stephen king guns essay pdf

Unfortunately, "Guns" goes downhill from there. King tries to position himself as a Good Old Fashioned American Centrist, full of Common Sense Solutions. He rails against the sorry state of political discourse—always an easy target—and he complains about left wing and right wing media. This portion of the essay results in unfortunate lines like this: "The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian ." And then he goes on to basically support all of President Obama's gun control proposals. Which: Great! I don't know if Obama needed the endorsement, but I'm sure it's not unwelcome.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I'm probably not in the target audience for this essay. "Guns" is directed toward the Stephen King fan who probably doesn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about political stuff. It's a mass market essay intended for the broad American audience, which is to say: Stephen King's people. And in that respect, it probably works. Maybe you should gift "Guns" to the King fans in your life, those people you've silenced on Facebook for one reason or another. Those are the people it's meant for, and those are the people it'll probably manage to sway.

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Stephen King’s Heartfelt Essay About Guns Could Have Used an Editor

Photo by BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP/Getty Images

This morning, Amazon published a 99-cent Kindle single by Stephen King called Guns . It’s an essay, and not a terribly long one, and it seems certain some magazine out there would have published it if King was interested in going that route. But King says he “ wanted it published quickly ,” and so, after finishing it “last Friday morning,” he sent it to Amazon, which accepted it more or less instantly.

It could have used an editor. King’s goal with the essay, he says, is to “provoke constructive debate,” and perhaps he’ll manage to do so—though an at least somewhat constructive debate is already going on. Judging from the essay, it seems that King believes he might be able to reach some who are resistant to gun control both because he’s an enormously popular author and a gun owner, one who grew up in a conservative home in fairly conservative towns in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maine. He acknowledges, though, that he is now very much a “blue state American” and that he may be dismissed as such by many who disagree with him.

Which is why he should have led the essay with his gun ownership. Halfway through the essay’s third section, King says he owns three handguns, and with a “clear conscience.” This already puts him more in the middle on this issue than many gun control advocates, and probably gives him at least a little bit of credibility with some gun owners. Instead, King opens with a distressing diatribe about the stages in the news media’s coverage of every mass killing in this country. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s not that enlightening, either—especially since the heart of King’s argument has nothing to do with the media.

In fact, King argues that, contrary to what people on both sides of the aisle sometimes say, the United States does not have a “culture of violence.” King considers that notion part of the NRA’s arsenal in their fight against gun control, which may be why he tears it down. But his attempt to do so is not terribly persuasive. He points out that the top 10 books and the top 10 movies in the country do very little to glorify gun violence, specifically, and also cites a slight dip in the sales of some gun-centric video games, concluding that “Americans have very little interest in entertainment featuring gunplay.” That’s a rather sweeping and intuitively unpersuasive claim to make following such a brief and seemingly cherry-picked analysis of American popular culture.

It also seems strikingly different from what King said in 1999, after the Columbine shooting. Then, in a rare public address at a library conference in Vermont, he argued that the “atmosphere of make-believe violence in which so many children now live has to be considered part of the problem” and that “there needs to be a re-examination of America’s violent culture of the imagination .” Though he seems to have changed his mind on this subject, he doesn’t, in the new essay, say why.

He does, both in 1999 and today, discuss his own sense of implication in the culture of violence. In 1965, when he was still in high school, King wrote a novel called Getting It On , which, ten years later, he revised and published with a new title, Rage , under the pseudonym Richard Bachman . In the novel, a troubled kid named Charlie “takes a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher, and holds his class hostage.” In 1988, a student in San Gabriel, Calif., took his classmates hostage and said he got the idea partly from that book. A year and a half later a student in Kentucky did something similar; he had read Rage , too. In 1996, another student killed a teacher and two classmates and quoted a line from the book after doing so. A year after that the book was found in the locker of another school shooter, one who killed three people.

King is clearly haunted by these incidents; he ultimately asked his publisher to pull the book, and it is now out of print. And while he rightly does not feel responsible for those shootings—the young men in question all had serious psychological problems—he describes the book, as he did in 1999, as a possible “accelerant,” which he’d rather not have available. And he says he’s now asking the NRA and those who support it to similarly help make certain kinds of guns and ammunition unavailable, not because they must, but because it’s “the responsible thing to do.”

The analogy doesn’t quite hold up: King pulled his novel, but he doesn’t believe that the writing of such novels should be banned; on the contrary, he strongly believes writers should be free to express themselves. But he’s asking people who want the right to own certain kinds of guns and ammo to help pass laws that would make owning such things illegal.

As it happens, I completely agree with him—and would, in fact, probably go farther than he does in restricting gun ownership, were it up to me. But I wish this essay had been honed and shaped a little more in service of his stated end: persuading some of those who are not already on his side. I hope, in any case, that the essay surprises me by prompting more constructive debate than I expect it to. And, at the very least, it is , in fact, constructive—unlike, say, this other essay about guns by an acclaimed American author , which was also published today. That one’s available for free, but if you’re only going to read one, pony up the 99 cents for King’s .

