reads: “He was found with a western-style quick-draw holster around his waist and a stopwatch in his hand in front of a full-length mirror.”
How do we measure the deeper, psychic impact of a century’s worth of myth building? “It is quite impossible to conceive the cultural imagery which ‘Gunsmoke’ and its dozens of imitators have created,” wrote historian Frank Prassel. “Impact must be measured in tens of billions of viewer hours on an international scope, for such series are broadcast throughout the world in many languages. Yet it is here rather than in fact that the American derives his typical impression of the West.”
Guns and violence were integral components of all film and TV westerns. “ … Since the western offers itself as a myth of American origins,” Richard Slotkin observed, “it implies that its violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.”
The seamless barrage of dime novels, movies, and television conflated guns with history. In this milieu, any attempt to regulate the free flow of guns becomes nothing less than an effort to repudiate history. In 1970, historian Richard Hofstadter framed the central enigma of America’s enthusiasm for guns: “In some measure our gun culture owes its origins to the needs of an agrarian society and to the dangers and terrors of the frontier, but for us the central question must be why it has survived into an age in which only about 5 percent of the population makes its living from farming and from which the frontier has long since gone. Why did the United States, alone among modern industrial societies, cling to the idea that the widespread substantially unregulated availability of guns among its city populations is an acceptable and a safe thing?”
The best answer is a question: How could we possibly have done otherwise?
Gun manufacturers have little interest in saving lives, although they struggle to convey the image that they are the last defenders of hearth and home, that their guns will stand by you long after marauding gangs force the police into retreat. To imagine such beneficial purpose is to confuse corporate image with corporate imperative. The domestic gun industry, despite its privileged status as the least regulated of consumer-product industries, sold so many guns in America that it saturated the market and now must scramble for ways to open new markets. The industry relies on Paxton Quigley, and other outspoken sales promoters, including gun