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All of us kids were sleeping in my mother’s room when the gunshot went off. The three of us who weren’t holding a gun woke up almost immediately. My mother, improbably, slept through it.
I sat up, obviously startled and a bit foggy, and saw my younger stepbrother, almost four at the time and barely over three feet tall, standing next to me and facing the bedroom window.
He was holding a small revolver, a faint trace of smoke billowing from it. I turned in the direction of the window, and there, in the early morning light, was a bullet hole in the center of the glass and a spider web of cracks extending in each direction.
Being the eldest, five at the time, I immediately woke up my mother, who took a few seconds to absorb the situation and then quickly grabbed the gun.
Everything after that is a blur, like a photograph misted with bleach. I vaguely remember the cops paying a visit. I vaguely remember my mother in a frantic state, but I don’t remember what was said.
Her second husband—my first stepfather—kept the handgun in the top drawer of their nightstand. It was not secured in any way. No trigger lock. Loaded, obviously. And my stepbrother and I knew it was there. We knew it was there because he didn’t keep it a secret.
I don’t know remember exactly what happened next. I don’t recall either of them being arrested or detained. I don’t think CPS was called. No one had been hurt, and so, I guess it was decided there would be no further consequences.
My mother and I only spoke about it once. I must have been nine or ten. She had escaped that abusive marriage a few years prior. We were sitting in the living room, just the two of us, watching television. I asked her if she remembered it.
She took a drag from her cigarette, never breaking eye contact with the television, offered a long exhalation into the air, and said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And that was that.
Maybe six months later, my father moved back to Texas, and we’d visit him on the weekends. He’d decided I was at the age where I needed to start learning about gun safety. He bought me a .22 caliber rifle for Christmas, and the education began immediately.
He drilled four rules into my head: 1) always treat any firearm like it’s loaded (keep it on safe), 2) never point a firearm at anything you don’t intend to shoot; keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, 3) never put your finger on the trigger unless you intend to shoot, and 4) always store the firearm properly.
He took me to the gun range numerous times. He showed me how important it is to wear proper ear and eye protection. He taught me how to shoot and the proper terminology and gun range etiquette and how to clean a firearm.
“This is not a toy,” he told me. “This could kill someone. You could kill another person or yourself if you’re not careful. Don’t ever let me catch you treating this like it’s not a deadly weapon.”
He taught me that there are no accidents, only irresponsible gun owners. Firearms may malfunction, but if you’re following a handful of common sense rules, no one will be killed. There are no “accidental deaths” when gun owners are responsible.
He kept my firearm and all of his locked in a safe in his bedroom. He showed me the trigger locks he put on the firearms. He never told me the combination to the safe or where the keys were kept. He told me I didn’t need to know, and that was that.
He also did something else: he told me that any time, no matter what he was doing, if I wanted to see any of the firearms, hold them, check them out, whatever, all I had to do was come to him and ask.
My father and I struggled to connect. We didn’t have the same interests, he was not one to be vulnerable, and trying to talk to him about life was like pulling teeth. We were not close, to say the least.
But the five or six times I asked to see the firearms, he immediately stopped what he was doing, led me over to his bedroom, asked me to stand completely outside of eye line while he punched in the combination, and then, he would hand over the guns and let me check them out.
He never rushed me, never left me alone with them, and patiently answered every single question that came to my mind about guns or shooting. I don’t mind admitting that I would occasionally ask to see the firearms because it was consistently the closest we ever got to bonding.
When I was done, he’d store the firearms back in the safe, remind me of the rules of gun safety, and we’d go on with our day.
I never did tell him about the incident with the revolver when I was younger, and I never told him that his educating me on gun safety removed any and all anxiety I had about firearms from that incident. He absolved the fear I had about them. I’ve never been afraid of guns since.
But I am afraid of the wrong kind of people having access to guns. I’m afraid of irresponsible people owning firearms. I fear for children in homes in which guns are left out in the open, displayed behind glass panes or kept on a wall rack.
I fear for children whose parents keep a handgun in an unlocked glove compartment with no trigger lock or under a pillow or nestled in the top drawer of a nightstand.
It is impossible for children to steal firearms from responsible gun owners. If an adult who owns firearms does everything they’re supposed to do—keep them secured in a safe, use trigger locks, teach about the importance of gun safety, etc.—no child, regardless of age, would steal them.
I firmly believe that any adult whose child “steals” their firearm and kills another person should be held criminally liable to the fullest extent. At minimum, they should be charged with involuntarily manslaughter.
I think if any adult fails to properly secure their firearm and its theft leads to the murder of another person, they should be required, on top of criminal charges, to publicly apologize to the loved ones of that slain human being and pay for their funeral expenses.
I think firearm ownership in our country should be as strictly regulated as car ownership and driving privileges, and I feel this is common sense.
I believe in responsible gun ownership under a rational application of the Second Amendment, and I realize there are some progressives who aren’t exactly thrilled with that position.
I also believe that civilians shouldn’t be permitted to legally own AR-15s and their variants or any other weapon that has no reasonable justification being in civilian hands, and I realize there are some conservatives who aren’t thrilled with that opinion.
The gun reform debate has room for many valid viewpoints, and yet, somehow, it’s become the most absurd public policy discussion in our country, overwhelmingly due to the bad faith witnessed on the right in response to children being horrifically and needlessly slaughtered at their schools.
None of the NRA loons are able to reasonably explain how a 14 year-old had access to a firearm in an environment with supposedly adequate gun laws, so instead, they'll yell as loudly as they can that an amendment written in the time of muskets is more important than your kids' lives.
I sure as hell don’t buy it, and I don’t think any responsible adult does, either.
We owe the children of this country a lot more.
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