Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Joe Nocera reflects on the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Gun Song,” which can be read today as a chilling premonition of America’s age of mass shootings.
In 1990, Stephen Sondheim, the great musical theater composer, wrote a wrenching song about gun violence. The lyrics Sondheim wrote for “The Gun Song,” as it was simply titled, have haunted me for years. Here’s how it begins:
It takes a lot of men to make a gun
Hundreds
Many men to make a gun
Men in the mines to dig the iron,
Men in the mills to forge the steel,
Men at machines to turn the barrel,
Mold the trigger, shape the wheel
It takes a lot of men to make a gun. . .
One gun. . .
And then comes the chorus—or is it the punchline?
And all you have to do
Is move your little finger
Move your little finger and [click]
You can change the world.
