Weapon-mention as political statement?

[Michael Bailey]

Okay, a little more context, courtesy of Amazon look inside:

It was a real machine gun, brought into the restaurant by a drunken Marine.
Da Conho, a Brazilian (so that's where the Portuguese name came from)
traded 3 artichokes and an eggplant for it, outbidding the bartender.

Highly improbable, verging on magical realism, also playing on
a) the sort of Sgt. Bilko picture of armed forces personnel being
porn-hounds, gamblers and drunks and diverting government property
(which Pynchon had probably seen a bit of himself), fleshed out in
more detail as Pig Bodine

b) wasn't Pynchon's friend Richard Farina prone to tales of gunrunning?

c) Since the threats were put in the mouth of the Jewish character,
while he was being made to appear ridiculous, Pynchon's artistic
choices here could be equally offensive to Jews and Arabs.  Perhaps
this is one of the passages he regretted in the Slow Learner intro.

e) The Jew as a figure of fun wasn't unique to Pynchon.  Early Philip
Roth has a lot of passages, eg, that eclipse this one in terms of
playing with Jewish stereotypes.