The Gun
by C.J. Chivers
First Posted Aug 2016
I think the bones of my review for The Gun are pretty good, but I have no idea what style I was shooting [intended] for; at the sentence level it was very unclear, even to me. I did my best to clean it up, though I still think it misses the mark [intended].
Which is a shame, because the book itself was really good. And it doesn’t seem like the type of book—about a gun—that I think people who would like it most—non-gun people—would pick up on their own.
While cutting edge quantum mechanics may hint that object permanence is not existentially true, it remains a developmental milestone that signifies depth in a child’s understanding of the structure of the world. Things outside of immediate visible range still exist; this takes care of the “spatial” component of spacetime, but the “time” portion can remain a messy bundle well into adulthood.
Feeling like I have a child’s ephemeral grasp on history is something with which I often struggle; there is an inherent difficulty in conceiving the world before I existed, or how things which are now taken for granted impacted the landscape once they were imagined. A mental image of battle before assault rifles exists in my mind solely because of cultural imagery: swords or whips or lightsabers or lances are the weapons of heroes. I can picture Agincourt without the M4A and Waterloo with an effective cavalry charge, but guns of war are either muskets or automatic rifles through simple syllogism.
Non-projectile weapons—archaic weapons of a more heroic aura—have their own issues. The conceptual problems that I had as a child still have not been resolved; when Leonardo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles unsheathes a katana, what’s he going to do with it? The action—the childhood promise of satisfactorily acrobatic action, anyway—dies. Maybe Leo blocks some laserblasts or cuts a rope holding something heavy that falls onto a bad guy, but you’re not going to see him decapitate The Shredder. No, he will always use the flat of the blade to knock someone out, expending a portion of his focus in each battle trying to not use lethal force. At least Raphael could use his pointy sais to pin people’s wrists and ankles.
It is the impracticality of these weapons, their purposeful malignancy and impetus to cause damage, that still gives me pause. It doesn’t fit the setting. You can’t just slice and dice in a cartoon! You can’t just start shooting wildly if you’re the hero! You can, Batman-style, bludgeon and cripple a thousand villains and skate by on the illusion of non-lethality, I suppose. But a bullet? You’re limited by the threat of death, of too much violence, of overkill. Smash a man’s face and he may live. Give a G.I. Joe a laser pistol and his or her enemies fall over in flurry of sparkly lights and scorched camouflage. Actual guns firing real bullets cannot be downplayed and will never, in the zeitgeist, come across as less than lethally efficient. They cannot be used the way something like nunchucks or a quarterstaff or a fist can be used.
Can’t be used that way in fiction, at least. In reality, guns and bullets are not just shockingly simple, they are everywhere. They are the de facto usable tools of combat, the everyfist of the wartime world:
During this time, the American intelligence community would fixate, understandably and properly, on the Soviet Union’s nuclear programs. The activities in Izhevsk [where the AK-47 was manufactured] would be missed. As the mushroom cloud towered over the Kazakh steppe, no one noticed the arrival of Stalin’s new firearm. No one would pay much mind as these rifle plants, and others across the Eastern bloc and in nations aligned with the Soviet Union or the socialist ideal, would ship off their automatic rifles by the untold millions during the years ahead. And no one would have predicted, as the world worried over nuclear war, that these rifles, with their cartridges of reduced size, would become the most lethal instrument of the Cold War. Unlike the nuclear arsenal and the infrastructure that would rise around them—the warheads, the mobile launders, the strategic bombers and submarines—an automatic rifle was a weapon that could actually be used.
Nuclear stockpiles are sharp blades in a kids’ show—no one really wants to use them because then it won’t be a kids’ show any longer. But a rifle? That can be employed. And is employed. By anyone and everyone.
The most startling revelation while reading The Gun was not that I knew very little about modern weaponry—I don’t—or that I can recognize the AK-47 and its descendants immediately—I do—but that before life the automatic rifle wasn’t the ubiquitous ur-image of infantry fighting that it is in my paradigm of violence. The Gun has the hallmark of good and easy-breezy non-fiction: small details and fascinating facts that make the pages zip by, presented as little bon mots and textured understanding that give color to the world. Non-fiction that delivers big conceptual shifts, though, are few and far between. When you find a book that changes your landscape and hammers it home over three-hundred pages of fascinating detail, you know you’ve picked up a winner. You never know what the little bits that stick out are going to be:
Bin Laden’s selection of this design (it is less than twenty inches long and weighs not quite six pounds) was on technical merits a strange endorsement. An AKSU-74 is inaccurate and fires rounds with less muzzle velocity than an AK-74, making it potentially less useful and lethal than many available choices. But people who regard themselves as warriors inhabit worlds in which symbols matter. And in the particular history of bin Laden’s martial surroundings—western Pakistan and Afghanistan of the last three decades—a short-barreled Kalashnikov emanated a trophy’s distinction. Relatively new, the AKSU-74 had been carried in the Soviet-Afghan War by specialized soldiers, including helicopter and armor crews, for whom a smaller weapon was useful in the tight confines of their transit. For an Afghan fighter, possession of one of these rifles signals bravery and action. It implied that the holder had participated in destroying an armored vehicle or aircraft; the rifle was akin to a scalp. By choosing it, bin Laden silently signaled to his followers: I am authentic, even if his actual combat experience was not what his prop suggested.
A deep knowledge of Afghani culture and guerilla symbolism is required, as well as baseline weapons-system recognition; I wouldn’t have known there was a language in that image to parse, let alone how to do it, without the book. The mixture of high-level conceptual displacement and cool cocktail-party fact makes this potentially disastrous material a breeze to read. The Gun is accessible and simple in conveying its trenchant insights, edging into must read territory for anyone interesting in global history or modern politics. It, like the gun it describes, can be picked up by anyone to devastating effect.
This is information that can be used.