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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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re: Schools, Guns and Charlton Heston

By Malcolm Gladwell
Posted Tuesday, June 9, 1998, at 6:30 PM ET

The hilarious thing about Charlton Heston and the NRA is how they have appropriated all the self-help and minority language for their cause. Heston's line--that there are more gun-owners in Hollywood in the closet than homosexuals--is wonderfully apt. We are now to the point that people who are defenders and specialists in the art of killing people now consider themselves to be a misunderstood and persecuted minority. I would have thought that the whole point of joining the NRA is that you rather emphatically wanted it known that you weren't a wus. Oh well. It's also a little rich that the NRA is looking to Hollywood for its leadership. I know this is a tired point, but what, exactly, is the practical difference between the policy platform of the NRA and the screenplay to, say, Lethal Weapon II. Both imagine a world beset by all kinds of villains in which the only recourse for honest men is to shoot everybody. There was a wonderful little story in the Times "Metro" section not long ago pointing out that it is so rare for a police officer to fire his gun that whenever it does happen there is a special investigation. That this came as a complete surprise to me--and, I suspect most people--just shows how much our impression of the actual utility of guns has been skewed by Hollywood.

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On the subject of messiness versus elegance, I agree that social policy tries to make sense of our messes, but social theory does not depend, for its success, on making elegant sense of our messes. That's the difference between physics and math, on the one hand, and political philosophy on the other. I think it can be said, for example, that the state of human knowledge about the origins of the universe is roughly equal to the state of human knowledge about, say, why marriages fail. But physicists, at least, have something they call the Standard Model (how much do I love that term!), whereas therapists and psychiatrists have to muck about in all kinds of complex and often contradictory theories about genetics and hormones and people's mothers and some such. Both, ultimately, make a kind of sense. But to the physicists things are an awful lot more elegant. . .

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