The Guns of Bonnie & Clyde By Hal Herring July 14, 2016
0 Comments
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, horsing around with what appears to be the Remington Model 11 20-gauge semiautomatic shotgun pictured in the gallery below. photo from pbs.com.
web photo
We have passed the time in our country where we glorify our outlaws. That is only right, and not least because most of our outlaws, historically and currently, were and are sociopathic, greed-crazed, lazy, or too stupid to make an honest living. Their stories, upon close examination, are dull, their illegal acts and murders notable only for the grief and loss they cause the innocent.
But we also have outlaws whose lives, sometimes equally grim, are windows into crucial times in our history, the very history that makes America the most vibrant, interesting, and often confounding countries on earth. Frank and Jesse James are good examples (at least for a proud son of the South like myself), because their violence and ruthless efficiency with weaponry personifies and makes real the era of the Missouri Border Wars, the Civil War and Reconstruction. We are who we are because of the struggles and injustices—on all sides—of that time. A James Gang Colt revolver, left over from that time of blood and vengeance and war, a time when we literally turned upon ourselves and slaughtered each other over ideas, is an object of fascination to almost anyone who loves history and guns, and the role that guns have and continue to play in our destiny.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the mythical lovers born into one of the hardest, most unjust times in our nation’s history, coming of age in a wasteland of failed banks and hunger and the very earth itself blowing away in suffocating clouds of dust, were not heroes. Far from it. They committed dozens of robberies, murdered storekeepers and simple citizens trying to save their property, and gunned down nine law officers. In the toughest of times, they made life tougher for almost everybody they came across.
But there are perhaps no two outlaws in American history who have captured our imagination so completely. They were hyperaware of their own hell-bent legend during their short years of banditry, photographing themselves endlessly—early masters of the selfie—in a worship of weaponry, hard-bitten youth and anarchic V8 freedom. They wore fashionable clothes and three-piece suits when many Americans were in rags. They drove at top speed in the newest of stolen cars while most of their families were plowing behind mules as raw-deal sharecroppers. They weren’t poseurs. They weren’t kidding.
As Barrow gang member WD “Deacon” Jones would say in a 1968 interview with Playboy magazine:
“I’ve seen that Bonnie and Clyde movie. The only thing that ain’t plumb silly the way they play it is the gun battles. Them was real enough to almost make me hurt. When I tried joining the Army in World War II after I got out of prison, them doctors turned me down because their X-rays showed four buckshot and a bullet in my chest and part of a lung blown away.”
Click for Full Text!
Poster Comment:
And that is the way things were.