Guns & the Imagination

A few days after the high school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, I stepped into my 10-year-old son’s bedroom with an armful of clean laundry and stopped short. Sprayed around me in an arc that encompassed floor, bed, night table, bureau, desk and futon couch, were perhaps 20 guns of varying descriptions. Most of them were plastic. All of them were toys. Nonetheless, I was stunned. That moment just over a year ago triggered many questions and was the starting point of my current work, which explores aggression, guns and the imagination.

My work began as a personal struggle to come to terms with aggression as a “nasty fact of human psychology”—a reality in my son’s makeup, in myself, and in society. My perspective as a woman and mother, and my conflicting desires to subdue and incorporate aggression guided me at the outset. Over time, the work grew into a rumination on the gun as psychological and sociological symbol and an ironic commentary on the location of guns in the popular imagination.

Though I began with multiple questions—What is the nature of my son’s connection to his guns? What is the relation, if any, between childhood gun play and real life violence? What’s behind my own hot fear of aggression and aversion to on-screen violence?—I have arrived, finally, at one: How do aggression and imagination combine in the crucibles of individual consciousness and popular culture, and what are the implications?