Bonnie and Clyde guns go to auction
Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2012 10:21 am
I saw preview stuff for this auction a while ago. I was in the midst of writing something for a friend's book release party. The book is an edit of Aileen Wuornos' diary. The creepy provenance letter that accompanies Bonnie's revolver inspired me a bit. I wrote this:
You know that girl who knits and has six sets of different needles and knows about all kinds of yarn? I’m like that about guns.
I go to the shooting range with a friend every week or two. I shoot for relaxation. It’s meditative for me. I focus all of my attention and practiced skill with the hope of putting a few bullets through a piece of paper, as close to each other as I can manage. When I’m doing it right, I can’t think about anything else and my world is very quiet.
My friend has a gun that is the one he learned to shoot with. It’s a .22 caliber revolver, cowboy style. It was marketed in the 1950s as what amounts to a fancy toy. A weapon suited to do combat with paper targets and pop bottles. It is also the same gun that Aileen Wuornos used to kill people.
My girlfriend, who doesn’t share my gun geekery, forwarded me an article about a couple of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns being auctioned. I found myself reading the provenance letter that accompanies Bonnie’s Colt Detective Special:
“On the morning of May 23, 1934, when my father and the officers with him in Louisiana killed Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. My father removed this gun from the inside thigh of Bonnie Parker where she had it taped with white, medical, adhesive tape. My father said that one reason she had the gun taped to the inside of her leg was that, in those days, no gentlemen officer would search a woman where she had it taped…Sometime later, my father gave this gun to Buster Davis who had been a Texas Ranger and was, at the time, an FBI Agent.” Included with this gun and mentioned in this letter is a framed handwritten note from Frank Hamer, written on the back of an old Texas Ranger Expense Account form, reads “Aug/1934 Davis hold onto this. Bonnie was ‘squatting’ on it. Frank.”
A man shot and killed Bonnie Parker, then lifted her skirt and took her gun from her inner thigh as a trophy, joking later to a friend about its proximity to her cunt. That man is the hero of the story. His violation of her person is seen as a victory for right and justice and a source of comedy between such men.
I live in fear of men like this. I could meet one on the sidewalk when I leave here tonight. Aileen Wuornos lived with similar fear. I am fortunate to live a life where I meet men like this fairly infrequently and I have, because of class and color and education, useful tools for escaping them when I do.
Bonnie Parker is the archetype of the female outlaw. She was powerful and glamorous and well armed. Even so, at the end, she was a dirty joke between powerful men.
When the thought of Frank Hamer’s hands clawing at the tape on Bonnie Parker’s thigh made me wince, I thought of the target revolver I keep unloaded in a safe. I thought about how that gun might be employed to protect me from the violation of such a man’s hands on my thigh, even if it isn’t a gun designed for that purpose. Just like that little gun designed for playing cowboy that Wuornos had wasn’t meant for such a purpose.
Aileen Wuornos didn’t have a fancy target revolver like mine. She had a crappy old .22 caliber High Standard Double Nine. I don’t know where she got it, but I can imagine. It is the kind of gun she might have found in somebody’s kid brother’s bedroom closet, or at a pawn shop with the lowest price tag in the display case. It is nobody’s weapon of choice for defense or for murder, except possibly in a moment of desperation. It is the gun you pick when you don’t really have a choice.