*plot points are revealed within*

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sunnydale, CA is always moments away from the end. Potential apocalypses lie around every corner, and danger to the existence of human life on earth is constant. This danger is also, to most everyone, inconsequential to daily life. Sunnydale residents know when something is off. They know that there is more going on than they have been told, but they don’t quite know what, or how close it is to killing them.

And, for most, it doesn’t really matter. Because the world is complicated enough without demons, difficult enough to manage a life without worrying about a constant barrage of the supernatural seeking to destroy humanity. In the Buffy Universe at large, the problem of being an individual human, of finding an identity and place of security to live as one would choose, is never fully resolved for anyone. Buffy spends her life saving the world, and with very few exceptions, her efforts are not rewarded. She’s by necessity an outsider; her romantic relationships always fall apart; she is more at home with vamps at demon bars than teenagers at dances. As the Slayer her days are numbered, her death certain, another Slayer ready to take her place. Buffy’s struggle with being the Slayer is as important as the Slayer’s struggles against demons and gods.

For the Scooby Gang it is the same. Xander is on the outside of the inside, powerless but faithful and looking for ways to help. Willow always struggling to maintain her shifting identity, first in romance and sexual identity, and later amid the impacts of addiction. Anya wonders how she can be a better human, and wonders why she wants to be one. Spike is tormented by his desire to love a human rather than desiring to kill her. Even Oz, cool as a cucumber, must chain himself to the walls to protect the world from his dark side. Fighting the forces of evil in Sunnydale means fighting with one’s identity all the time.

In this way the show is much like real life; there is despair in Buffy that is tragic to behold. And, also like real life, there are people in despair, wishing to inflict their will upon a world that has cast them out. That guns are used in this endeavor should be recognizable to anyone paying attention. Guns, in Buffy, serve two purposes: as salve to the despair of young men, like Jonathon and Warren, and aid to those who would join a battle in which they don’t belong, like Agent Finn and the Initiative. This piece is about the former.

During the conclusion of ”Earshot”, (3.18), a young man named Jonathon stands in the clock-tower of his school hurriedly assembling a rifle. Earlier in this episode, Buffy contracted some bit of demon blood, which enabled her to hear the thoughts in the minds of every one around her. During the very long days that ensue for Buffy, she hears one mind repeating: “I’ll kill you all.” A letter of apology for the actions he is about to take is found from Jonathon, and his are assumed to be the murderous thoughts Buffy hears. She eventually finds him in the tower, assembling his gun. The following dialog ensues:

JONATHAN
You think I won’t use this?
BUFFY
I don’t know, Jonathan, I’m just –
JONATHAN
Stop doing that!
BUFFY
Doing what?
JONATHAN
Stop saying my name like we’re friends. We’re not friends. You all think I’m an idiot. A short idiot.
BUFFY
I don’t. I don’t think about you much at all. Most people here don’t. Bugs you, doesn’t it? You’ve got all this pain, all these feelings and nobody’s paying attention.
JONATHAN
You think I just want attention?
BUFFY
No, I think you’re in the bell tower with a high powered rifle because you want to blend in. Believe it or not, Jonathan, I understand. About the pain.
JONATHAN
Oh, right. ‘Cause the burden of being beautiful and athletic, that’s a crippler.
BUFFY
I’m sorry, I was wrong. You are an idiot. My life happens very occasionally to suck beyond the telling of it. More than I can stand sometimes. And not just me. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they’re way too busy with their own. The beautiful ones, the popular ones, the guys that pick on you… everyone. If you could hear what they’re feeling - the confusion, the loneliness… It looks quiet down there. It’s not. It’s deafening.
They stand side by side for a moment, looking down.
BUFFY
You know I could have taken the gun by now.
JONATHAN
I know.
BUFFY
Rather do it this way.
Slowly, he hands her the gun. Her hand is shaking a little as she takes it and unloads it.

Of the recurring characters outside the Scooby Gang, Jonathon is one of my favorites in Buffy. He’s a loner whose life is lived off-stage from the action of Sunnydale. He wishes to be a part of the adventures that unfold around him, those Buffy and Willow and Xander occupy. By any means at his disposal, he tries to insert himself into those stories.

