Just a heads up that this post contains a brief story about suicide and gun violence. It’s in the second to last paragraph if you want to avoid reading it.
I was maybe 9 years old, riding in the back of my great uncle’s old pickup truck, holding a pistol. My great uncle was driving us down a two-lane country road back to my great grandma’s house in rural Arkansas. The warm summer air was whizzing by my ears, tangling my long blond hair into a bird’s nest when I noticed the people driving maybe a couple of car lengths behind us. A notion suddenly came over me—I held the pistol with both hands and raised it to eye level, arms straight, staring down the barrel at the car behind us, just like I’d seen Crockett and Tubbs do it in Miami Vice. The people in the car panicked, ducked down, and swerved off the road. My uncle immediately stopped the truck and pulled over. He and my dad leapt out of the cab, gravel crunching as they landed. My brother and I blinked at them, wide-eyed and confused by all of the angry yelling. I was just playing TV like we did at home! The grownups talked to the people in the car behind us, who’d also pulled off, my dad all apologies, and I knew that I was in serious, big time trouble. It’s important to note that the pistol I was holding was a pellet gun and that the reason I was holding it is that we’d just been firing at targets in the woods. But the people in the car behind us just saw a small blond child pointing a gun at them. (This is now part of official family canon, right alongside the story about when I was 3 years old, about to serve a volleyball at a family get together full of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, when I reared back and yelled, “Lookout, motherfuckers!”)
A few years later, I was 11 or 12 at this point, my little brother and I were staying with my grandparents in central Texas, out on their land on the Brazos River. My parents would drop us at my grandparents’ doorstep for a couple of weeks each summer, probably to give themselves a freaking break. And this was fine by me—I loved it out there. We’d wake up every morning to the smell of eggs and bacon, then go “help” my grandpa feed the cattle, ride around on the tractor, go swimming down at the river upstream from where my grandpa had a trotline strung from bank to bank that caught catfish. We’d have big family cookouts where we’d eat those catfish under the live oaks, country relatives and kids everywhere, polka music and cicadas, the smell of Lone Star Beer and fried stuff on the air. And during the quiet times—the draggy, boring summer afternoons when literally nothing was happening except for wind blowing over the pasture—my brother and I would generally either 1) dig giant, grave-like holes in the garden, or 2) head out into the woods near the house with BB guns to build forts, shoot at targets, and swing on the wild grape vines.
We mostly shot at beer and soda cans. But one day—and I had to consult my brother for details on this event because I don’t really remember it—we were both standing on the big deck in front of the house, Daisy rifles in hand, and I (allegedly) said, “Let’s play BB Gun Wars!” And then, I (allegedly) shot him in the foot, to which he said, “You haven't even told me what BB Gun Wars is!” I remember this being an accident, but suffice it to say, there are conflicting accounts.
I must’ve been in my late teens or early twenties when I went with my friend and his dad to a gun range, not too far from our suburban Houston neighborhood. He’d been my boyfriend in middle school, which hadn’t worked out for myriad reasons, but he and my best friend and I were a tiny teenage gang of would-be intellectual artsy types. My friend had always been into guns—probably because his dad was. I saw more guns at their house than I’d ever seen otherwise, even though my grandpas were hunters. My friend was an almost Eagle Scout (some ridiculous complication kept him from receiving full honors). He’d had a BB lodged in his cheek from playing Hunt Your Buddies (??) with some of his dude friends years before. (Sometimes, he’d let me touch his skinny cheek and feel the round, hard bump of BB inside, which always both fascinated me and grossed me out.) Anyway, for some reason my friend and his dad invited me to the gun range one day, and I said, “Uh…Sure?” Try everything once, right? So, his dad drove us maybe 10 minutes outside of our neighborhood to this large, corrugated aluminum building that stood alone, down a short dirt road. The grizzled man at the counter outfitted me with foam earplugs, over the ear muffs, and a set of goggles. Frankly, I thought this was a little much. But when we entered the actual shooting range—a room about the size of a skating rink with targets at one end in front of a huge mound of compacted dirt and separated areas for people to stand and shoot from at the other end, just like you’ve probably seen on TV—I was shocked by how loud it still was despite all the ear protection. My friend gave me a pistol of some sort and I took aim at the paper target. It turned out that I was a pretty good shot—I got a bullseye in my first few minutes. And I remember being pretty stoked about this at first. But over our time at the range, that feeling subsided and was replaced by an awful darkness in my stomach as the jarring loud shots in the room rang through my body and it dawned on me what a violent, terrifying thing people had invented.
Fast-forward a decade or so. That same friend and my best friend had married and had two adorable little girls. He was an incredible artist who’d had gained some professional success and he was a loving dad. But he also struggled mightily with intense mental health issues. And one day, when he was having a particularly hard time, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart multiple times, underneath his favorite live oak tree in a public park, next to a red rope swing that hung from the tree. That’s all I can say about that right now.
And that’s my Tiny History of guns. I’ve been thinking about guns a lot this week in the wake of so many horrific events in the US. And my thoughts have mostly been, Oh my god, AGAIN. How? Why?? Is it okay to turn off the newscast now or do I have an obligation to listen despite feeling completely leaden and hopeless? How did we get here? How can we do better? How can I help? I don’t know what the answers are. Honestly, I don’t even know how to end this post. But I’m going to try to figure it out. I hope we all do.
I was the younger brother in this story. She totally shot me in the foot.