Tag Archives: family

I held a gun for the first time last month.

It was during our visit to Tulsa over Thanksgiving. Both my Dad and my father-in-law had made recent gun purchases, and my father-in-law was especially eager to take his son out to the shooting range to try the AR-15, the Sig Sauer handgun, and the Glock. These are the same weapons recovered from Adam Lanza’s body. When they got back, Brian asked if I’d ever held a gun. I said no.

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I don’t know anything about guns. My Dad got a gun when I was in high school, and I was appalled in a very dramatic, teenagery way. He joined the NRA when I was in college and became fairly active in the local branch, attending their galas, writing his legislators. I’d always thought of my Dad as an aging hippie, but he’s really very Midwestern and conservative. He grew up in a cornfield in Illinois and he’s a lot more like my neighbors in Pleasantville than, say, Jerry Garcia (although he did have gorgeous long locks in the 70s). We’ve disagreed on gay marriage, abortion, presidential candidates, and guns. A few years ago, I gave him a gift card to Cabela’s for his birthday and he said, “Oh good! I can shot those rabbits that are eating the plants in our yard.” I was distraught about the bunnies. He was confused about why that would bother me. The rabbits were ruining the petunias.

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I love my father. I love him the way girls love their Daddies. I respect him to a nearly irrational degree, even though I disagree with him in so many ways. My Dad is smart. He’s thoughtful. We talked about the Republican primaries last year and he said he based his decision not on what any candidate says, but on their voting records. He liked Michelle Bachmann. I disagreed, but it’s hard to argue with that decision-making. He was far more concerned about the economy than social issues, but he loves his guns. I love him, but guns freak me out.

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I recently wrote:

A couple of years ago, my husband and I went through a really bad period in our marriage. There was a lot of fighting. At one point, he said to me, “You’re more interested in being right than in maintaining this relationship.”This… has become a touchstone for me when I start to feel myself getting worked up over ideological differences. I used to think that hypocrisy was the absolute worst thing a person could do… Now as I get older and see how flawed and complicated life is, I now think that self-righteousness might be the most damaging and problematic attribute. Believing that you are right above all others, and being willing to sacrifice relationships on principle? That divides. That hurts. I would rather be a hypocrite with strange allies than alone and convinced I’m right.

At the dinner table in November I thought of this line as listened as my husband (who no longer owns a gun) and our fathers talked shop: ammo, pistols, kickback, grip, scopes.

I thought about my friend, R, a co-teacher and office mate who once turned to me and said, “Listen, Lauren. I want to tell you about this because I know you won’t judge me. I love shooting guns.” She got a shotgun for her birthday. She described the satisfaction of sharpshooting; the strange communal experience of shooting at a range with other enthusiasts. I thought to myself, “I need to be less of a judgy dick about this. I don’t get guns, but there’s clearly an appeal here. They make people I love happy. Maybe I’ll get Dad that refill kit he wants for Christmas.”

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Brian described shooting the assault rifle as living in an action film. He said it conjured Predator.

I made a list of topics to blog about during our long drive home. “Guns” was at the top.

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We live in the country. Hunting is a big deal here. My daughters’ friends’ families will have guns. We will teach our girls to safely handle firearms.  We will have to, because the likelihood of accidental injury or death dramatically increases when there are guns in the home, even if it isn’t our home. We will have to because of their grandfathers’ arsenals, which are kept unloaded and locked in safes, but they’re still there. Because we live in a small town, a sleepy town; a low poverty, mostly white town, a place where you’d never expect anything like this to happen.

We will do this because holding a gun, a real gun, does not feel like a toy. It’s heavy. It’s serious. It’s cold. I thought, “How can people carry these and wave them around? How heavy must a rifle be? A machine gun?” You forget they’re made of metal and metal is fucking heavy. You can’t just sling ‘em around like Doc Holliday. The weight reminds you. You’d have to carry that weight with you. It’s not easy. You have to be purposeful with a gun. You have to know what you’re doing.

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Eddie Izzard has this great line. “The National Rifle Association says that guns don’t kill people, people kill people… but I think the gun helps!”

