While You Weren't Looking, 45 Children Died in June 2021

When my parents brought me home from the hospital after my birth, it was to a home where there were guns.

And if you think to yourself, “Oh, I know where this is headed,” just bear with me – you may be surprised.

Our house was never without a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle. My father carried the pistol on his hip when he went to the mountains of North Carolina, where he was overseeing the construction of a golf course he had designed. For self-protection, he said, although I knew of him firing it only once: the resort developer was lost on the mountain, and Dad went out, in the dark, to find him. He fired the pistol as a signal.

I grew up knowing that guns were dangerous, and that I was never allowed to touch them unless my dad was there.

I grew up hearing that if guns were outlawed, only outlaws would have guns.

But I also grew up with the knowledge that although the Second Amendment gave us the right to keep and bear arms, it also placed upon us an immense burden of responsibility in executing that right.

My father taught me to shoot when I was twelve. He bought me a Daisy BB gun, and once he was assured that I knew the basics (don’t point it at anyone, not me, not yourself, not anyone), he put his Colt .38 Detective Special in my hand and taught me to shoot a pistol.

He also taught me that pulling a gun was a last resort. He told me, “Never point a gun at anybody unless you’re prepared to take responsibility for killing them.” He taught me how to empty the chamber and clean it before putting it away.

I went to a high school where, in hunting seasons, boys brought their guns to school and left them in the vice principal’s office, so they could head up to High Knob and go hunting as soon as school was dismissed. And although we had our share of kerfuffles and upscuddles and donnybrooks, they always involved fists (and on one or two occasions a knife, although that was a rumor that I never substantiated). Nobody “packed heat”. Nobody brought a gun to a fistfight. I guess we were innocent or naïve, or maybe we had a better grasp of permanent consequences than later generations.

My dad ruined a perfectly good watermelon with a shotgun, teaching me that I’d better think before I pointed a gun at anybody, and think twice or more before I pulled the trigger.

When I was twenty-five and pregnant, my husband decided to teach me to shoot. He was astonished to find that not only did I already know how, but that I was a better shot with a handgun than he was.

So I grew up, you see, with an assumption that owning guns was okay, as long as you were a responsible gun owner, and didn’t act like the lawless dictator of a banana republic. Those were my dad’s words; in his worldview, people who didn’t have the sense it required to responsibly own a gun were the reason why the world had to endure lawless dictators and banana republics.

And now I’m fifty-seven, and I wonder what happened to the responsible environment in which I grew up.

My house is equidistant between Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky. I watch the rising rates of gun violence in those cities with alarm, and I know that those cities are just two in a long list of places where personal safety is becoming less and less assured. I track the rising rates weekly. My husband worries that I’m obsessed; maybe I am. But sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich is not going to make the problem go away, nor will it make me or my children or my grandchildren any safer in this increasingly-fractured world. My attention to these statistics is so focused, I can tell you that you’re most likely to be murdered in Louisville on a Sunday between 4PM and midnight.

Maybe this obsession isn't healthy. But neither are the streets of our cities – large cities, small cities, doesn’t matter anymore. An online video shows two children trapped in the unsafe space between a gang assassin and his victim on the streets of New York. A news headline screams that in Statesville, North Carolina (population 24,532), a nine-year-old child was killed and two other children, ages seven and ten, were injured in two separate drive-by shootings. A four-year-old child in Louisville died in early April, shot to death under circumstances that have not yet been adequately publicly explained.

Nationwide during June 2021, 45 children died as a result of gun violence.

And yes, please tell me how we can make things better if we just try. And yes, please tell me how many things – marriage equality, for example – that I thought I would never live to see happen have happened. Remind me that slow change is lasting change.

Pardon my language, but I fucking don’t care.

Go ahead and tell me that every country has its problems, its bad apples, its blind spots. I know. There is no perfect “away” to which one can run. I know that. And I also know that countries such as South Africa and Colombia have much worse rates of gun violence than the United States. And while we’re at it, I’m aware of the lives of women and girls in war-torn African countries, and I’m also aware of the bloodbath that has washed the streets of the Middle East. I may be disillusioned, but I’m not uninformed.

But I also know that there are countries on this planet where gun violence is the exception and not the rule, and ours isn’t one of them. We cling obstinately to a constitutional amendment that was written when an infant nation was emerging from the chaos of revolution. We cling to it because we are afraid, and because we would rather be armed and afraid than disarmed and truly free. The only ones profiting from this are those who own the factories where actions and barrels and magazines and frames and stocks and handgrips are assembled into an item that is, oxymoronically, both the source of and our solution to our fears.

My father would probably disown me, if he was still alive to do so, for taking this view. I don’t think even the reality of mass shootings and dead children would be enough to convince him that something needs to change, that the time for mass handgun ownership has passed. The deaths of 45 children in one month in this country is not enough to shout down the voices of the fearmongers and their followers. And that’s a damn shame.