page_title: Get Your Gunn
section_title: Background and release
hierarchical_section_title: Get Your Gunn / Background and release
caption_attribution_description: English: Mug shot of Michael F. Griffin.
context_page_description: "Get Your Gunn" is a song by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released as the lead single from their debut studio album, Portrait of an American Family. The song was written by the band's eponymous vocalist along with original guitarist and bassist Daisy Berkowitz and Gidget Gein, respectively, and was produced by Manson with Trent Reznor. "Get Your Gunn" was inspired by the murder of abortionist David Gunn by a pro-life activist, an event which angered Manson. The song also took influence from Manson's lifelong fascination with abortion and an interaction he had with an anti-abortion protester.
  A gothic rock and hard rock song, the track received a mostly positive response from music critics, who described it as both nightmarish and well-produced, while Manson garnered acclaim for his vocal performance. The song features saxophone played by Sugarsmack vocalist Hope Nicholls, and an audio sample of the televised suicide of R. Budd Dwyer. According to Berkowitz, the writing of the song marked a change of direction for Manson, after which he began to write more politically-charged songs.
context_section_description: Abortionist David Gunn was shot and killed in 1993 at an anti-abortion protest by Michael Frederick Griffin, a Christian fundamentalist. At his trial, Griffin claimed to have been manipulated into killing Gunn by John Burt, a pro-life leader and former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Gunn's death was, in the words of Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, "the first targeted killing of an abortion doctor in America". The murder inspired "Get Your Gunn", hence the spelling of the song's title. In 1999, Manson wrote in Rolling Stone that Gunn's death "was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that these people killed someone in the name of being 'prolife.'"
  Manson has said that the murder "almost made me laugh, but it made me mad. When you think about it, it's so fucking backwards, despite the whole Christian belief of love thy enemy and all that." When writing the track, Manson also drew inspiration from his longtime fascination with abortion as well as an elderly man he saw at an anti-abortion protest. Manson remembered: "I had this thing that I bought at a magic shop in Florida that shot cotton-wad fire things out of the palm of your hand, and I drove up to him one day and said the devil's got a message for you and I shot the fireball at him and he ran." Commenting on both "Get Your Gunn" and "Lunchbox", Manson noted that "The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually the ones that sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am decrying."
  When deciding the direction of Portrait of an American Family, Manson and band-mate Daisy Berkowitz decided that it would comment on what they saw as the hypocrisy of the U.S. media. Discussing "Get Your Gunn" with Noisey in 2014, Berkowitz said: "When we started out [Manson's lyricism] was more psychedelic. It was weirdness. We played up weirdness rather than anything socially pointed. We got more social and political as things went on. Like with our song, 'Get Your Gunn' that definitely wasn't something that we started out doing."
  Manson has said that "Get Your Gunn" is his favorite song from Portrait of an American Family. Manson told the Sun-Sentinel that "What's great is that ["Get Your Gunn"] is the most uncommercial track, the most politically incorrect." "Snake Eyes and Sissies" was originally planned to be the band's debut single, but "Get Your Gunn" was released instead on June 9, 1994. The single featured "Get Your Gunn" and "Misery Machine", another song from Portrait of an American Family, as well as two other tracks: "Mother Inferior Got Her Gunn" and "Revelation #9". The titles of the two latter songs are puns based on songs from the White Album. The child pictured on the sleeve for the disc is Wes Brown, the half-brother of Twiggy Ramirez.
caption: Michael Frederick Griffin (pictured) murdered Dr. David Gunn; the murder inspired "Get Your Gunn".
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