If I love you, you know that our dad, a World War II vet who saw some of the worst mass atrocities that humans are capable of, who survived a German ambush crossing the Moselle where fewer than half his unit came back alive, who cut down the fences to liberate the living skeletons of Buchenwald, who saw the horses butchered by starving families in Trier, who told us near the end of his beautiful life that most of the people he saw shot in the war were Americans shooting other Americans, that’s the kind of madness and confusion and crossfire he saw...you know that he never allowed guns on our farm. He didn’t want anything to do with them.
I was there with you when we wanted guns more than anything. It sucked to be the only boys in our eighth grade class who didn’t own a shotgun or a rifle. I was with you when we shot the shit out of everything that moved, including each other, with our BB guns when we got our Daisys, replicas of real guns. Mine a Remington .22 rifle. Yours a classic ‘Rifleman’ Winchester. I wanted yours. You always had the coolest weapons. Boomerangs. Slingshots. Bows and arrows.
We all carried pocket knives and would play with them at recess at school. Remember the game of Stretch? We would face one another, knives out. You would toss your knife at the ground, and if it stuck, I’d have to stretch and touch it with my foot, and from that position throw my knife to a spot where you’d have to touch it with your foot. And so it would go, until one of us couldn’t stretch far enough to touch the other’s knife with his foot and would fall over. Laughing. On the ground. With knives. The shit we did that no teacher or parent in their right mind would let a kid do today. We loved every second of it, didn’t we? I am still a decent knife-thrower thanks to Stretch.
Remember how all us kids would stand together in the middle of our front yard and you or I would shoot an arrow so far into the sky we could barely see it, and we’d all run for our lives so it wouldn’t hit us coming down? Talk about thrilling. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. Wouldn’t allow my kids to do it today, either. It’s a different time. We are in a different place. Not all old games are worth playing today.
At the time and place where we grew up, we could run from an arrow we’d shot into the sky because we danced with danger on a daily basis. We were hyper aware that we could get a sleeve caught in a power takeoff shaft, a foot in a grain auger, a hand in a brush hog, and that would be that, and it would be no one’s fault but our own. We knew plenty of kids who’d been maimed or even killed when they got careless, and didn’t see the danger coming.
Maybe running from a falling arrow was so much fun because we were more in control of our destinies than usual. We had more warning than we got from a concealed copperhead or a spooked horse or a bear on a trail. We could keep an eye on a falling arrow as it soared to its apogee, turned, fell. Could see it coming. It was the time of our lives when adrenalin became our friend. Running from an falling arrow that will pierce you through the top of your head if it hits you pegs the needle on the Being Alive meter.
I understand the aching for that re-lived rush. The way a kid who scores the winning basket in a big game will spend his or her adult life listening for the echoes of those cheers. The way a young surfer catches a wave that stirs a lifelong relationship with the oceans. After our basic needs are met, we we hunger for what makes us feel most alive. This is, simply, the act of expressing our humanity. For you, the rush comes with shooting guns.
Over the years, I have seen your gun collection grow, and have shared in some of the fun of that. Making like cowboys and cops with target practice in the desert. Shooting skeet on the farm. Hunting ducks when the ducks never showed, and when it was a shooting gallery, and either way, we got shit-faced drunk and it was fun. Was with you when we shot propane tanks from a thousand yards with high powered rifles at your family’s ranch in Nevada. And that time we were sailing out of San Diego, and you opened a canvas bag and pulled out Charles Bronson’s actual machine gun from the movie Machine Gun Kelly, and shocked the hell out of everyone on the boat by spraying live ammo across the water. Incredibly illegal. Also incredible. The wow factor, for me, outweighed any other factor. I’ll never forget it. Thank you for that cinematically terrifying moment.
Today, though, we don’t live in the country we grew up in. And I don’t care what your hats say, we never will again. That’s how life is. It moves on. It doesn’t repeat itself. There are no re-dos. The environment changes, and when it does, it’s up to us to adapt. That’s how we got here over a couple of million years. Today, we live in a world where most people are incapable of sensing danger like you and I grew up learning how to do. The possibilities increase that the arrow will turn and fall before people have a chance to run. To survive, as always, we have to adapt to our new conditions.
