Toward the end of the 1997 movie Titanic comes a scene where Margaret Brown, who later became known as “the unsinkable Molly Brown,” confronts her fellow passengers on the lifeboat that had just saved them from drowning in the ice cold Atlantic. The twenty or so people on the boat looking back at her are among the few lucky ones. There they sit, trembling in their life vests, with plenty of room to take additional survivors on the boat, listening to the desperate screams of drowning fellow passengers in the near distance, with looks of teary-eyed terror on their pale faces. When Molly tries to push them to turn the boat around so that they can save at least a few more people, she is met with a mixture of hostility and apathy. “I don’t understand no one of you,” she bursts out, “What’s the matter with you? It’s your men out there!”
The scene popped into my head when I switched on the radio yesterday and happened to tune in to a live report about yet another ongoing school shooting in the United States, where, by now – as the Washington Post reported just a few hours after the shooting – more people have been killed at schools in the year 2018 than have been killed serving in the military.
Given the fact that the United States is engaged in several wars at the moment, I found this to be an especially chilling statistic, even more so since I am the mother of two school-aged children who happily attend school here. A few weeks ago, in the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where seventeen people were fatally shot, one of them came home and told me that they had been asked at school whether they think their teachers should be carrying weapons. When my child answered that they should not, she was asked to give her reasons. “It would make me feel scared; as if it was dangerous to be in school,” she told them. This was, by the way, at an elementary school.
All of which makes me wonder: is this perhaps the moment when, as an American, one should bring up the topic of gun education with your fourth grader and pull out the NRA catalogue so that they can pick one of these stylish guns targeted specifically at young kids? All grown up, your kids might then successfully become one of these people, who – as I witnessed a few years ago – proudly post on Facebook a picture of their girlfriend firing a rifle on a shooting range, because, you know, what’s wrong with showing off sexy toys in the hands of responsible and attractive citizens?
I’m being ironic, of course. To be honest, I, too, somewhat get the fetish and allure of weapons. Maybe I watched too many movies where the guy I like to look at the most is the one who singlehandedly – with the help of many weapons, of course! – is able to avert the disaster about to befall all the pretty ladies surrounding him. Here’s the thing, though: I can still easily control the urge to go out, buy a gun, and start shooting. There are plenty of other nonlethal stimulants in our society anyway, and those movies won’t go away either, so you can always watch them again and again and imagine either being The One – or being rescued by an all-powerful, shooting Avenger.
Not every fantasy we have is suited to become our reality. On the contrary, as Kurt Andersen shows in his important book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, it is crucial that we reerect the border between what is fact and what is mere fantasy. That we even talk about gun ownership in the context of a possible tyrannical takeover of the United States is a direct result of clever, unconscionable, and relentless propaganda by the NRA over the past few decades.
And how successful this propaganda was! Case in point: There is always that well-intentioned student in my course on Nazi Germany who boldly brings up the argument that guns in the hands of German Jews would have made a real difference when Hitler and his antisemitic henchmen came to power in 1933. Would it, now?
Let’s think this through: there were approximately a half-million Jews living in Germany at the time, less than 1 percent of the entire German population. Some of them were children, women, and older people. Most of them had no idea how far the Nazis’ antisemitism would go, into what abyss they would stare over the next one and a half decades. But even if all the able-bodied Jewish men would have had the gift of foresight in 1933 and decided to rise up against the Nazi state, they still would have had to fight the German police force, the German army, as well as the SA, Hitler’s personal paramilitary, whose main purpose was to suppress with brutal force any potential inner enemies of the new state.
Modern tyrannies, in other words, are usually not defeated by militias. If anything, it is much likelier that they are created by them. They are defeated, however, either by a strong civil society that makes sure tyrants don’t come too close to power in the first place, or by strong armies that can overpower them. Everything else only really happens in the movies.
Which brings me back to Titanic and the “Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Yes, she really did exist, of course. But the scene on the lifeboat I described at the outset is fiction. Still, Molly’s perplexed incredulity in that scene perfectly captures not just the helplessness, but also the incomprehension I feel toward those of my fellow Americans who continue to believe that the solution to these increasingly frequent shootings is to hug their many guns a little tighter and teach their children to believe a little more in the fantasy that the Second Amendment is their best defense against the looming threat of a tyrannical government in the not-so-distant American future.
Reality has a way of hitting home, though. Every time another shooting happens – not in Great Britain, not in Japan, not in Germany, but, once again and ever more frequently, here in the United States – reality forces us to stare at that stubborn thing called “facts.” Please don’t avert your gaze. After all, to paraphrase Molly, “it’s your children out there!”