Opinionator: Back When I Was Packing

I know what it feels like to be a gun lover.

As a kid watching Saturday afternoon World War II movies in Nebraska, I fell head over heels in love. With the Luger. I don't expect more than a handful of folks to know what I'm talking about. But it was real and it was intense; terms usually associated, I know, with a love affair.

There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves level-headed.

I sat in the dark and watched Helmut Dantine, the downed German flyer in "Mrs. Miniver," menace Greer Garson with his Luger and, yes, I dreamed that night that he came to Grand Island, Neb., and gave the gun to me.

No other gun has ever appealed to me in the least.

Charles "Peanuts" Schulz said on my show that he "brought home a bag of 'em" from the war. Seeing me nearly swoon with envy, he added, "I'll send you one."

I gasped. I wish he had.

Time went by, about a decade's worth, and I accompanied a friend to a gun show in Los Angeles.

And I bought a Luger. Easy. No questions asked. Like buying a candy bar. My friend was a friend of a dealer. I signed nothing other than a check.

If you prefer not to think me a loon, you might want to skip the next part.

I took my treasure back to my hotel and spent an hour or more in front of a full-length mirror being, alternately, Conrad Veidt, Ivan Triesault, Eduardo Ciannelli, Walter Slezak and probably 10 other of those splendid European actors who always seemed to be playing Nazi officers in the war movies of the '40s and '50s.

And you might as well know the worst: I slept with it.

I think the degree to which this resembles a sexual confession is not entirely coincidental. Learned (two-syllable pronunciation) papers and studies exist on the sexuality of guns, focusing always on the rather obvious phallic resemblance of the hand-held gun and the male organ; comfortable grip, extension, ejection, consequences of improper use … the list goes on.

The gun-confiscation paranoid mind-set is seen in these studies as — what else? — castration fear. And there's the unfailing potency of the gun as a substitute for the failing potency of, well, you know. As Gore Vidal said, you can always get your gun up.

Because I couldn't take my prize possession to New York, I left it with my friend in L.A. He died, and I never saw it again. (I make do with a frighteningly perfect scale model.)

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Hasn't just about everything possible been said about the death of the children last month? And the gun laws that have made this country the sick joke of the world?

And, as always, there were some things that shouldn't have been said.

The raving speech by the N.R.A.'s boy, Wayne La Pierre, for example, urging more guns in schools as the answer.

I had Wayne as a guest on the show once. He may not remember, because I'm not sure he ever saw me. His eyes and consciousness seem to bypass you somehow, and focus somewhere in an undefined middle distance. The words sound memorized; he has an affect that might best be described as "nobody home."

Maybe you saw Bob Costas — before the roof caved in on him — make the reasonable observation, after the football player Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend and then himself, that had he not had a gun, they might be alive. Many were outraged by Costas. You'd have thought he had painted obscenities on the Statue of Liberty. How dare a sportscaster sully the sacred atmosphere of a sports event with a thought?

Costas was berated on Don Imus's show by the usually intelligent Laura Ingraham with one of those why-blame-the-gun mental quirks so compatible with the right-wing mind. (Her segment was wickedly utilized by Jon Stewart.)

As her version of "Guns don't kill people … ," she wondered whether Costas thought the football player wasn't strong enough to strangle the woman? Well, for one thing, there are survivable attempted stranglings. Significantly fewer folks survive close-range gun blasts. But let's say that being gunless, he does manage manually to throttle the girl. Then what? He goes to that parking lot and, in front of two observers, strangles himself?

One of the worst things said in the awful succeeding days — though it wasn't nearly at Mike Huckabee-level inanity — came, surprisingly, straight from the White House. I was appalled to see the president ruin a movingly delivered statement about the shooting of the kids by closing with, "God has called them all home."

Talk about not blaming the shooter. So it was God who did it. It's not hard to imagine a kid hearing the president's words and asking, "Mommy, is God going to call me home?"

One of the main tenets of the true gun-crazies — and the N.R.A. is not even the most rabid of the many gun-shielding organizations — is, as Rachel Maddow expertly delineated, that old stand-by "the first step."

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing — nothing at all or in any way — be done about any guns whatever, anywhere. Not assault rifles, not the super-magazines that allowed the kids to be ripped apart, nothing.

Why?

Because it is the first step toward confiscation.

The mind falls faint. Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

And, of course, all first steps are but first steps. Thus, all kisses lead to pregnancy, a single joint leads to heroin, a Band-Aid leads to surgery. Can't I take a first step toward China without going to China? Oh, well.

Reading this over, I'm not really sure what the first part about me and my Luger has to do with all this. Perhaps qualified people among you will tell me.

I'm not going to worry about it. After all, for me, it might just be a first step toward self-criticism.

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