As a man that grew up around guns, Gawker's Adam Weinstein has written a great article called, "
It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun". In it, he talks about the numerous decisions that go along with carrying (and using) a firearm that many people just don't consider, such as where you will store it when you need to go into a place that doesn't allow it or how to present yourself to the police once necessity has caused you to use it.
He goes on to tell of how he came to remove his guns from his home for his family's sake.
When my son was born, all of my questions suddenly had a very basic answer. I would love for him to grow up as I did, enjoying shooting but understanding that every gun is loaded and you never touch one without an adult and you don't point it at anything you don't intend to shoot. But more than that, I'd love to believe that he'll have no mischievous accidents, no suicidal depressions or homicidal rages, no moments of weakness or fits of pique or questions that can be answered by the pull of a trigger. As with all the other scenarios in which I'm the good guy with the gun, I can never be sure. I carry my permit, as I always have. But now all my guns live with my father.
I made the decision not to buy a gun for similar reasons. Meet me after the fold.
Unlike Weinstein, I have no positive associations with guns. Guns are never for fun--for target shooting or letting off steam or hunting. Guns are tools meant for protection of yourself, of other people, of property. They are for killing. In the Spring of 2008, my wife was pregnant. I was 38 and she was 32, and he was was the first child for both of us. She was going to be a Mommy. I was going to be a Daddy. As our nesting instincts kicked in and we began to prepare for his arrival, I became obsessed with the thought that our home might be burglarized. Well, not burglarized really, but a good old-fashioned home invasion in which crazed men, armed to the teeth and high on drugs, would break in while we slept. And not just to steal, but to terrorize and assault us, maybe even kill us.
Though we'd both grown up in a rough neighborhood, we'd moved on to a firmly middle-class life in a decent one--the same South Side area in which Michelle Obama had been raised. In recent years, it's become a mixed-bag--mostly a bedroom community, but with touches of crime and violence that are all the more off-putting when they occur.
At the time, I owned a real estate business that was falling apart. I saw physically protecting my family as a priority in an uncertain world where a man's livelihood could collapse with little notice as he looked on helplessly. But I could do something to make my family safer. I told my wife I wanted to buy a gun for home protection. She reasonably reminded me that, at that time, you still couldn't legally possess a handgun in Chicago. But I just as reasonably explained that while I'm a law-and-order kind of guy, my family's safety was at stake. And if I ever needed to use a firearm to defend my home, I'd gladly bear the legal consequences of possessing it.
By God, at least within the confines of my own home, I was going to be a good guy with a gun.
But my wife was emphatic. No way. And I knew this was too important a decision to make without her, so I set out to win her over. Meanwhile, I had largely stopped sleeping at night. I worked from home and didn't have much work to do so I would walk aimlessly for hours and would be waiting for her when she arrived home from her job. We argued about the risk of stray bullets flying out of windows and hitting pedestrians outside or entering one of the many bungalows around us--a not uncommon thing for stray bullets to do in Chicago. About the risk of one of us accidentally shooting the other in the dark and confusion of a home invasion. Or of shooting through a wall and hitting the baby with an errant slug meant for an armed intruder. I knew from my research that most people are terrible shots in the best of circumstances and that fumbling for a gun in the dark as the bad guys closed in would be the worst of them. So I started researching guns and ammunition that had less penetration power--what would go through a bad guy but not through a bedroom wall? I had to think. Think! This was a family decision--I might need her to use the gun!
This went on for months. At one point, as I again tried to get her to see reason, my wife--a progressive Christian and guaranteed a spot in heaven--said that she would rather die than shoot someone. I was appalled. I announced that it was my responsibility to make sure that didn't happen. And while she might be willing to sacrifice her life, and mine, was she willing to sacrifice our baby--our new baby boy? Wouldn't she be willing to do absolutely anything to save him?
And she flinched.
So I quickly suggested a compromise. We would get a shotgun instead. Not only were they legal, but, loaded with buckshot, it would be less likely to go through walls. The long barrel would make it harder for the shooter to accidentally shoot himself and with enough distance--say from our living room to the kitchen--it would actually increase the odds that the intruder would be hit by the spreading shot. Buckshot might even improve the odds we could knock down the bad guys without killing them and didn't this address most of her concerns and besides, it was for the baby and hadn't she read the paper lately?
Finally, she agreed. And almost instantly, my feelings changed. It was as if I had been pushing hard against a wall that suddenly gave way and I was fighting to keep my balance. With the way clear to own a firearm, I suddenly began to wrestle with the risk of domestic violence. The risk had seemed silly to me before--I had envisioned spouses methodically planning murders of which I didn't believe either of us was capable. But I also knew that many such killings are acts of passion--committed in unthinking moments of anger with nearby tools.
And I was capable of anger. I knew that. My wife and I were arguing a lot over money and I was angry. My business had collapsed and I was angry. I had suddenly fallen behind my peers and I was angry. The baby needed things that we scraped to provide and I was angry. And while it had never occurred to me to harm my wife, it only took one time to be so angry that I did something so terrible that I couldn't fix it, right? I doubted it, but who thinks they're capable of shooting their wife? Their lover? The very idea of depriving my son of his mommy made me feel sick. And yet, it happens. And if that risk was there--the risk that I might, in some crazy moment, hurt the love of my life, betray my son--wasn't that a greater risk than a home invasion?
I thought, too, of a childhood acquaintance whose boyfriend had killed her with a shot to the head. And how, as a board member of a domestic violence shelter for years, I had heard many stories of sorrowful batterers asking forgiveness for sudden unimaginable violence. I thought of how during one of our debates, my wife had brought up the possibility of one of us intentionally harming the other. I had laughingly asked if she secretly had plans for me. She said no. Well, surely she didn't think I would hurt her?
But in her life, she'd seen things, too.
Things are much better now, as tends to happen if you hang in there long enough. My little boy will soon turn six years old, my wife and I still love each other, and that time seems long ago. In the end, I never bought a firearm at all. It seemed to be trading a less certain risk for a more certain one. Within a year, we moved. For a long time, whenever I've explained my reasoning to my friends and acquaintances, I've always said that I hadn't wanted to risk becoming one of those men who swear that "it all happened so fast".
It is only recently that I've accepted that I went looking for a gun during a period of depression in my life. At a time when I was crushed by the failure of my business and my inability to provide. Now, I look back and see myself in pain, desperate to find a way to relieve it. I see myself sitting in my basement in the dark. And I know that I have been willing to admit to others that I feared my son losing a parent without admitting even to myself which one. I'm glad I came to my senses. I'm a valuable part of this family.
I'm the daddy.
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