Why Batman Believes in Gun Control

Since 1940, guns have mostly been off-limits for Batman. And that should never change.
Image courtesy DC Comics

Anyone who knows anything about Batman knows his parents were gunned down outside a theater. This is why the Dark Knight has rarely used guns in more than 70 years of comics history. And why he almost never kills anyone, even when the urge to do so reaches critical, maddening mass.

The times Batman crossed that line occurred mostly before 1940, when he was a shadow of The Shadow. Later lapses include his bare-handed murder of Joker in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

Miller’s influential graphic novel opened the field to Tim Burton’s films, and the rest is pop history. Through it all, Batman has doggedly retained his distaste for guns.

“This is the weapon of the enemy,” he says in The Dark Knight Returns. “We do not need it. We will not use it.”

Miller brought his hard-boiled Batman back to darker shores, but even he didn’t cross the line when it came to guns. From DC Comics’ 1940 Bat-edict on gun control to Batman’s declaration to Selina Kyle in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises that there should be “no guns, no killing,” the superhero’s surprising pacifism with regard to firearms and capital punishment remains sacrosanct.

Then comes Friday’s horrific news of 70 wounded, 12 fatally, during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado — a mass shooting by a gunman wearing body armor and a gas mask, and armed with a Glock, an assault rifle, a shotgun and incendiary devices. All the weaponry was apparently legally obtained by the alleged shooter, a neuroscience dropout named James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested at the scene.

What Would Batman Do?

What would Batman do in the wake of such an incident? He’d shake his head at us for making it easy for the Aurora shooter to acquire the weaponry he used to violently warp reality.

The horror of losing his loving parents in a hail of bullets is no accidental part of Batman’s origin story, as crafted by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. That infusion of humanity has made Batman more earthly than an extraterrestrial ideal like Superman and more honorable than a space cop with a green power ring.

Batman has dominated the art and commerce of comics because he’s driven like few archetypes to rebuild his soul. And you can’t get much soul-building done when terrorists are mowing down your loved ones at the mall.

Not that Batman hasn’t wanted to kill criminals. In the powerful Batman: Under the Red Hood (below) — adapted for animation from Jim Starlin’s Batman: A Death in the Family and Judd Winick’s Batman: Under the Hood — the distraught Dark Knight’s philosophy of “too easy” murder is challenged after losing a prodigal son. The Caped Crusader wavers again in Geoff Johns’ Infinite Crisis, but does not yield. Because unlike most of us, he knows what it is like when loved ones and bullets collide.

That Batman can’t stop tragedy from happening is also no accident. As Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has proven with masterful precision, the freak show always reboots and replicates. Exponentially, if we let it.

Terrorists understand that massacres like the one in Aurora produce a shattering impact on the actual victims as well as on their loved ones and the world at large. But if we allow their massacres to destroy the social contract championed by Batman, we lose. Do we want to lock, load and mercilessly unload our weaponized souls upon each other? Because we’re already firing.

That’s the issue, beyond the data. If we place no reasonable limits on the acquisition of weaponry that gives criminals the ability to senselessly steal our loved ones, we’ll forever remain buried in violence. Just like Batman.

(Dedicated to my best friend’s father, who passed Thursday in California. He taught us how to fight, and love, with our hands.)