Gratuitous Guns
Fig. 1. Cannon in Brookline Park. Photograph by author, April 4, 2020.
I have yet another addition to the gratuitous guns collection, this time in Brookline Park, near Dormont, but within the City of Pittsburgh. It’s on the other side of Route 51 from Carrick. Most of the people I pick up in Brookline are white; almost everyone I pick up in Carrick is Black. This addition thus continues a theme of placing these “memorials” in and around predominantly Black areas.
I haven’t seen this particular gun before, even though I go through Brookline fairly often, so I think it’s new, which just absolutely disgusts me. We need less of this nonsense, not more of it. The map (figure 2) has been updated. Photographs are here; the map is here.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1K1CjgWPOH71L1UsUSHs00ubbu-jYnWux&w=640&h=480]
Fig. 2. Map of gratuitous guns.
I am also noting that, given that this gun has indeed been newly placed, that its placement occurred on allegedly progressive Mayor Bill Peduto’s watch. Peduto, too, now must answer why these guns are necessary to memorialize war and war dead and why these displays seem so consistently to valorize armed whites and almost never armed Blacks.[1] And I still want to know why this (figure 3), pointed directly at Carrick High School, a high school for crying out loud, is allowed to exist at all.
Fig. 3. Photograph by author, December 31, 2019.
- [1]David Benfell, “The banners and the guns: Flagrant racism in Pittsburgh,” Not Housebroken, October 12, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/09/20/the-banners-and-the-guns-flagrant-racism-in-pittsburgh/↩