The article ‘The Fatalism of Gun Worship’ by Colin Dickey tries to highlight how centuries of permissiveness towards guns and their possession and use by civilians has led not only to a lax mind-set about the dangers of guns but has also altered public psyche in a negative way. Dickey quotes Manseau and states that the way that gun-related deaths are reported has caused the public to accept such incidents with a certain kind of fatalistic melancholy.
This analysis of the article will assert that even if one grants the apparent pessimism of the American public, there is no basis to connect this state of mind to gun control. The basic argument against Dickey is that he makes two fundamental logical fallacies – he assumes that the sample stories that he and other commentators on the topic have chosen are the only ones possible and he makes the jump from stating that gun related accidents are a cause for public melancholy to claiming that it is the only cause for public melancholy.
The fact that gun-related accidents often lead to death is, without a doubt, a tragic one, and, as Dickey points out, the way they are reported induces a sense of helplessness or melancholy in the reader. It is a feeling that these things ‘simply happen’ and they are a part of everyday life. But this does not mean that guns alone are responsible for the kinds of emotions that the public experience. There are other factors involved. Public unrest, economic crises, international events which are aimed at the USA (such as attacks on American embassies) among other events, all lead to a certain melancholy which contribute to the general feeling of melancholy.
This is not to say that Dickey’s analysis was bad or incorrect, on the contrary, they were very sharp and clear. The problem is that this kind of analysis is meant for literary scholars, not public commentators. If he really wanted to conduct such a study. A simple counter-example can be used to show how far removed from reality a good literary analysis can be – the nursery rhyme ‘Ring around the rosies’ can be traced back to the middle ages during the outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe. The ‘rosies’ signify the rashes that appear on the bodies of infected people and the ashes refer to the fact that the people of that time knew only one way to control the spread of the disease – fire. When the rhyme ends with ‘we all fall down’ it signifies that the people have been burnt and they are now dead. How is it that this incredibly depressing nursery rhyme makes children laugh? It might be because there is a lot of time between when the rhyme was written and the present day, or it could be that children don’t understand it because they never lived in medieval Europe.
Whatever the explanation, the point it clear – a piece of writing can have very different effects on different people at different times. Even the cynical comment about the man who was upset after accidentally shooting his mother-in-law when it was ‘preserve season’ cannot be said to make everyone feel the same way. Some people might laugh, others might be indifferent and others, like Dickey himself, might take offense or feel saddened at how easy it is to turn tragedy into a joke. The fact of the matter is that people cannot be grouped together into a single unit and said to feel the same thing about a given event.
Dickey’s final argument is that America has set up Fate as its new God and therefore gun-related accidents cause melancholy (although it might be the other way round – that gun-related deaths caused Fate to be made God: Dickey’s argument is unclear and I have chosen this version because it presents a slightly stronger argument). Once again, Dickey simply assumes that there is a causal chain linking gun-related deaths to some form of fatalism. Although this argument looks good, there is no way to prove it – every individual is so complex that making a connection between guns and fatalism is very difficult (unless the individual has directly experienced some kind of gun-related accident). When one adds up all these individuals as a single nation, the complexity is so great that any attempt to generalise and claim that something is a fact is nearly impossible and also very dangerous. Dickey not only claims this, he implicitly asserts that there can be no other way.
In conclusion, Dickey’s arguments are highly questionable in many ways. His reasoning is clear and solid, though it does not consider all the facts. Many of the assumptions he made are too general and do not reflect what America is like in reality. However, it should be said that he does highlight some interesting points and a more detailed study on this topic, over a longer period of time might provide some more useful insights.
Work Cited
Dickey, Colin. ‘The Fatalism of Gun Worship’. New Republic. 14 Mar 2016. Web. 23
April 2016.
