A History of Guns: Part Eight

This is the eighth in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

Crime Fighting
When people defend their need for guns, invariably they mention two things: protection from government tyranny (although private gun ownership in Iraq didn't stop Saddam Hussein) and self-defense (although studies show a gun in the home increases the chances of homicide and suicide). Of course, why believe statistics?

I'm not going to spend much time on protection from government tyranny. It seems that's what the Founding Fathers intended the Second Amendment to be (although some disagree). I'm a little amused by the thought of rednecks with shotguns leading resistance from the forest a la Red Dawn. But to me, if people were really serious about protecting themselves from government tyranny, why would they be so quick to throw away other basic civil liberties like habeas corpus and unreasonable searches? But I digress.

Self-defense would seem to be a more compelling argument for gun ownership. Do guns help protect people from crime? Yes, they do. In fact, I have a scare-the-pants-off-of-you story about that.

My friend, Sharon, lives in Munger Place, a lovely little turn-of-the-last-century neighborhood in Dallas. It's a great neighborhood if you want an old Craftsman-style house, but it's bordered by some rather rough neighborhoods. People have been murdered in the street very close to Sharon's house. Nonetheless, she takes her dogs for a walk at night. When dogs gotta go, they gotta go.

One night, Sharon was out with her teen-age son walking the dogs when two guys in a car drove by really slow, asking if they wanted a "ride." Sharon says nothing, turns in the opposite direction and sends her son running home to get her husband. The guys go down the street, turn around and come back. By the time Sharon's husband shows up with his pistol, these guys are trying to drag her into the car. The guys see the gun and take off.

If Sharon's husband doesn't show up with a gun at the right moment, she's probably a crime statistic. Did guns protect life and limb in this instance? You bet.

For another example of this, look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As basic government services like police protection absolutely disintergrated in the wake of the storm, people depended on guns to protect themselves, their family and their property. I never thought I would see the day when the rule of law would so completely and utterly break down like it did then. And if it could happen then and there, who's to say it couldn't happen again?

So maybe I'm just getting in touch with my inner Archie Bunker, but my attitudes have shifted some regarding guns. I know responsible gun owners and I believe that some people need the protection that guns offer. Is this just me getting older and more fearful of this crazy, fucked-up world? Maybe. But I'm not going to draw any conclusions just yet. I'll save that for the next, last installment. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

A History of Guns: Part Seven

This is the seventh in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six.

I have been trying to write this story about Larry for several weeks now, but the words just haven’t flowed. I sort of thought that the closer I got to present day, the easier it would be to write because my memory would be fresher, but that hasn't been the case. In fact, it has been the opposite. Because there is not as much distance, the events are actually harder to write about. But this story is an important part of my history of guns because it rolls together the themes of God, guns and Americanism. I don't think it is a coincidence that guns, religion and patriotism get all mixed up together. Guns, for better or worse, are like a religion in the U-S-of-A.

Larry was married to my wife’s oldest sister, Roxanne. I first met them after my wife and I had been dating for about a year. We were visiting them in Oklahoma City when we passed through on our way out to New Mexico. Larry and Roxanne wouldn’t let us stay at their house because they didn’t want an unmarried couple shacking up in front of the kids.

Larry and Roxanne belonged to one of those evangelical faiths somewhere to the right of the Baptists –- which is my baseline for how wacko I think any particular denomination is. Quite honestly, since I parted ways with the Baptist church about 20 years ago, I’ve taken a rather dim view of these folks out to the right (which is a whole other post). Snake-handlers and mouth-breathers is how I think of them. I’ve told myself I ought to be more respectful of their beliefs, but I never found these people to be respectful of others, so I didn’t see a need to afford them that courtesy.

I bring this up to explain how Larry and Roxanne viewed the world. Larry was the head of the family, the breadwinner. Roxanne took care of the home and the children. They believed that they were locked in spiritual warfare against Satan. The kids did not celebrate Halloween. Personal problems were moral failings that could be solved by prayer. Gender roles were to be aggressively enforced: boys did boy things and girls did girl things.

Part of what boys did was hunt. If you have been following this series, then you know that isn’t that different than my experience growing up. But Larry took it to a different level. He was an honest-to-goodness gun nut. When it was hunting season, he and his son went hunting. When it wasn’t hunting season, he and his son went to gun shows and worked on their deer lease to get ready for hunting season.