But here, with his rifle in the clock tower, he is stopped from his act of violence not by someone providing reasons he should go on living or offering him adventures, but giving him reality just as he imagines it: no one cares about what he is doing. They’re thinking about themselves. Is that comforting or discomforting? Either way, it’s isolating. The problem of isolation envelopes Jonathan. His story is characterized by the desire for acceptance at any costs, and that is always sad, if also too common.

The exchange in the clock-tower is one of the darkest real moments* in the show’s first three seasons. Buffy is not an after-school special, and never are lessons packaged tidily for the education of its viewers. And here, we are not given one. A young man is met by a young woman who tells him: everybody’s lonely, don’t do something you’ll regret. The background din of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that humans, too, are always seeking to destroy each other or ourselves. That Buffy is successful at preventing not just mystical violence, but human violence as well, matters.

But sometimes, human violence cannot be stopped. Sometimes, the consequences of our actions are beyond any the demons of Sunnydale could ever achieve.

Another man with a gun, Warren, appears later in the series, culminating in “Seeing Red” (6.19). Warren is defined by failure. A friend of Jonathan’s, he was a tech-geek as a kid, skilled at robotics and programming, unskilled in social interaction. He built a robot for sex but when he tried to trade her in for a real woman, he lost both. He’s a genius who cannot succeed, and so becomes a villain by choice; his eagerness for acceptance leads to an eagerness for power. To that end, with two friends (including Jonathon), Warren forms The Trio. The Trio plans to kill Buffy and turn Sunnydale over to the forces of darkness. Eventually, Warren’s hunger for power pushes his friends aside; he gets more reckless, and more dangerous. Failure for the power hungry can be as dangerous as success.

What is interesting about The Trio, compared to every other arch villain in Buffy, is that The Trio is comprised simply of humans. They have no mystical origins or powers beyond their capacity to learn and build things. Defeated, they are not dusted, or destroyed, or sent to another dimension. Instead, they do what people do: panic. When his friends flee to Mexico for safety, Warren stays for a last shot at revenge. His plans have failed, his genius proved insufficient. And as a last resort, he buys a handgun with which he plans to kill Buffy: if he can’t best her with his brains, he’ll shoot her down with a gun.

When he shows up to kill Buffy he is humiliated, and filled with rage, and terrified. And he fails. Instead he murders a young woman in a lover’s embrace. The results of his violent outburst are shocking, and unforeseen. It is for me the saddest moment of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not simply because of what happens, an innocent young woman is killed by a stupid raging kid, but because of what that action means in the world. A woman killed by a gun is fixed into reality in a way that few things in the Buffy Universe are. Even in fantasy, one cannot undo the permanence of gun violence.

Of all of Buffy‘s arch villains, Warren terrifies me the most, and that is because he is not a villain. He’s an isolated young man looking for an identity that suits him. He need not be evil any more than a Slayer needs to be good. We make our choices. Warren was a brilliant mind. He does not act like a monster but like a man. Which is much more frightening than demons bringing about the end of days.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t big on lessons. Still. Here’s a lesson I’ve pulled from Buffy. In 2014, the US is fascinated by the end of the world. Our politicians and leaders fantasize about the many horrors that make up our future, and our televisions offer reality shows about preparing for the collapse of human civilization. Failing in our capacity to imagine the future a better place, we prepare for the world to fall apart. This is what Buffy the Vampire Slayer is premised on. Another day, another apocalypse. Still, all our readiness for battle, all our preparing for the worst, we can not escape the fact that our capacity for good or evil in the face of the unknown eventually, always, contains this: desperate boys taking up guns and murdering innocent girls.

Why must that be so.

*what I refer to as “real” moments in Buffy are simply those that do not partake in fantasy. Gun violence perpetrated by boy in a school, unfortunately must be termed a real moment exempted from the fantasy-horror of the show’s genre plot. Such moments are not above or below the fantasy elements, but they are, I believe, separate from them.