I find myself (as Commander-in-Chief of this space every two weeks) trying to come up with something useful to say about the gun issue. Ever since reading the statistics showing that countries with low per capita gun ownership have much lower rates of homicides by guns, my take on guns, like that of most people I know, has been that we should do anything we can to reduce their numbers. In a way, there’s nothing more to be said. Makes for a nice, short column.
But full disclosure would include the complicating factor that I once bought a gun for self protection.
In our mid-20s and living in California, my first wife and I were planning a cross-country car trip. Having no money for motels, we would be car camping the whole way. A couple of weeks before we were to take off I read a story in the newspaper about a couple car-camping on the very route through Nevada we planned to take. They ran into some bad guys, the wife raped in front of the husband, both eventually butchered.
Thinking that I had better do what I could to protect us, I went right down to a sporting goods store to buy a gun, which in those days in California was about as simple as that. I knew nothing about guns; I bought it for the pretty burled maple handle. It was only a .22, but when I gave it a trial run in the backyard it made an impressive noise. It certainly impressed me that I was now a potential killer.
We had remodelled our ’57 VW bug (not the bus, mind you) as a tidy little camper. In those days you could slide out the bucket seats, which made for luxury seating by the campfire. I built a plywood sleeping platform and Gretchen made curtains for the windows. Voila, we had a snug little roadside retreat.
It was also a fort. In addition to the gun I had packed a wicked-looking combination ax and hammer. With the curtains snapped in place we would be able to see our potential rapist-murderer before he saw us. If worse came to worst, he would be in for a surprise. Thus armed and dangerous we made it from camping spot to camping spot safely across the wild west.
I’d like to be presenting this as a cautionary tale; but I’m not sure what the message is. It’s true that one of the oft-cited reasons for not owning a gun happened, or almost happened, with that gun of mine. Shortly after buying it I was showing it off to friends. With mock braggadocio I said that yes, mild-manner graduate student though they knew me to be, I had indeed armed myself, and produced the weapon. My friend asked to see it and almost immediately pulled the trigger, aiming it into a big fireplace, sending a bullet richocheting around the room to the shock and consternation of all. It missed us, but death had been set loose amongst us. Fortunately he obeyed the first rule of guns—don’t point it at anybody even if it’s not loaded—so civilization won out. But not by much.
So yes, there was that cautionary aspect to the story. On the other hand, the gun did in fact afford us a certain sense of security. And I still don’t see what else I could or should have done. (Contacted small towns along the way for an armed escort through the area?)
In a recent “New Yorker” article, a gun advocate suggests that there are sheep (the masses of unarmed), wolves (the bad guys), and sheepdogs—gun owners, who arm themselves to be able to protect the former from the latter. The sheepdogs are obviously the heroes of that way of looking at it. I had chosen to become a sheepdog.
Since that one episode I have been content to be a sheep, delegating the shooting part of life to the sheepdogs in blue uniforms. The choice to go unarmed comes easily in Wellfleet, which. like many here, we prefer to see as a safe place.
So as far as positions go, I’m pro-gun control laws, anti-NRA, etc. But perhaps my credibility is undermined a bit by that complicating factor of when I opted to be a sheepdog to get across the wild west.
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