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" Guns " is a non-fiction essay published by Stephen King , and released by King's own Philtrum Press as a Kindle Single on 25 January 2013 .

Summary [ ]

There are a handful of subjects in America so emotional and polarizing that the national dialogue around them amounts to little more than a shouting match. Chief among these is the subject of guns. In this intimate and moving Kindle Single, Stephen King employs all his abilities as writer and citizen to address gun violence in America. But why should we care what Stephen King has to say? As it turns out, there are a number of reasons. Despite his "liberal creds," King is an unapologetic gun owner himself. He is also the author of a novel – published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman – that has served as a "possible accelerant" for at least four real-life high school shooters. King had his publisher take that book off the market long ago, but the guns and the occasional bursts of unfathomable violence remain. When division is everywhere, is it possible for someone to argue passionately for the middle road? That is what King seeks to do here – this is a frank and thoughtful contribution to a dialogue in dire need of voices from the "all-but-deserted middle."

• Stephen King
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Gun owner Stephen King adds voice to gun-control debate

In an angry essay released Friday, best-selling novelist Stephen King calls on gun owners — including himself — to support a ban on semiautomatic weapons and other gun-control measures in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

In the 25-page essay, Guns (available exclusively for 99 cents in Amazon's online Kindle Store), King writes that he owns three handguns "with a clear conscience."

He criticizes the National Rifle Association, the media (for knee-jerk coverage of school shootings) and politicians (for inaction). He also discusses why he pulled his novella Rage , about a teenage gunman, after it was linked to four shootings between 1988 and 1996.

King writes that "it took more than one slim novel to cause (the shooters) to do what they did. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse." All, he notes, had easy access to guns.

He adds, "My book did not break (them) or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant which is why I pulled it from sale. You don't leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it."

He writes that he asked his publisher to pull Rage -- published in 1977 under the pen name Richard Bachman -- "not because the law demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn't demand it. I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do. Assault weapons will remain readily available to crazy people until the powerful pro-gun forces in this country decide to do a similar turnaround. They must accept responsibility, recognizing that responsibility is not the same as culpability."

His essay also addresses fellow gun owners:

"No one wants to take away your hunting rifles. No one wants to take away your shotguns. No one wants to take away your revolvers, and no one wants to take away your automatic pistols, as long as said pistols hold no more than ten 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."

And he asks:

"How paranoid do you want to be? How many guns does it take to make you feel safe? And how do you simultaneously keep them loaded and close at hand, but still out of reach of your inquisitive children or grandchildren? Are you sure you wouldn't do better with a really good burglar alarm? It's true you have to remember to set the darn thing before you go to bed, but think of this — if you happened to mistake your wife or live-in partner for a crazed drug addict, you couldn't shoot her with a burglar alarm."

In a statement about the release of the Kindle Single, King said, "I think the issue of an America awash in guns is one every citizen has to think about. If this helps provoke constructive debate, I've done my job. Once I finished writing 'Guns,' I wanted it published quickly."

David Blum, editor of Kindle Singles, said that King "finished this essay last Friday morning, and by that night we had accepted it and scheduled for publication today."

Launched in 2011, Kindle Singles are works that are considered too long for a magazine article and too short for a book.

The Dark Tower #1

The gunslinger, stephen king.

231 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1982

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When I read this novel more than twenty years ago, I did not appreciate it. Clearly, Roland's story did not charmed enough my distracted and teenage mind. Therefore, I decided to prematurely stop the "The Black Tower" series. A few days ago in a bookstore I stumbled on a copy of the new edition of "The Gunslinger", and reading the preface I understood a couple of things. FIRST: not just myself, but also Stephen King was young when he wrote the same edition of "The Gunslinger" that I read eons ago. SECOND: to overcome the incomplete literary maturity possessed at that time, Stephen King thought to revise and enrich the original novel, publishing a new edition that for simplicity I will define "more mature". In fact, in that preface King confesses that when he starts writing a novel, he has no idea where he's going with this, let alone when he stars to write a multi-volume saga! In this light, the rearrangement of "The Gunslinger", done only after completing the last episode of "The Black Tower", was necessary.

The plot is simple. Roland is a gunslinger and chases the man in black. The deadly desert dominates on them. Some meetings take place along the way, new characters come into play, while flashbacks clarify the gunslinger's past. In my opinion the most beautiful parts of the novel are precisely Roland's memories, which begin to roughly make us understand the meaning of "The Black Tower". King give us the only hint about the time of the facts practically at the end:

«Gunslinger, our fathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which we call cancer, almost conquered aging, went to the moon...»,

Although some details escape me at the moment, I expect a lot from this saga. I think this novel is a kind of introduction that I will fully understand after the next volumes, and probably I will return to these reflections once again in the future to update my personal judgment of "The Gunslinger". For now, I trust the positive reviews of the next volumes. Overall I trust the positive reviews of "The Black Tower" series. But above all I trust the author who, more than anyone else, always stimulated my imagination. And that's not a small thing!

My journey just started.

