The Guns of Autumn

Max Finkelstein isn’t trying to change the world. He just wants to make a point.

Toward that goal he’s devoting many of his waking hours building works of art that see guns as, well, American as apple pie.

You buy firearms, in Finkelstein’s world, as easily as you buy cat food, stepping up to a register and watching the clerk run the bar code over a sensor that flashes the price on a register.

You get the point.

“I’m trying to show the commercialism of guns,” he said one day in the living room of his West Hollywood home, seated across from one of his guns-and-apple-pie art pieces. “I want to show how easy it is to buy them.”

A trim man of 83 with graying hair and beard, he looks a little like a character from a Sholom Aleichem story. There is a quality of grace about him, a quietness that edges an iron spirit.

His art piece on the wall is a wooden depiction of the American flag created with rifles, bullets, bar code stripes and the kind of camouflaged material worn by gun-crazy survivalists.

“One critic said it’s handed to you on a silver platter,” Finkelstein says, shrugging slightly. “That’s exactly what I wanted.”

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A retired tool and dye maker who has been anti-gun since the 1960s, Finkelstein makes no attempt to conceal his message in the sculptures he creates.

A dove means peace, a helmet means war, a flag made with guns means American violence, period. “It’s all there,” he says simply.

The piece on the living room wall is one of a series of his anti-gun creations, and while none will likely hang in the Louvre, he is hoping they will be exhibited in schools and local galleries.

I heard of Finkelstein months ago but put off calling because I was as tired of writing about guns as you are of reading about them. Been there, done that.

But autumn has echoed with gunfire in unlikely places, turning its victims into body outlines on the street and their lives into statistics.

Much has especially been made of the image-shattering blood spilled in Santa Monica, as though this people’s paradise, this urban island, ought to be spared the violence that terrifies the mainland.

I read with wonder a tourist-comforting comment by Santa Monica’s Mayor Robert Holbrook that the gangbangers who fill the air with gunfire “are looking for gang members and . . . are not interested in anyone else.”

If this is intended to create a feeling of well-being, it misses the point. There are no “smart bullets” to begin with. And even if there were, violence on the fringe of culture impacts on the broader society as well. What affects one, affects all.

Bang, we’re all dead.

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Finkelstein understood that concept years ago creating art for the antiwar movement of the 1960s, most particularly a polished aluminum dove soaring dangerously near a bullet against a background as dark as hell.

Thirty years later he was energized to begin his current campaign against firearms with the bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. The body count created a sense of horror in him that would not go away.

It wasn’t guns that killed 168 human beings that spring day in 1995, but it got Finkelstein thinking about the easy access of weaponry and resulted in his collection of anti-gun sculptures.

“The bomber was a part of the NRA,” he says, “and the NRA stands for the proliferation of guns. There are so few controls over weapons. It worries me and it ought to worry us all.”

Finkelstein lives in a quiet neighborhood of neatly kept lawns and gardens, but there are bars on the windows too. His home has been burglarized twice and not far away a friend’s father-in-law was shot in broad daylight.

Quiet neighborhoods, like quiet cities, will increasingly become the targets of violence if, during a slowly declining crime rate, we become blase to the elements of violence.

Max Finkelstein, a gentle man, is doing what he can by creating art against guns. His other works have been exhibited across the country and in places around the world, and his gun series deserves the same kind of exposure.

In the art piece on the wall the stars on the flag are represented by bullets standing on end, but five of the bullets have toppled in metaphoric death. Finkelstein makes it very clear that one of them could be us.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com