I know a guy who does the crime beat for a newspaper and on facebook he said that crazy people will find a weapon if they want to, so if we treat the crazy people (the mental illness thing), then the guns become “irrelevant.” He says he’s seen baseball bats, VCRs, knives, etc, used as weapons. A caller to On Point on Monday made the point that cars are the number one killers of children, and we don’t plan on banning them, do we?

But the thing is, I always think, and don’t always say, that those objects have other uses. We drive in our cars to get places. We hit baseballs with bats.  Grandma watches movies on our VCRs. But guns do nothing other than kill. Or give people practice at eventually killing something, I guess. They’re heavy and expensive and their whole point is to end life. At some point, if they’re around? You know? They’ll be put to use. So I’m just not convinced that these are analogous in any way. I’m loath, I’m really loath to say, that they should be freely available to be carried, concealed, purchased, and used all over society forever. I’m really loath to say that schoolteachers ought to be trained in weaponry. I’m really loath to say that the right to own one is more important than the right to not live in complete, stunned horror. Or my daughters’ right to go to kindergarten, or the movies, free from the fear of being shot. I don’t understand how more weapons in more places adds up to better safety.

Stricter gun control makes sense to me, but I know it’s not as simple as that. I know because I’ve been grilling my husband about guns via gchat and realizing how little I know about guns and what they are used for, how they can be modified, how you buy them, why you buy them, why people love them. I’m ignorant on all fronts and fueled by fear. As a friend recently said, “I’m getting really sick of all the gun control/mental illness talk lately, because it seems like the people who are most frothy are the ones who know the least about both guns and mental illness.”

So, I have some learning to do.

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I keep thinking that I should call my Dad to check on him and see how he’s doing. I keep thinking that he would be a good person to talk to about what could be done to make this less likely to happen. Because he knows so much more than I do about guns, laws, and regulations. And he loves his granddaughters.

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On the morning those babies were killed, Black Girl Dangerous posted this on facebook:

This country was founded on the killing of innocent children, particularly black, brown and red. Right now, U.S. drones are killing innocent children in the Middle East. What happened today in Connecticut is terrible and heartbreaking. But in the midst of all the usual media jibberish about monsters toting guns, let’s remember that violence against children is perpetuated at every level of American existence, every day. We only get outraged when the children look like the babies who died today.

And I thought, “Fuck you!” and then I thought, “Dammit, she’s right!” Newtown is horrifying because we expect our children — our privileged children — to be protected from Things Like That. It’s horrifying to see the war waged out there, on other people and their beautiful little kids, brought into our safest, softest places. It’s horrifying to think that we have a hand in that kind of devastation, every day, in other schoolhouses, other families.

And now our kids are just like their kids. They’re all our kids.

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In the story of Jesus’s birth, the Angel spreads the good news and says “and on Earth peace toward men of good will.” (Not, I guess, “good will towards men,” if you correctly translate the Latin genetive case.) Some people get all huffy about this translation like, “Hey, see, it’s not all universalist, so you have to do what Jesus says to get peace!” or whatever, but I keep having those lines run through my head because in school we sang SO many choir songs with et in terra pax this time of year and I can’t wake up in December without that or a Christmas pop medley as an ear worm.

I’m no longer a Christian, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to add a depth of purpose to the humanist way we celebrate the season as a family. I’m thinking about how all our holiday traditions at this time of year, no matter what religion, focus on that place where hope rubs up against despair, and somehow manages to triumph. I believe in the good will of my Dad, and my neighbors, my representatives, and my friends. I believe it’s possible that we can come together and learn from each other because none of us wants children to be murdered. No one wants that. We can improve laws. We can improve mental health access. We can turn off our TVs and ask for better media for children. We can talk to each other. We can love. We can find a solution. Way too late for it to do 27 or 32 or 13 any good, but I still believe. I believe people of good will want peace for our children, and for all children.

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Right now, I hope that in two years I can send my daughter to first grade reasonably sure that she will not be killed. I hope. I hope.