And Larry’s fascination with guns actually led to problems with Roxanne. Time and money went into his hobby rather than his marriage. Inevitably, these tensions led to turmoil with Roxanne. Divorce, of course, was unthinkable. There was a lot of faith-based counseling and prayer – and I actually have nothing against either one of those things – except that they didn’t seem to work in this instance.

Unfortunately, Larry and Roxanne had their marriage problems worsened by another seemingly unrelated factor -- the Y2K problem. Yeah, I know WTF? But, see, I told you Larry was a gun nut and he was also one of those black helicopter guys who believed that all of those crazy UN, one-world-government-conspiracy-to-take-away-your-guns stuff. The Ruby Ridge and Waco stuff didn’t help matters.

So Larry started working on turning his deer lease into a refuge from the impending collapse of society. He started storing food, guns and ammunition so he would be ready.

But one day in the summer of 1999, he realized there was too much left to do. He realized that he would never be ready in time. So he went out to his lease, put a .44 magnum to his head, and shot himself.

I don't believe that his inability to prepare his apocalyptic hidey-hole was the reason he killed himself. I believe he was a very sick man. He suffered from Depression and probably bipolar disorder. But also, he was a true believer. He was one of those All-American guys – football player, Vietnam vet, family man, pillar of the church – who did everything they were supposed to do. Larry always followed the rules, but life doesn't always go by the rules, does it?

And while I feel a lot of empathy for him, I also feel relief that he didn’t kill everyone in his family before he killed himself. That was always my wife’s secret fear, and I always thought there was something to it.

But the real tragedy is seeing the wreckage left behind. Roxanne married again and her new husband seems like an alright guy. But the kids have had a harder time. His son is a very angry, pissed off guy. My wife talks about what a sweet boy he used to be, but I haven’t seen that side of him since before we married. Now he's grown up, and he’s a Marine officer, and that frightens the hell out of me. All I can think of is Neidermeyer -- not a guy I would want to be in a foxhole with.

And Larry’s daughters are even sadder. His older daughter doesn’t seem to miss him at all, but she's already in a marriage that looks oddly like the one her mother and father had. And Larry's younger daughter was had a pretty tough life because of her father's absence. She's already had a pretty rough time with men who take advantage of her insecurity and need for love.

So how did all this shape my opinions about guns? In Larry's case, guns became kind of a religion to him that ended up feeding his sickness and paranoia. And, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we realize more than ever how dangerous guns can be in the hands of sick and fearful people. Now everyone feels that we need to take steps to keep guns out of the hands of unstable, mentally ill people. But how do you identify those people? Larry certainly looked like an upstanding citizen. The darkness inside of him was hard to see, except for a few people closest to him.

When I look back on this still-unfolding tragedy, it's hard not to think it would be better to live in a world without guns. There. I've said it.

A History of Guns: Part Six

This is the sixth in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.

The Working Years
When I started working full-time at the Startlegram, I did sports agate -- that's the little type like box scores, standings, leaders. It's a Sisyphean task. Do well at it and you can set yourself apart -- one guy who did it before me went on to become sport editor at the San Jose Mercury-News and another went on to win awards for writing about the Iditarod sled dog race. One of the people I supervised went on to cover the UN for The Associated Press and another guy is now a sports editor in North Carolina. But the one guy I remember the most was Brian Shults.

Brian was a funny guy with a big smile and an easy way about him. His dream was to be the beat writer covering the San Jose Sharks. And he could have done it, too. He won two Gold Circle Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association -- there’s future Pultizer winners on that list. He was that good.

But Brian was also troubled. He was in recovery for his alcoholism when I met him at age 22. I used to hang with Brian and his other AA buddies Skip and Big Ron at Ol South Pancake House even though I wasn’t a Friend of Bill W. I’d sit and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with the boys until the wee hours. In fact, I was with those guys at Ol South the first time I met my wife. Brian was neurotic as hell but poked fun at his misery. He even tried his hand at standup and did pretty well.

One Saturday night, I was finishing up some agate real late -- like 1 a.m. -- when Brian stopped by my desk. He had just filed a review of a standup performance by a comedian I had never heard of named Ellen Degeneres. We shot the breeze for 10 minutes. We talked about him doing standup. He made me laugh.

I was the last person to see Brian alive. The police found him the next afternoon in a field by his apartment complex. He shot himself with a pistol he bought from a pawn shop on Division Street in Arlington earlier that week. Because I was his supervisor, I got to tell his roommate.

