Musings | Sept. 23, 2025
Lone Gunman
Art Courtesy of Jim Burklo
One man strides boldly forward. He's on a mission to make things right. His pistols are at the ready in their holsters. He steps inside the saloon. His eyes glint with the fiery certainty of his convictions. His guns blaze. People die. Others scream and cower. They had it coming. The gunman blows the smoke off the ends of his guns, turns, swings out the slatted doors, and walks away. Alone.
It's the myth of countless Westerns of yesterday, the myth of the formulaic action-hero movies of today. It's as American as Clint Eastwood, as American as Captain America. And it's proof that there is no such thing as the lone gunman. The men who assassinated Democratic Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and conservative activist Charlie Kirk plotted their crimes on their own, and did not act on behalf of any organizations. All the recent shootings have been the work of loners. But they didn't act alone, because a nation of believers in the myth of the heroic lone gunman, the myth of the rugged individual individualist, loomed behind them.
As a resident of Greater Hollywood, it's hard for me to miss the evidence of this all-pervasive myth. Huge images of the lone gunman, in his (and occasionally her) many costumes, are plastered against the sides of skyscrapers. The media industry is too greedy and lazy to create a better myth, and we're too complacent to demand it of them.
Murder is a social phenomenon. Of course individuals bear responsibility for their actions. But we are social creatures. Even what we call the "self" is socially constructed. The US has a murder rate over 3 times higher than Canada's. That's no statistical accident. It's only partly about guns. Canadians love to hunt with the same kind of bolt-action rifle that was used to murder Charlie Kirk. They just shoot elk instead of people. Their culture is different. (It helps that they never had a "wild West", because they sent out the Mounties to establish law and order before the setters came.) Of course we need sensible gun-control laws, and a ban on military-grade assault weapons. But that won't be enough to turn things around.
We'd rather not believe that there is something fundamentally sick about our society. Our politicians are afraid of offending voters by lifting up the mirror for us to look at ourselves. But yes, we can deal with it! It's a public health problem: a complex, tough one, but we are up to the task. We eliminated polio. We stopped smallpox. (It's awful that we're now going backward on these amazing public health advances... sigh....) There's no reason we can't dramatically reduce the murder rate, and particularly the incidence of mass mayhem, in this country. Tougher laws helped reduce smoking, but even more effective was the change in our national culture. Through long-term, smart media campaigns, we made cigarettes much less socially acceptable. We can do the same with guns.
And we can do the same with our mythology.
What if the men who have engaged recently in political violence had not been "lone"? What if they had been integrated into in-person circles of people with deep connection to each other? Belonged to churches or temples filled with compassionate folks? What if they had been engaged in face-to-face relationships in organizations working to "make things right" in society by peaceful, democratic means? It isn't a task for loners. We need to team up with kind, wholesome people, and in doing so, it is likely that we'll find our impulses being moderated by the others on the team.
Those of us who are Christians have a choice about which Christian myth to live by. The dominant one is the myth of the Lone Ranger Savior who shows up to set things right in the world, saving the good guys and punishing the bad guys, all by himself. The alternative Christian myth is one that lifts up Jesus as a servant-leader who gathered people together into a beloved community that is bringing the kin-dom of heaven into reality on earth. As ought to be obvious in light of current events, myths are a matter of life and death. So let us choose the myth that serves us best in building a world of kindness.
Together, let's get a glint in our eyes, a fire of conviction, that we can stop the madness of gun violence in America, and replace the mythology that perpetrates it with stories that bind us together in harmony and creativity.