30 August 2014

A True and Fucked-Up Thing

This is an article from the Atlantic about what guns are most often used for. I posted it on Facebook a while back. Now I'm posting it here.

This is not a political statement. I am not anti-gun. I've had guns; I've lived in houses with guns; I can shoot a gun, and hit what I aim for.

When my son was a baby, his dad bought me a pistol, because he worked late into the night and I was home alone with a baby in the middle of nowhere. It would keep us safe, he said, when he wasn't there. I didn't want it, because we already had plenty of guns, but he wouldn't take it back.

One night, he got pissed off and shot himself with it. He's been dead 11 and a half years, and my feelings about it, like my feelings about guns, are really complicated. Would he have gotten pissed off and hanged himself? Opened a vein? Overdosed? No. I knew him, and no.

There's nothing that can be done about this, nothing I expect or even want to be done about it, because whatever gun control laws might dictate, under whatever present/future/ideal circumstances, he still would have had the gun. By the time it happens, it's too late to do anything about. Until it happens, there's no way -- because there's no need -- to prevent it.

But here it is, a thing I believe because I know it to be true. A ridiculous, impossible, senseless, fucked-up, true thing.

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