We have been abandoned by our ostensible leaders to this fact and its aftermath: Wars come home. They come home in the form of soldiers who have been scarred, physically and psychologically. 22 suicides a day! Does this mean anything to you? If not, at least please consider what it means to the families of those vets. Wars come home with vets who are drawn by design into a job opportunity field heavy on surveillance, police militarization, immigrant harassment, and prisoner acquisition & retention. And light on bridge-building, education, the arts, health, entrepreneurship, renewable energy. When wars come home they target people of color and people of the Islamic faith because they [cosmetically] resemble people our vets have been ordered to surveil and suppress [often with Vietnam-like illogic] in Iraq and Afghanistan. When wars come home, the behaviors learned in war will surely follow.
When wars come home, so do the weapons. And so we have municipal and county law enforcement agencies, approximately 18,000 of them, as I understand it, with zero federal oversight or standards, armed like soldiers at war--many of them believing that they’re not armed enough! We have politicians bullied and bribed by the NRA into ignoring gun trafficking across state and national borders. Where do you think Chicago gangbangers get their guns? Across the state line in Indiana!. We have agencies rounding up people as if they are the enemy, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of these people are here to fulfill this country’s promise—that they can dream a life of peace and prosperity into existence. The immigrants and people of color want a fair chance. Equity in the American narrative. A fresh start. New roots in a fertile land. Instead, they find that the wars they thought they’d left behind are here, now, too. Black folks are seeing that the fights they fought for voting and civil rights must still be fought. Not all echoes of the past are worth hearing again. Not all the crowds of the past are roaring their approval.
War is violent discrimination. Between oppressor and oppressed, between one religion and another, one tribe and another, one leader and another, one skin color and another, one flag and another, between who has guns and who does not, who is loved and who is hated. War feeds on discrimination like a fire feeds on oxygen. And weapons are the fire’s accelerants.
Some of you I love unconditionally. That doesn’t mean you make it easy to do. Or that I am happy about your growing collection of guns. Or about what your quest for an adrenalin jolt has become. Or that I’m not troubled by seeing you with a bullet re-loading operation where your exercise room used to be. Or that I think it’s a good idea to keep a clip for your .44 labeled ‘Kill’ — the clip with the hollow points. It doesn’t mean I want to be in the vicinity when you and your buddies shoot tripod-mounted military rifles equipped with suppressors and holographic sights, shells hissing and setting off explosions of Tannerite that feel like somebody ramming a truck into the side of the house.
How many guns do you own now? 20? 30? I’ve lost count.
I’m writing this because I can’t personally do anything about de-gunning America. Because I don’t own any guns. You own all the guns. It is you who have to see the lunacy of making military weapons easily available to people who are on tilt like that guy in Vegas, or the one in Orlando, or the one in the church basement in Charleston, or the kid at Newtown, or...or...or…
If I know and love you, it is not you I am worried about. We grew up around dangerous situations, and we know how to dance with them. I am worried about all you gun owners I don’t know, which is most of you. I cannot count on you to have any kind of clue about where the danger is coming from.
I am worried about the lives of the people you fear — irrationally, I add. I realize that after watching Fox News and reading Drudge for a week straight, it must seem to you that there’s a terrorist lurking outside every window. That everyone who doesn’t [cosmetically] look like you is a threat. I know you think football players who kneel during the anthem are disrespecting the flag and the military. This simply isn’t so. The real threat, the danger, is from within your own communities, and neighborhoods. And ultimately from your own imaginations. Your imaginings result in the too-common occurrence of what my father saw way back in World War II—Americans shooting other Americans. When we discriminate between those of us who stand and remove our hats for the national anthem, and athletes who carry on a long and worthy American tradition of peaceful protests against injustice—that’s the war coming home. When you perceive and respond to a peaceful expression of free speech as a threat to your way of life—that’s the war coming home.
It is you sensible, danger-respecting, sport-loving gun owners — the vets and the hunters and the competitive shooters and the skeet shooters and the muzzle loaders and law enforcement professionals who discern the difference between policing and waging war — it is you who have to spot the arrow falling, and warn our fellow citizens and our lawmakers about the danger they’re putting us all in if they don’t limit the proliferation of personal weapons. It can be so simple. Mirror the rules we place on drivers before they can take the road! And digitize the gun-buyers’ database! Two moves can make it less likely that the next deranged man or child will be able to mow down a crowd of innocents with a killing machine, or that the next under-trained cop will shoot an unarmed black man during a traffic stop.
It would be awesome if a group of you would begin a de-gunning movement. I can’t do it. I don’t have any guns to de-gun with. You can. It has to come from you, who own all the guns. Who among you will have the courage to step up and say Enough?
If I love you, you know that I would take a bullet for you. I hope you understand that I want to lower the odds that I’ll ever have to.