Guns. 80,000 of them are being handed out to citizens of the Ukraine over the last few days. AK-47s (oh, the irony of the classic Soviet sub-machine gun being used in anger to kill Russian soldiers) seem to be the standard issue weapon. Seeing normal citizens being radicalised by nightly bombing and by having to take their children and parents into cellars and underground stations to keep them safe, is sobering. We can all be pushed only so far before we are willing to grab a gun and see that as preferable to passive quiescence or pacifism. I am sure that in similar circumstances, I would want to loose a full magazine into the invaders within my land who are putting my family through so much.
As a boy, I handled lots of guns. It seemed normal back then. Living in the countryside and with two older brothers who had a veritable arsenal of weaponry, I fired my first air rifle at seven years old. At the age of nine I was given my own air rifle – a piece with a stripped down stock which revealed the metalwork underneath. It felt like an IRA sniper rifle. At eleven, I fired my eldest brother’s .22 rifle, which was a bolt action grown up weapon. Equipped with a telescopic sight, he told me it would fell a full grown cow on the other side of our valley – half a mile away.
For my eighteenth birthday my father had his father’s left handed twelve bore re-conditioned. It was double barrelled, had a kick like Peter Lorimer and a scroll embossed barrel. It came in its original cased with all the cleaning rods and brushes, with a little compartment for gun oil and wadding. It was a piece. (My father gave it away – yup, gave it away – when they moved house and there was no land to justify the license. He didn’t even ask me.)
Over the years, I massacred wildlife. That’s what guns are for. Killing things. The meadows and trees and woods near my home were the killing fields. Squirrels, sparrows, pigeons, rabbits, pheasant, ducks – they were all fair game. I would take my friends from university down the field and let them have a shot. The gun never failed to impress: noise, smoke, the smell of cordite – and that kick to the shoulder. But one day, I killed a bird and just felt shame. Shame and regret. And I never killed another thing ever again. It just seemed so wrong, so unnecessary.
Ripple dissolve to a visit to my brother’s bucolic home in the middle of nowhere. It is so bucolic, you cannot see another house or dwelling for thirty miles. My sons were going to have a go with his shotgun. Walking towards the fence, where the targets were to be erected, my brother heard the flap of a pigeon’s wings overhead and instinctively moved the gun vertical and let go both barrels. The pigeon was obliterated and fell to earth in a bloody mess. My son looked on in horror. “What d’you do that for?” he exclaimed. “Vermin” replied my brother. Josh wasn’t convinced. He was in shock for the rest of the evening and refused to handle the gun. It was cleaned and put away. My brother probably felt his nephew was an urban effete. My son felt his uncle was a bird murderer.
I have a horror of guns. They are dangerous. They are unnecessary in modern, civilised society and they are repulsive. I wouldn’t have one in the house. Nor would I take my children to Eastern bloc countries, as the father of one of their school friends did in the early 2000s, to fire machine guns and other paramilitary hardware in to the bodies of live cattle. I mean, what kind of father does that? (One that worked in special services in Northern Ireland it turns out. Disturbed.) And I remember giving my wife a hard time about going to a gun range ‘for some fun’. Guns are not fun. Not in a sane world.
And yet.
I love when other people – gangsters in movies, GIs in war films, detectives in American police series – use them. Dirty Harry, with his 44 Magnum, asking if you’re feeling lucky, punk. Scarface saying ‘say hello to my little friend’. Pablo Escobar’s thugs firing randomly at people as they speed past pedestrians in their Cadillacs, just for kicks. Edward Fox’s precision assassin in The Day Of The Jackal firing his dum-dum bullets into a watermelon as he sets the gunsights for his cold blooded killing of President de Gaulle. Guns add glamour.
Scarcface 
Jackal 
Dirty Harry
There’s a scene in Peaky Blinders when Arthur and John, the muscle end of the Shelby family teach their cousin, Michael, to fire a gun. It’s no ordinary “You ‘ave to feeeel it, Michael”, says Arthur and gets Michael to press the loaded gun right up against Arthur’s own eye. “The power”, Arthur continues. “Now you’re feeling it.” Fuck tin cans and targets. And there’s the appeal. The power a gun gives you to hold life and death at your finger tips. They turn you into a God.
When I worked at Allen Brady and Marsh, an advertising agency in Tavistock Square which was, in truth, on its last legs and being run into the ground by the most incompetent management team I have ever had the misfortune to work under, there was a vogue for the adrenalin fuelled account managers – all mid twenty somethings, all males – to wear shoulder holsters and replica Colt 45s. I don’t know why. We were bored? We fancied adding some glamour to our work lives? We were all fantasists? Eminently believable given we worked in the business equivalent of light entertainment and were all refugees from other potential careers: thespians, frustrated war correspondents (in my case) – natural show offs. I think we fancied ourselves going up to clients as going out into the wild streets of NYPD.
My wife cannot understand the male fascination with gangland, mafiosi. With guns and knives and cruelty. With tough talk, spittle specked vitriol and dark threats meted out in brilliant scripts. With the hollow-eyed menace of Vito Corleone’s speech to the assembled heads of the five families in The Godfather. With Scrosese’s Goodfellas and the ignominious assassination of Tommy DeVito when he dresses up to become a ‘made man’ but ends up being shot through the back of his head with the resultant despoliation of his face and thus the impossibility of being laid to rest in an open coffin. With Samuel L. Jackson’s lethal delivery of Ezekiel 25:17.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon you.
Pulp Fiction
It is why we love Tony Soprano. Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders. Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Michael Caine in Get Carter. Villanelle in Killing Eve. Clint Eastwood as the nameless man in spaghetti westerns, Pale Rider and as Harry Callaghan. They are all us, if we had the balls. The man outside the law. The individual incarnate who exemplifies the American Dream, the man who invents himself, makes his own fate and bends the knee to no one. And if we can’t have a gun, we’ll settle for a vicious looking sword or a big knife: as a Spartan warrior in 300 or Russel Crowe in Gladiator. Such characters are the quintessence of the ideal of what a man is, a free man. Unfettered by petty rules. A Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart incarnation of Nietzsche’s übermensch. A colonel Kurtz for the C21st. Because we all want to be Kurtz, not Willard, the
errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill
Apocalypse Now
Which is what most of us are.
Maximus reinvented as Gladiator 
Villanelle 
Kurtz. Perhaps the ultimate expression of how far one man can push it
A gun in our hand – or in the hand of our proxy on the big screen – allows us to indulge the belief that, for a brief moment, that we are that man.