Kurt Vonnegut, a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association?

In Fates Worse than Death, his autobiographical collage of the 1980s, Vonnegut admits that he and his father, years back, were NRA members, and that Vonnegut himself, “used to be very good with guns.” Growing up in Indianapolis in the 1930s, Vonnegut kept a small arsenal in his bedroom, impressing his male cousin with his collection of rifles, shotguns, and antique pistols. Yet the infatuation did not last. Fifty years later, Vonnegut, in an interview with The Nation, described the presence of guns in human hands as “intolerable” and later wrote that he “wouldn’t have one of the motherfuckers in my house for anything.”

Until the breakout success of his sixth novel, Vonnegut’s public profile was minimal. Though he’d been publishing fiction for over 20 years and had built a reputation on college campuses and with readers of paperback science fiction, opportunities to reach a wider audience were rare. All that changed when Slaughterhouse-Five became a best-seller. Suddenly, Vonnegut was in demand as a commentator on the hot-button issues of the day, a role he took seriously despite the often comic and caustic tone of his message.

In Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction, long-time Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz describes Vonnegut’s role as a public spokesman as “one who fashions his own reaction as an expression of what he feels should be the socially and culturally responsible view.” While the target of Vonnegut’s ire was often the carnage wrought by military adventurism abroad, he also spoke against violence closer to home and, in particular, the American obsession with guns.

In his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, first performed in 1970 and revived in New York in 2018, Vonnegut satirizes the Hemingway model of masculinity through the main character, Harold Ryan, a World War II vet, big-game hunter, and avid gun enthusiast. At the end of the Third Act, Ryan bellows, “Whoever has the gun … gets to tell everybody else exactly what to do. It’s the American way.” Ryan’s New York apartment is decorated with the pelts of African animals killed for sport. He goads his young son to load a rifle so he can protect his mother from Ryan himself, calling the rifle “an iron penis three feet long.” Throughout the play Ryan’s aggressive “manliness” is symptomatic of a hatred of women born of sexual inadequacy. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ends with Ryan confronted by his own clownishness as Vonnegut makes clear where his sympathies lie. During the play’s final moments Ryan aims the gun at his own head as a single gunshot sounds offstage.

In the 1971 paperback edition, Ryan survives, and the play ends with Ryan telling the audience, “I missed.” Yet this ending was never fixed, as Vonnegut kept revising even after the play had opened, and most productions conclude with Ryan standing beside the other dead characters in heaven. Either way, Ryan’s enthusiasm for gun violence is lampooned and condemned, Vonnegut’s outrage the central focus of his lone dramatic work.

Vonnegut’s 1982 novel Deadeye Dick is his strongest fictional statement on the tragic consequences of what Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, calls “gun love.” Though rarely mentioned among his greater works, and judged by Vonnegut himself, as recounted in Charles J. Shields’s 2011 biography And So It Goes, as “sort of a B minus,” Deadeye Dick is a blend of satire, social comment, and family history featuring one of Vonnegut’s most well-rounded narrators, Rudy Waltz, a depressed pharmacist, failed playwright, and self-described “neuter … out of the sex game entirely.”

“Guns in civilian hands, whether accidental or on purpose, kill so many of us day after day.”

As a 12-year-old, Rudy is given the key to the family gun room by his father, an event marking Rudy’s initiation into supposed manhood. In a typical Vonnegutian blend of fiction and history, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt questions the young Rudy’s familiarity with guns. It is 1944, and Roosevelt has visited the Waltz family’s mansion while touring the arms manufacturing plants of Midland City, Ohio. Rudy’s blowhard father Otto, a fraudulent artist and former drinking buddy of Adolf Hitler, brags to Mrs. Roosevelt about “how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns.”

Later that day Rudy carries a Springfield rifle into the cupola of the house’s gun room and fires the gun into the air. “It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood,” Rudy tells us. Though he was aiming “at nothing,” the bullet finds a target eight blocks away. Eloise Metzger, the pregnant wife of a newspaper editor, is killed by Rudy’s bullet while running a vacuum cleaner in her home. Rudy’s passage into manhood leaves him a double-murderer.

The consequences ruin both families. The Waltzes lose their inherited fortune and Otto is sent to prison. The guilt-ridden Rudy, forever burdened with the nickname Deadeye Dick, assumes a fatalistic passivity that he never shakes. The novel’s most powerful moment occurs when George Metzger, his wife and unborn child murdered by the careless use of a gun, visits Rudy in prison and forgives him. Vonnegut, in his signature “easy to read” prose, leaves no doubt about his message. In an editorial for the local paper Metzger writes:

My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. There is evil for you. We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM.

Vonnegut addresses the issue of guns head-on in 1991’s Fates Worse Than Death. Writing about former spokesman Charlton Heston’s TV commercials promoting the NRA, Vonnegut states that when he hears Heston say how glad we should be that Americans can keep weapons in their homes and vehicles or places of work, “I feel exactly as though he were praising the germs of some loathsome disease, since guns in civilian hands, whether accidental or on purpose, kill so many of us day after day.”

Throughout his career Vonnegut explored the human propensity for cruelty and violence and how the weapons we’ve created, from the B-52s and megaton bombs that destroyed Dresden to the firearms that have turned our public gathering places into massacre sites, bring death and devastation to families and communities. Yet as a dedicated humanist, he also offers hope and the possibility of generational progress. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he describes his father as a sweet man, and a gun nut, too. “He left me his guns,” Vonnegut writes, but the tradition of gun love ends with Kurt Sr. Vonnegut refuses to pass them to his own sons and tells them not to work for companies that make “massacre machinery.

The fate of those guns in his childhood bedroom is clear. “They rust.”