I’m becoming fiercely aware and, in turn, terrified by a presence that’s been an inextricable part of my life since my first memory: guns. For obvious devastating reasons, it’s been the word on everyone’s lips.
I think of the question as a presence, not just a political issue or problem; this isn’t credit card debt or corporate tax loopholes. This is life and the threat of its loss at all times – the defense of it and how defense is defined. I’ve never been more aware that this threat is all around us in the U.S. as I am now. Just when I thought this country couldn’t be more divided, an event surfaces that drives that wedge deep into its wound.
My very first memory of gun violence was during the war in Beirut, where I lived the first handful of my years. I was probably about 3, and we were crawling around the house – lights off to not attract attention. We weren’t permitted to look out the windows for the same reason as bombs and gunfire raged outside. I was sitting beneath a window with my back to the wall, and my beloved jido (granddad) slowly peeked out the window right over the sill. I asked him if I could look out, and he said, “No. If you do, you’ll get shot.”
That is truly my first recollection. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t curious. I just was. Like the sky being blue, I had nothing else to compare it to.
Sounds depressing, but it’s not. It’s a daily reality for millions. In this country, we, as a collective, have been relatively sheltered from this – until now. When I go out these days, I wonder how many people around me are armed. At Whole Foods, at sports bars, just walking down the street – I’m sketched out.
That’s a dramatic shift in consciousness for me. I wasn’t always so wary. I grew up around guns, both hunting weapons and handguns. I shot guns for sport and for fun. My dad taught me how to use them for protection. And I’ve always kind of understood the romanticism around them. I love The Matrix; I spent college playing GoldenEye on Nintendo 64. I’m embarrassed to admit, but I got it when people said, “Guns are bad-ass.” That’s how they’d always been represented in my life. And growing up in Kentucky, I wasn’t exactly getting challenged much on that thought. Also, given my history, maybe I wanted to downplay the dangers in my mind. Downplayed, they are no longer.
A couple years ago, not long into my relationship with my girlfriend, we got into what our friend lovingly coined “the lesbian gun fight.” After a night at Beauty Bar, we and a couple others returned to her Cap Hill pad. Vodka shots were had, and then verbal shots were taken.
She is not a gun person, to put it lightly. And her reasoning blew my default “we have a right to protect ourselves” response out of the water. Sure, I “got it,” but at that point, I didn’t really. It’s not necessarily weaponry that she opposes, it’s a system that enables such lax treatment of a tool that’s sole purpose is to kill. “Why no extensive and mandatory background checks? Why the need for assault weapons with high-capacity magazines? Why isn’t suicide a major factor in the gun control debate? What’s at the core of being so afraid of our neighbors that we have to arm ourselves against them?”
It took awhile, but she broke through, and she was right.
Maybe it’s my nature to assume that progress and responsibility on an individual level will only evolve for the best. Maybe I needed to make light of it to quantify my past. I was part of the problem, and now, I want to be part of the solution.
I understand that it’s never going to be all hand-to-hand combat – guns are here to stay – but it can’t go on like this. We all know what happens when we play with fire.
