My Father’s Gun: Americans have turned weapons of war into consumer goods.
own a gun. It’s under a couch in my family room, which is a weird place for a gun, but maybe not for a gun owned by an American. How many stories of children who find a gun and accidentally shoot themselves or a sibling report the odd location where they picked it up—on the edge of a bathroom sink, on a kitchen counter, on a parent’s bedside table? Our country is so full of guns that we’ve run out of places to put them. There can be one safely stowed in a lock box, with the ammo removed, another one half-forgotten in a linen cupboard, and a third one underneath the front seat of the car, loaded and ready to go. Guns have a lot of meaning to many of us, and I am no different. Last night my husband was out of town, and when I heard a strange sound—probably a squirrel or a rat in the tree near my window—my first comforting thought was of the burglar alarm and the second, illogical one (encoded deep in the preverbal brain of earliest childhood) was of the gun.
My Japanese rifle is the grandson of the musket: a wooden long gun that needs to be loaded by hand. The guns used in the Dayton and El Paso murders are to 18th-century weapons as a jet is to a buggy. There is no conceivable way that the Founders could have imagined weapons of mass death like these guns in the hands of millions of Americans. Separate from this private arsenal, the nation has a well-ordered militia by which it can protect itself: the largest and most lethal military in the history of the world, with a $700 billion budget. Gun owners who make a constitutional argument for the insanity of this parallel standing military will tell you that the people need to be prepared to defend themselves from a state that becomes tyrannical. Bernie Sanders is sometimes mentioned. Socialism. And to protect ourselves from this lunatic possibility, the merchants of death have put an arsenal in the hands of the kind of people who want 100-bullet magazines and the machine guns with which to fire them. The merchants don’t want us to call these weapons machine guns. They prefer the term sporting guns or, better yet, the cool shorthand of AKs. They are machine guns, and some of them are near the playground where your children play and the movie theater where you go on the weekends.
Thirty-five years ago, I walked into a college activities fair and signed up at a table that said handgun control. That’s what the effort was called all those decades ago. Ronald Reagan had been shot and almost killed the year before by a schizophrenic with a Saturday night special, and it seemed like we had to get those things under some kind of rational control. Here I am now, with college-age children of my own, and the effort I joined in good faith and with the intention of making the country a safer and saner place has been a complete and abject failure. The National Rifle Association won, and we’re all in danger of losing the people we love the most because there is good money to be made in selling the machinery of mass murder.
