Why Batman will never use a gun (or wouldn't, circa 1993)

[about_faces]

Note: I've posted this two different places so far: scans_daily, and at my comicsvine.com blog. The former exploded in a debate about gun control, while the later was met by a handful of dismissive comments typical of those one would find on your average comics message board. So I thought I'd post this here and see what you guys think.A couple

Comments

[bitemetechie]

(YOU FORGOT TO MENTION MY OMGCRAZYAWESOMEAMAZING INTERPRETATION OF HOW THE USE OF THE GUN COULD TOTALLY WORK. I AM DISAPPOINT.)

You know, I could understand the pro-gun people who bought Seduction of the Gun feeling betrayed because a portion of their money went to a cause that's in direct conflict with their ideologies--I mean, I can't shop at Target or eat at Chik-fil-a because of both companies connections to anti-gay causes--if their money was going to gun control legislation...but it was going to education, that's all.

What we're talking about here isn't trying to revoke anyone's right to bear arms, it's teaching children that, hey, maybe grabbing mom/dad's revolver out of the shoebox on the top shelf in the closet and showing it off to friends isn't such a hot idea. Guns can hurt people; guns do hurt people and not all parents are going to be responsible NRA members who teach their children to respect the power of such a weapon. Honestly, I fail to grasp how teaching gun safety is BAD!EVIL!WRONG!, but then again, I fail to

[thehefner]

(WELL I WAS KINDA HOPING THAT YOU'D WRITE THAT ONE YOURSELF SINCE I'D PROBABLY GET A COUPLE OF THE DETAILS WRONG AND YOU'RE SO SMART AND ELOQUENT AND PRETTY)

[bitemetechie]

(YOU'RE JUST SAYING THAT BECAUSE YOU WANT ME TO MAKE PIE. I SEE THROUGH YOU TO YOUR REAL AGENDAAAAA!)

[surrealname]

As far as I'm concerned, turning batman into a god killer in anyway shape or form regardless of how he does it (and seriously, fuck batman using a gun) completely defeats everything that makes batman work.

Then again, I'm a crazy pants and don't really think batman works in the grand galactic scale confrontations. They've made him too powerful. He has no superpowers, but jesus, it's just too much. I'm too tired to get into it all right now, so, as is my usual style i will say that batman being the guy who kills darkseid is fucking clown shoes.

[lego_joker]

Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, as the international/galactic threat level of who/whatever Batman is facing goes up, my capacity to give a damn about the story goes down.

It's one of the reasons why I believe that Ra's al-Ghul works best as a hammy, never-completely-taken-seriously throwback to the cheesiness of the pre-Crisis era, instead of a serious modern terrorist threat. Paul Dini showed in his epilogue to Resurrection EXACTLY how a Ra's that's taken seriously would be treated.

[prof_pig]

That there's a tricky issue to tackle. I love the idea of Batman going up against Darkseid. He's been fighting the symptons of evil his entire life, so him actually going up against evil incarnate and being able to say "gotcha" is friggin' awesome in my book. However, him using a gun to do so is something I dont know if I like or hate

[jaredmith]

The main thing to remember is Morrison wasn't doing it to reject Batman's general Anti-Gun stance. It's like at the end of Ralph Bashki's Wizards when Avatar uses a Gun to kill Blackwolf.

[akselavshalom]

I don't have enough knowledge to say anything when it comes to gun regulation in USA, so I won't say much there. Suffice it to say that from the little I've seen, I find the controversy around this very, very, veeery strange.
Also, the only times I'll permit Batman to use something that even remotely look like guns is if he has no choice out of sheer practicality and doesn't intend to kill people (like in TDKR, that scene after Joker killed(?) himself) or if it's a powerful grapnel gun for bigger distances (again, TDKR, specifically his face-off with Harvey). Otherwise, I don't think I want to see Batman using those things.

[jaredmith]

Why do people think this story started Batman's radical anit-gun stance? I'll bet the stance originated with a Denny O'Neil story Guns absence absence from latter Gold and Silver Age stories was pure censorship) but the reason I know it existed before 1993 is about of Dark Knight Returns, where it calls it the weapon of the enemy.

I find it amusing this is the one area where people don't give DKR all the credit. Maybe because everyone now thinks Miller is a conservative, I don't know his overall politics, but I know plenty of Liberals who are as Islamophobic as he is.