The Guns of My Girlhood

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/the-guns-of-my-girlhood.html

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Nashville — GROWING up on a farm outside Nashville, I shot Coke cans off sawhorses. I didn’t use a shotgun because I wasn’t big enough. I was once thrown to the ground from the kick of a rifle, so at 9 I stuck to handguns. There were six of us when we were all together — two children from my mother’s first marriage (my sister and I) and four children from my stepfather’s first marriage. We lined up by age and took turns. In the pantheon of summer activities in the country, guns were better than catching frogs but not as much fun as riding a horse.

There were guns in my father’s house as well, but those guns were different. My father was a police officer in Los Angeles. When I was young he was a detective and wore a jacket over the gun that clipped to the back of his belt and the gun that was holstered beneath his arm. Always there were two guns, the standard issue .38 revolver and the backup 2-inch snub nose. For the most part they were unseen, not discussed, and never touched except in moments of rigorous supervision. My sister and I would beg him to take us to the firing range at the police academy when we visited. If we seemed to have a preternatural gift for target shooting, our father never noticed.

While my father endured his guns, my stepfather loved his guns, and counseled us on what to do in case of home break-ins, kidnappings and all manner of Armageddon. There were guns in the bedside tables and in a holster bolted beneath a wingback chair in the living room (we practiced how we would snatch it up in an emergency). There was a gun hidden behind the face of the mantel clock. In my stepfather’s medical office there was a secret room of guns — of every stripe and legality — behind a false air-conditioning vent that required a Phillips head screwdriver to access.

When we left the country for the leafy suburbs of Nashville, it was no longer possible to shoot Coke cans in the yard. Instead we practiced throwing flat knives into the outline of a man drawn on a Styrofoam board in the garage.

I got my driver’s license on my 16th birthday in 1979, and after that I was allowed to drive the family Jeep to school. I could go to friends’ houses and theater rehearsals and the mall. It didn’t matter if it was late or dark because I had a gun in the car. I didn’t have a license to carry a concealed weapon, nor did I want to keep a handgun out on the passenger seat. My stepfather put a folded paper target in the glove compartment with the gun. He told me that if I was pulled over and if the car was searched and if the gun was found, I should say that I was on my way to target practice, even if it was 7:30 in the morning and I was wearing knee socks and the blue plaid uniform skirt of Catholic school.

I didn’t want to have a gun in my car, not because I thought I could be hurt or could hurt someone else, but because I believed that if I were pulled over by the police in Tennessee my father in California would find out. Still, being armed was part of the deal if I wanted to drive myself to school.

Once when I was 16 and depressed, I put a gun in my mouth. I didn’t have any intention of shooting myself, but at that age the gesture seemed deep and important. It did not happen twice. The click that a gun makes against your teeth is like no other sound that will ever be inside your head.

All of this stopped when I was 23.

I was dating a man from New York who had never shot a gun and admired my familiarity with firearms. When I took him home to meet my family, I asked my stepfather to take us shooting. My stepfather called his friend Pony, who manufactured gun mounts for the Coast Guard. Pony brought along a young man and that man’s young girlfriend, both of whom were coked out of their minds.

The six of us drove out to a tree farm that belonged to one of Pony’s friends, and there we shot up rocks with a vast assortment of handguns and assault rifles. The girlfriend sprayed a meadow with bullets from an Uzi, shouting, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” then fell over in her high heels. Pony had brought some kind of machine gun mounted on a flatbed truck, and the men shot tracer bullets as long as my hand.

One of those bullets ricocheted off a rock and deflected into the mountain beside us. About 10 minutes later we saw smoke. Five of us crossed the field with a single shovel and headed toward the flame while the girlfriend waited in the car. Of all the stupid things I’ve done in my life, nothing comes close to running into the woods to chase a fire in the middle of a hot, dry summer. With every flame I stepped on, I was reminded that shooting a gun wasn’t fun or productive. It imperiled my safety rather than insuring it.

When my father retired from the police department, he and my stepmother moved out of Los Angeles. They decided the guns wouldn’t come along. My sister’s children were young at the time, and she didn’t want the guns in her house, so I said they could come to me. I called Pony and asked if he would keep the guns for me until I figured out what to do with them. Pony had gun safes the size of walk-in freezers. But five years went by and then 10, and I never went back to pick them up. I realized that a gun was not capable of making me feel sentimental, even the guns my father had carried for 33 years.

Chekhov said: “You must not put a loaded gun on the stage if no one intends to use it. You must not just promise.” I am the exception to the rule. In all my years of growing up among firearms, there were never any accidents, which is not the same as saying there was never any harm.

My father never shot anyone. In 33 years on the force he never once unholstered his gun. My stepfather never shot anyone either, though I saw him point his gun at people in a state of white-hot rage.

It was my sister’s friend Betty Carter’s father who was shot. He was the nicest man. He ran the country market where we all used to hang out after school. Someone came in to rob the store in the middle of the day, and after Mr. Carter handed over the money, the man with the gun walked to the door, then he turned back around, shot him and killed him. Betty was standing there when it happened.

Don’t ever believe the old saw about guns not killing people. They do and they will, again and again. Guns shoot children, parents, siblings, lovers, neighbors, co-workers, strangers and friends, in error and in fury. This will happen until we decide it should stop, which would mean getting rid of not only the AK-47s but the pretty little silver .22s as well. All of them. No one ever asks for that, maybe because it feels prudent to not enrage the many people who own guns, but the right to not get shot takes precedence over the right to bear arms.