Quando lessi questo romanzo più di vent'anni fa, non ne fui entusiasta. Evidentemente la vicenda di Roland non aveva colpito abbastanza la mia mente distratta e adolescente. Decisi pertanto di non continuare la serie de "La Torre Nera". Qualche giorno fa mi sono imbattuto in libreria in una copia della nuova edizione de "L'Ultimo Cavaliere", e leggendone la prefazione vengo a conoscenza di un paio di cose. UNO: non solo il sottoscritto, ma anche il buon Stephen era giovane, molto giovane, quando scrisse l'edizione dell'ultimo cavaliere che lessi eoni fa. DUE: per ovviare alla non piena maturità letteraria posseduta all'epoca, il buon Stephen ha pensato bene di rivedere ed arricchire il romanzo originale, mandando alle stampe una nuova edizione che per semplicità definisco "più matura". Difatti nella suddetta prefazione King confessa che quando inizia a scrivere un romanzo, non sa con precisione dove vuole andare a parare. Figuriamoci quando inizia a scrivere una saga di più volumi! In quest'ottica, il rimaneggiamento de "L'ultimo cavaliere", fatto solo dopo aver completato l'ultimo episodio de "La Torre Nera", è stato necessario.

La trama è semplice. Roland è un pistolero ed insegue l'uomo in nero. Su di loro domina il deserto, torrido e letale. Lungo il cammino avvengono degli incontri, entrano in gioco nuovi personaggi, mentre flashback di ricordi chiariscono il passato del pistolero. Sono proprio i ricordi di Roland le parti più belle secondo me, sono brani che cominciano grossolanamente a farci capire il senso della Torre Nera. L'unico indizio sull'epoca in cui avvengono i fatti lo si ottiene praticamente alla fine:

«Pistolero, i nostri plurisnonni debellarono il morbo che fa marcire, quello che chiamavano cancro. Quasi debellarono la vecchiaia, camminarono sulla luna...»,

Nonostante ci sono alcuni dettagli che mi sfuggono, mi aspetto molto da questa saga. Credo che questo romanzo sia una sorta di introduzione che comprenderò appieno dopo i volumi successivi, ed immagino che tornerò in futuro su queste riflessioni per aggiornare il mio personale giudizio de "L'Ultimo Cavaliere". Per ora mi fido delle recensioni positive dei prossimi volumi. Mi fido delle recensioni positive della serie "La Torre Nera" nella sua interezza. Ma soprattutto mi fido dell'autore che più di tutti ha sempre stimolato la mia immaginazione. E scusate se è poco.

Il mio viaggio è appena iniziato.

From King’s 2003 foreword to the revised and expanded version: “When I looked back at the first volume, which you now hold in your hands, three obvious truths presented themselves. The first was that The Gunslinger had been written by a very young man, and had all the problems of a very young man’s book. The second was that it contained a great many errors and false starts, particularly in light of the volumes that followed. The third was that The Gunslinger did not even sound like the later books—it was, frankly, rather difficult to read. All too often I heard myself apologizing for it, and telling people that if they persevered, they would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three.” So he revised it, and apparently removed quite a few of the adverbs that he detests.

“The world has moved on,' we say... we've always said. But it's moving on faster now. Something has happened to time. It’s softening.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. “I think this is it.”

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

“Stephen King, on the foreword; The younger man who dared to write this book had been exposed to far too many writing seminars, and had grown far too used to the ideas those seminars promulgate: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity , which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind. As a result, I was not surprised to find a high degree of pretension in Roland’s debut appearance (not to mention what seemed like thousands of unnecessary adverbs) . I removed as much of this hollow blather as I could,... ”

“Stephen King, on the foreword; Although I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing these books in the thirty-three years between 1970 and 2003, comparatively few people have read them. ”

“Stephen King, on the foreword; The Gunslinger did not even sound like the later books—it was, frankly, rather difficult to read. All too often I heard myself apologizing for it, and telling people that if they persevered, they would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three. ”

“Jake?” “Uh-huh?” “Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?” “Forget it,” The boy said promptly. “When the blood came out of my mouth I could taste my own shit.”

“The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of the nonliving brain—although it may think it can—the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.”

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Guest Essay

Stephen King on Mass Shootings: We’re Out of Things to Say

By Stephen King

Mr. King is the author of numerous works of fiction. He lives in Maine.

There is no solution to the gun problem and little more to write, because Americans are addicted to firearms.

Representative Jared Golden, from Maine’s Second Congressional District, has reversed course and says he will now support outlawing military-style semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the killing of 18 people in Lewiston this week. But neither the House nor the Senate is likely to pass such a law, and if Congress actually did, the Supreme Court, as it now exists, would almost certainly rule it unconstitutional.

Every mass shooting is a gut punch; with every one, unimaginative people say, “I never thought it could happen here,” but such things can and will happen anywhere and everywhere in this locked-and-loaded country. The guns are available, and the targets are soft.

When rapid-fire guns are difficult to get, things improve, but I see no such improvement in the future. Americans love guns and appear willing to pay the price in blood.

Stephen King is the author of numerous works of fiction.

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