Bangs and Whimpers

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL and Other Guns with Which Americans Won the West, Protected Bootleg Franchises, Slew Wildlife, Robbed Countless Banks, Shot Husbands Purposely and by Mistake and Killed Presidents--Together with the Debate over Continuing Same by ROBERT SHERRILL 352 pages. Charterhouse. $8.95.

There might as well be a magazine called Playgun to offer forthright celebration of America's steamy relationship with firearms. Such a publication might eliminate the need to justify all that noisy discharge of lead at tin cans, clay pigeons and passing cars that is so dyed-ih-the-Dacron American. There might even be a centerfold featuring the latest model that has come to the big city for the exciting night life--but ultimately, of course, would like to settle down as a policeman's side arm.

Why not? When it comes to guns, anything is possible in what Polemicist Robert Sherrill (The Accidental President, The Drugstore Liberal) calls "a phantasmagoria of roscoes." Although the U.S. has no corner on the world's violence, no nation offers its citizens such grand opportunities to display their dissatisfactions with such destructive results. A few random examples, courtesy of Sherrill's research: Dateline New York. Two youths ask a shopkeeper for apple pie. He offers them Danish pastry instead and is shot dead. Ohio. An engineer living near an Air Force base tattoos a number of bomb-laden B-52s with his deer rifles to protest their takeoffs over his house. California. A Glendale landlady loses an argument with a tenant when he shoots her with a German antitank weapon.

Sherrill's statistics are less amusing. Each year 20,000 Americans die by gunfire (murder, accidents, suicides), a rate 35 times higher than England's or Germany's. Half of the 60 million households in the U.S. harbor one or more guns. These plus military and police weapons add up to 200 million firearms --50 million more than when John Kennedy was killed with a $19.95 used rifle imported from Italy.

Knocking off U.S. Presidents has always been a cut-rate, do-it-yourself operation. Fanatics may be willing to go to any lengths, fiscally and otherwise. But the fact remains that from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald, as Sherrill reckons it, the total cost of all the guns used to kill Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy was under $75. Like the vote, the cheap gun is a great leveler.

This is particularly true of the illfamed Saturday Night Specials, those $25-and-under, small-caliber imported handguns that are flooding our cities at a rate of 2,000,000 a year. They are being used increasingly in muggings, holdups and the random, senseless murders of strangers, which are also on the rise. The 1968 Federal Gun Control Act banned the import of many of these so-called "junk guns." But under pressure from various gun lobbyists, the landing of gun parts was not stopped. This led naturally to the profitable gun-assembly business.

The best-known advocate of gun-ownership is, of course, the National Rifle Association. Sherrill follows its progress from shaky beginning to the boom period after World War II, when the Defense Department made available tens of thousands of surplus rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition for N.R.A. gun clubs. That practice was curtailed in the late '60s when the threat of armed blacks and radicals at last made the passage of limited gun-control laws possible.

Sherrill romps sardonically over the history, sociology and psychology of America's love affair with the gat with out getting bogged down in the theoretical musings of experts. The over whelming evidence of his senses seems sufficient. His best achievement is to report fully and clearly the most impor tant facts about guns: they are a huge, influential business. Last year alone, Americans spent $581.6 million for fire arms and ammunition.

Sherrill seems both fascinated and disgusted by such facts. He armors him self against his conflicting feelings with bitter sarcasm and hyperbole. Yet they are perfectly appropriate to a situation where there is a gun for every man, woman and child in the U.S. The Saturday Night Special is the most valuable and engaging book you are likely to read on the subject.

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