After the Sandy Hook School Shooting, an actor friend of mine declared on Facebook that he would never take a role on stage or on screen that involved holding a gun. I thought this was brave and absolutely the morally correct stance to take.
As a mystery writer, it would be difficult, if not impossible for me to make a similar statement.
I have been agonizing over this quite a bit lately, especially since the latest shooting in Oregon. I am a parent, a teacher, and a human being. How could I not feel deeply moved and upset by these horrible events? How could I not feel that something needs to be done? And while I strongly believe the government needs to act, isn’t it my responsibility to do something too? Does my art somehow implicitly condone gun violence?
Because my stories often involve guns. Oh sure, I write in other genres as well, and usually those plays and stories don’t involve guns. And sometimes the victims in my mysteries are strangled or killed with an ax. But sometimes even my non-mystery works involve guns. Of course, sometimes it’s just the “good guys” who carry the guns, but sometimes not.
You might have noticed I put “good guys” in quotes above. I did this because I don’t really believe that there truly are “good guys” and “bad guys.” On some level, I think every human is capable of a horrific act. Certainly, some people are more likely to commit such acts than others. And I don’t mean the mentally ill, because in this messed up society of ours, I am not even really sure what that means anymore. Human beings are fragile. We have strong emotions. We feel things passionately. What makes humanity so beautiful could also make it so ugly. There are horror stories every day about people losing control. I don’t think any of us are immune.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t think people should have guns.
I know that I have mystery writing colleagues who fall all over the gun-ownership spectrum. There are plenty of people I truly respect who own guns. I have a cousin who hunts regularly. I have had students tell me proudly about their hunting weekends. I have eaten venison shot by friends. I used to enjoy target practice with a pellet gun when I was a kid, and when I attended Writer’s Police Academy a few years ago, I was quick to sign up for the firearms training. (FYI, I was a really poor shot.) A fellow mystery writer recently did a very useful shooting demonstration on his blog to help answer a question I had for one of my stories. The writer in question has worked in law enforcement his entire adult life, so yeah, a responsible gun owner if there ever was one. And I have to say that I was very thankful for his demonstration and thrilled that someone would go to such lengths to help out a fellow writer.
And then the Oregon school shooting happened. And once again, I am reminded that guns kill.
I know that there are many responsible gun owners out there. I know that many of these gun owners also advocate for tougher gun laws and don’t think the answer to our nation’s mass shooting crisis is more guns. And even if they don’t share my values, the point of this blog is not to condemn anyone’s personal beliefs, but rather to examine my own. If I had my way, guns would only appear in fiction. And sometimes I wonder if they should even appear there.
This is not the first time I’ve had a moral crisis about the types of stories I write. After I gave birth to my daughter, I asked myself how I could write such gruesome murder tales.
Am I being a hypocrite by writing stories with guns while actively advocating tougher gun laws?
I honestly don’t know. But it is a question I will continue to ask myself.
Surely, Agatha Christie never wondered if she was somehow condoning poisonings. (Not that I am comparing myself to the Queen of Crime.) But she wasn’t writing in a time where mass poisonings were occurring all too often.
