The American Spectator

Neither Atticus, Dill, nor Scout knew of any firearms present at the jail that night except in the hands of the mob that came for the hapless Tom Robinson-Atticus made a call, not the worst call, that he’d be better off without a rifle than against a mob armed with several such and shotguns. Heck Tate would doubtless have defended Tom with all the means at his disposal-it was not uncommon to find a Thompson submachine gun in police armories of the time-but he had been lured away by a false report of trouble, duty confounded by duty. Scout recognized in the mob Mr. Walter Cunningham, a decent man helping to lead a lynch mob based upon the horrible idea that lynching a black man accused of raping a white girl was the decent thing to do. Scout greeted the man, a client of her father’s, with friendly affection, not realizing that the mob was at the point of doing violence to her father-and suddenly, the mob wasn’t, and went home.

THEN comes the point that Hollywood did indeed omit, most wrongly, I agree, from the movie. Atticus remarks to Tom, “They won’t bother you any more,” and from a window across the street comes, “You’re d**n tootin’ they won’t! Had you covered all the time, Atticus!” And who is the wielder of the double-barreled shotgun in question? Not Sheriff Heck Tate.

It is Braxton Bragg Underwood (ah, evocative name!), editor of the Maycomb Tribune, wielding not his namesake typewriter, but buckshot instead. Mr. Underwood despises Negroes, Scout tells us, and yet principles matter to him enough for him to be ready to rain lead upon his subscribers should the right of trial by jury be taken from Tom Robinson and Atticus Finch. Or — in other words — the account is of a man who makes his living by the 1st Amendment employing his rights under the 2nd Amendment to ensure the preservation of the 4th!