Word: guns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...perimeter observation tower in Viet Nam when I heard of the tragic and violent death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy [June 14]. How and why can death be so prevalent in an advanced civilization such as ours? At that moment, my attention became fixed on the M-60 machine gun which rested, black and suddenly very ugly, in front of me. I wondered when I would have to kill or be killed...
FORGET the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun...
...image, of course, is wildly overblown, but America's own mythmakers are largely to blame. In U.S. folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them. From the nation's beginnings, in fact and fiction, the gun has been provider and protector. The Pilgrim gained a foothold with his harquebus. A legion of loners won the West with Colt .45 Peacemakers holstered at their hips or Winchester 73 repeaters cradled in their arms...
...Thrall. Often as not, the frontiersman was an antisocial misfit who helped create a climate of barbaric lawlessness. No matter. Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid, hero and villain alike, all were men of the gun and all were idolized. "Have gun, will travel" was more than a catch phrase. It was a way of life. Even after the frontier reached its limits, the myths lingered and the legends multiplied, first in dime novels, later in movies and on TV. Americans flowed into great cities, but still they remained in thrall to the mystique...
Emulating their mythicized forebears, Americans have turned their country into an arsenal. Today they own somewhere between 50 million and 200 million pistols and revolvers, shotguns and rifles, as well as uncounted machine guns, hand grenades, bazookas, mortars, even antitank guns. At least 3,000,000 more are bought each year, some twothirds through the mails?"as easily," in Lyndon Johnson's words, "as baskets of fruit or cartons of cigarettes." Said Maryland's Democratic Senator Joseph Tydings last week in an appeal for more effective legislation to curb this traffic: "It is just tragic that in all of Western...