Gun Control In Huckleberry Finn

In 2015 Trey Parker and Matt Stone satirized gun violence in their season finale of South Park. That year, as well as 2013 and 2014, was particularly violent in terms of shooting deaths making headlines. Reflecting back, according to ABC News “The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin led to the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. . . carried the outrage through 2014. It was the deaths of Walter Scott and Freddie Gray, both at the hands of police officers, that fueled the outcry in 2015.” Most recently the September 2016 shooting in Charlotte, North Carolina of Keith Scott has continued to keep the debate over gun control in the forefront.

The subject

In Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the subject of gun violence plays a prominent role. Twain satirizes the subject pointing out its futility through the point of view of the novel’s central character. Huck was raised around guns all of his life. He explains that he was taken away from his abusive father and forced to live with the Widow Douglass who had plans to “sivilize” him. His father, however, kidnaps him and threatens his life during a drunken rage forcing Huck to take up arms to escape his father’s wrath. He does not have to kill his father, but instead, he kills a pig with his father’s gun and smears the blood around the cabin to fake his own death. For those readers who would attempt to find a moral teaching in Twain’s novel on the evils of gun violence in American society; they may find themselves scratching their heads. The subject is not quite as clear as it may appear from a casual reading. In chapter five when Huck’s father is introduced, Huck explains that a naïve judge came to town not knowing the details of Huck’s circumstances subsequently ruling in favor of Pap believing in the notion that a person could be reformed. By the end of the chapter, however, after making a brief show of turning over a new leaf, Pap proceeds to take advantage of the good judges’ charity by selling his new coat for a bottle of whiskey, getting drunk, falling off the rooftop, and finally breaking his arm. Huck remarks, “The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way” (Twain