Esquire did its annual “What I’ve Learned” issue this month. Interviews with noteworthy folks, broken down into concise quotes that summarize what was said in an interview.
When Cal Fussman interviewed noted subway vigilante Bernie Goetz, both knew not that Newtown would resuscitate the always-simmering-just-beneath-the-level gun-control debate. Timing’s everything. And this interview couldn’t be timed better.
I scanned it here since it wasn’t available on the website when I checked. That’s my right as a print subscriber, I hope.
Many interesting nuggets, the most interest of which is circled in red. While he claims “right-wing pro-gun people look at me and don’t understand” later in the piece, his “a lot of people deserve being killed” quote grabbed me by the gut. While “a lot of people” might be going a wee-bit too far, it reminded me of the lede from a capital punishment column I wrote for City Paper way back in ’06. It read:
Some people deserve to die. Officer Gary Skerski wasn’t one of them, but the soulless scumbag who blasted the 46-year-old father of two with a sawed-off shotgun is. And the sooner he’s put down, the better off we’ll all be.
Applied to the current gun debate, I guess you could take that to mean that, in some cases, guns are good, those cases being times that bad people are shot. However, far too often, it isn’t the bad people being shot. It’s the good people, by bad people. Common arguments, to be sure. Ones that make it an impossible issue to solve. However, I hadn’t seen anybody say it as bluntly as Bernie Goetz did in that interview. The whole thing’s worth a read. He speaks from gun-violence experience, and his point is one that makes me realize disappearing all guns wouldn’t necessarily be as edenistic as I once thought.
