Bowie songs of the year #6: Running Gun Blues (1970)

There were more than 600 mass shootings in the United States during the first 11 months of 2022. Incredibly, that’s not a record. So, while it doesn’t actually seem unusual, mass shootings were once again a top story of the year. On a personal level, I was particularly affected by the May 14th massacre in Buffalo, perpetrated by a deranged racist intent on sparking a race war.

As perverse as the machine-gun pace of mass shooting incidents are in this country, the extent to which they have more or less become background noise is perhaps more perverse. These stories make the news one day, and are forgotten the next day. If the shooter has a political motive or kills an especially large number of people (or in the case of the Uvalde shooting, if there was a botched police response), the story might make the news for a little longer, but most incidents don’t have time to linger in the public consciousness before being replaced by the next one.

Bowie has two songs that have something to do with mass shootings— “Valentine’s Day” (2013), which I featured not too long ago after a late November shooting at a Virginia Walmart (do you remember that one?), and “Running Gun Blues.” The subject of this earlier song appears to be a racist Vietnam Veteran— there’s a few lines about a war, and he calls his victims “gooks,” which is a derogatory term for Vietnamese. Of course, the Vietnam war was in full force at the time Bowie released the song in 1970, but this isn’t a war song, it’s a song about a psychotic, racist mass-shooter.

Both of Bowie’s mass-shooter songs hint at their subjects’ motivations— here, the shooter can’t stop his wartime behavior even though he’s apparently out of the war. “Valentine’s Day” is about a school-shooter, who apparently felt humiliated. Bowie is not justifying their motives, but is echoing the inevitable attempt in news reports to explain why someone would do such horrible things. Many Bowie songs embrace the inexplicable, many are abstract, and a very many are artistic expressions of abject chaos. These two songs are far more concrete. Two shooters take nearly unspeakably violent actions because they feel the world isn’t working out the way they wanted.

Bowie doesn’t offer a solution in either song. Bowie is saying, people like the shooters in his two songs exist along with their violent thoughts. There’s no hint, in either song, the the killers made their intentions known before they took to the gun. And in that I think there’s a hint that they could only be stopped by denying them means. In that sense, I view both songs as pro-gun control. Bowie manages to take two of his less abstract songs and inspires an idea that he doesn’t actually express. So maybe these two songs are less obvious than they first appear. And maybe the solution is more obvious— Bowie’s two shooters are certainly insane, but there’s no hint that “mental health” programs would have identified them before they acted and cured their impulses. The way to stop them from shooting is preventing them from getting guns.

As far as I can tell, Bowie did not perform “Running Gun Blues” live. I found no alternate versions on YouTube, and only two covers, by very amateurish artists (good for them). So I’m posting a version that is essentially identical to the one attached to my 2016 commentary on the song (this one was remastered in 2015– I can’t tell the difference). Hopefully, if you get to this point and you are here for the music, the song isn’t fresh in your head. But I thought it spoke well to this unfortunately recurring top story.