Man with Gun - Illustrated Edition: A Wonder Paperback -

Tony Milne was born in Scotland, and joined the Royal Navy after leaving school. He trained with automatic pistols, sub-machine-guns, .22 rifles and NATO-standard SLRs, shot competitively, and qualified as a range supervisor. As a junior officer in the Royal Navy, he was the gunnery officer on a Leander-class frigate, responsible for two 4.5" guns, which he fired for naval gunfire support at the end of the Falklands War. He never killed anyone with a gun. In a Bodmin nightclub, a man with a knife threatened to kill him, for dancing with his girlfriend; on patrol on Dartmoor, a man with a knife threatened to kill him, for making him carry a five-gallon drum of water; and on a training ship, a man with a knife threatened to kill him, for making him take his boots off before entering the mess. He survived these threats. The first visit to the cinema he remembers was to see The Longest Day, the original black and white version. He has since seen many more films. Some were comedies, some romances, many were art house, a few musicals. Some films were based on true stories, others were complete fiction. More and more of them involved guns. Only about three years ago, it became obvious to him that a gun in the hand of a film star was a necessary poster tactic. The regular drive to work, past dozens of publicity spots, merely reinforced that idea. At the same time, the news published by the media seemed to correlate, with the endless stories of avoidable death; of government-sponsored violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Libya; of the shoot-to-kill policy of democratic governments' law enforcement agencies; of seemingly spontaneous outbreaks of murderous violence in Africa, Asia, America and Europe. This work is not a judgement; but an observation. Young men delight in the power they feel when handling guns, whether small or large. Young men are ill-equipped educationally to judge a war; and emotionally to cope with the death and mutilation of their enemies, friends, or of themselves. The shoot-'em-up video game and films watched by young men do nothing to teach the reality of war. Older men seem little better able to judge or control. Justification for acts of violence are as old as the Bible; even Hitler justified the Holocaust in murderous prose. The danger of judgement is that the judges all too often use it as a justification for more violence. There are better ways to deal with unwanted people that are cheap and effective.