How did the book Bloodbath Nation come about?
My son-in-law, the photographer Spencer Ostrander, came to me one day very upset about the gun violence he was seeing all around him – as a decent human being would be. He said he’d decided to start travelling around the country, photographing the sites of all the mass shootings in the past 20 years. As I say in the book, mass shootings account for just a small fraction of American gun deaths, but they nevertheless occur with stunning frequency – roughly one per day over the course of any given year. Spencer made a series of long-distance excursions over the course of two-and-a-half years and finally took pictures of 30 to 40 places. When he showed them to me, I said: ‘“I think these are very, very compelling photos, and maybe if you put them together as some kind of book, I could write a text to go with it.” It was just an idea at that point and as it evolved, it became a kind of dialogue between us – the word man and the picture man.
What do you think makes Spencer’s photographs so eloquent?
I think the absence of human figures is striking and the way that there are no guns, no reference to mass shootings, just these often rather ugly buildings in the middle of rather nondescript, depressing American landscapes. There’s an emptiness to them. I don’t want to get too pompous about it but I think that emptiness does reflect the emptiness of this world we’ve created in which people are slaughtered with so little effect on the life of the country. We all get upset, we all complain, and yet things stay the same. And the gun lobby remains very, very strong.
What are you hoping to achieve with the book?
That it will initiate a discussion that we really haven’t had in America about how to confront this monstrous situation we’ve built for ourselves. I see it as a national project that I’m willing to go on the stump for and to be a missionary for, and I very much want to see what kind of effect it will have. Hopefully, it will be instructive for people outside the US too, because a vast number of my British and European friends are completely lost when it comes to trying to understand American gun violence. So I tried to explain the history behind it.
You show how America’s love affair with guns began far longer ago than I imagined…
It started right at the beginning. The first British settlers in North America were scared – they were really frightened to death. They were few and the Indigenous population were many. The fear of being massacred was immense. So they armed themselves and made sure they were the first to attack – and our attachment to guns began right there.
In the book you say the second amendment, framing the individual’s right to bear arms, was largely ignored until just a few decades ago, when it began to be seen as a fundamental text about what it means to be an American. Why did this happen?
Because of the 1960s – the assassinations and the chaos. People were frightened. And also because of the Black Panthers, who were obviously not white conservatives, but they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence. It is hugely ironic: the Panthers were wiped out but their ideas stuck and were adopted by the white right wing. Now, for many, the second amendment has an almost religious component to it. The right to own a gun is seen as a kind of holy grail.
What gives you hope for the future?
This is so huge, so utopian, this dream of mine that both sides will want to talk and to end the nightmare… but if I can’t have hope, if I can’t dream of some possibility of finding a solution, then how is it possible to be alive?
Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster, with photographs by Spencer Ostrander, is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
