A farewell to arms - gun control

Interview, March, 1994 by Steven Garbarino

Pop culture made guns cool. Now, through gun-exchange programs, it's helping persuade people and the culture at large to disarm. And everyone from the Dallas cowboys and Columbia records to Reba McEntire and Cypress Hill is lending a hand

From The Great Train Robbery to Dirty Harry to The Terminator, action films have fueled our fascination with firearms. On television, cop dramas have made

bullet wounds seem as harmless as mosquito bites. And while country music and, to a lesser extent, rock 'n' roll have also been instrumental in glamorizing and mythologizing guns, it wasn't until the advent of gangsta rap that the music industry really seemed to go gun ho. Now a whole new generation is staring down the barrel of the culture we've created. In a recent MTV survey of eight hundred teens and young adults aged sixteen to twenty-nine, 44 percent of the men claimed to own a gun, 48 percent of the teenagers were thinking about buying one in the next year, and two out of three high-school students said they could easily get their hands on a firearm.

But stop, don't move, hold it - suddenly some things are happening that strike us as disarmingly good. Popular culture - in the form of art, music, fashion, even sports - is taking aim at the monster it once fed. Artists such as Robert Longo, Andres Serrano, Chris Burden, and many others have been turning our culture's hunger for guns into images that clarify the dead ends that our gun culture leads to.

Another weapon being use to disarm the insidious ubiquitousness of guns is programs where gun owners can swap their firearms for money, gift certificates, or tickets to sporting events and concerts. Many of these efforts are taking their cue from the Goods for Guns program , initiated this past December by a New York City carpet-store owner named Fernando Mateo. The privately funded organization hands over certificates for toys, sporting goods, and food for guns, any guns - no questions asked. Before winning the Super Bowl this year, the Dallas Cowboys football team, led by owner Jerry Jones, started a less highly publicized exchange program in conjunction with the Children's Medical Center of Dallas: two preseason tickets for a gun. Concurrently with her national tour, which began last month, country singer Reba McEntire will be giving a concert ticket to every fan who hands in a firearm. And recently hip-hop kings Cypress Hill donated $10,000 to Goods for Guns, triggering nearly a dozen hip-hop and R & B acts and solo artists - among them Run-DMC, MC Lyte, Silk, and Heavy D - to join forces for a benefit show, to be held at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on March 18, which will raise money for the New York City-based program. Goods for Guns' Mateo says that Def Jam chief Russell Simmons has expressed interest in making a series of public-service announcements with gun-control messages in the future. Other record labels, including Columbia and Elektra, along with a number of their recording artists, have already begun to throw their support, time, and money behind Mateo. With so many individuals, organizations, and businesses targeting the issue of guns and the violence and fear that they have caused in so many different areas of our culture, we wanted to speak to a few of those whose voices and ideas are inspiring a new kind of freedom - freedom from the fear of guns.

FERNANDO MATEO

SR., FOUNDER OF

GOODS FOR GUNS

Interview. How did you get the idea for ground-breaking gun-exchange program, which is now being imitated all over the country?

Fernando Mateo, Sr.: I was watching the news one night with my fourteen-year-old son, Fernando, Jr., and it was reported that four kids had just been shot: two fatally and two seriously. That same week, two other kids died violently. One of them, playing Russian roulette, had blown his head off. The other, a young girl, had found out that her mother had AIDS, so she took a gun that was in the house and blew her own head off.

I looked at my son and said to him, "What can I do to get these kids off the street and guns out of their hands?" And he said, "I don't know, Dad, but if I had to give up all my Christmas presents to get one gun off the street, I would." So that planted the whole idea in my head, and we had it implemented twenty-four hours later. First we called the program Toys for Guns, and then we broadened it to being Goods for Guns.

I: It sounds so simple. Why didn't somebody within the criminal-justice system think of it?

FM: Well, everybody laughed at first: the New York City police commissioner, the police department, the news reporters. But today I'm very proud because it's a program that has revolutionized how we deal with gun control.

I: How does it work exactly, and how effective has it been?

FM: People bring the guns to a participating precinct, and in exchange for them, they are given a gift certificate for $100, which comes out of my pocket, to be used in stores including Toys R Us, Foot Locker, and A&P supermarkets, among others. The New York police department has its own program, by which it gives people between $25 and $75 in cash for their firearms based on their weapons' value.