I think about Brian from time to time. I wonder what he would be doing if he were alive. Mostly, I get angry because I believe he might still be alive if he hadn’t gotten his hands on a gun. But there are lots of ways to kill yourself, and who’s to say Brian wouldn’t have found another one. The experts say men are usually successful when they attempt suicide because they don’t grab a fistful of pills, they grab a gun. They get it right the first time.

Why do people do these things? What was so wrong in Brian's life that this was the answer? Could I have done anything to help Brian? Those are questions without answers. I accepted that a long time ago. Another question apparently without answer is why guns are a fact of American life?

Working at a newspaper, you get to hear all the stuff that doesn’t get in the paper and read all of the little three paragraph items that make up the never-ending onslaught of tragedy in urban life. Gang shootings, robberies, kids killed by their father’s guns -- I always read more of those kind of stories than stories where someone used a gun to stop a crime. Those are the things that formed most of my feelings about guns. Go ahead and blame the media. Blame Brian. But it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that many gun deaths are needless, stupid and preventable.

A History of Guns: Part Five

This is the fifth in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four

The College Years
I didn’t spend a lot of time hunting or shooting in college. My dad was busy running his business and I was busy trying to stay as far away from home as possible. There was this one quail hunt down near San Saba on one of those December days with a battleship gray sky and a chill in the air. We went with the electrical contractor my dad knew who seemed to kill everything that flew. Later in the day when we were following a covey through a grove of mesquite trees, I thought I accidentally shot my dad, but I didn’t (insert Dick Cheney joke here). And later, when instructing me in the art of cleaning quail, the electric contractor, in an effort to add to the description, asked me, “You ever stick your finger in some ol’ gal’s twat?” Uh, no, sir. Not with my dad standing right there. The awkward moment passed with a lot of laughter at my expense.

I slept on the most uncomfortable couch in the world that night while my father played poker all night. When we drove off in the foggy morning, my Dad was several thousand dollars richer and earned a hefty “commission” not to say anything to mom. Not 100 yards down the road, we stopped as 100 or so deer silently bounded out of the fog, across the road and disappeared again into the mist. The moment was one of those magic, time stops kind of moments. We never went hunting again.

A History of Guns: Part Four

This is the fourth in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

The High School Years
Let's talk about Dave, a trailer-park dweller who was slow and smelled kind of bad. I know he smelled bad because I always got paired up to wrestle him in ninth-grade gym class. I didn’t like him, not so much because of anything he did -- he was one of those sort-of invisible people you knew in school who never made an impression on anyone. I disliked him because I hated wrestling him.

After ninth grade, my wrestling days were over and I didn't think about him at all until the day an announcement came over the loudspeaker at my high school saying that Dave had been killed in an accidental shooting. He was working at pizza place and one of Dave’s co-workers decided to show him his gun. Blam! Lights out. Just like at Freddie’s house, except the gun didn’t go off when Freddie pointed it at me.

But, that didn't change my desire to have a gun. And I finally did get a gun of my own on my 16th birthday. My father bought me a Charles Daly over-and-under 20-gauge -- a nice gun. My dad took me skeet shooting and -- occasionally -- quail hunting. I enjoyed spending time with my father. There is kind of a macho big dick thing about shooting a gun.

I remember one day we went skeet shooting at this old gun club out on on Northwest Highway between Dallas and Irving. We ran into an old friend of his who hit every clay that came out of the tower. The only reason I remember this guy is my dad asked him about hunting and he replied that he never went hunting anymore because “he didn’t want to kill anything.” I always thought that was an odd answer. I didn’t understand it at the time.

A History of Guns: Part Three

This is the third in a personal history of guns in my life. Previous entries: Part One, Part Two

The Junior High Years
By the time I got into junior high, real, live guns became a part of my life. Looking back, I never worried about some kid bringing a gun to school and pulling a Columbine, but I became aware that guns weren't just in the guestroom closet. They were around and they could be lethal.

When I was in eighth grade, a seventh-grader killed himself because he was upset about breaking up with his girlfriend. I don’t even remember that kid’s name now but it had a deep impact on my middle-school psyche. Then there was the Mexican kid in gym class named BB who was older because he was held back a few times. He fucking tormented us, any we hated him in return. But that’s just junior high, right? A couple of years later, he killed himself and it turned out he was dealing with some pretty horrible home issues -- abuse, that kind of thing.

Then there was Freddie.

I always liked Freddie. He moved into the neighborhood in eighth grade. He talked a lot and was funny and a bit crazy, but I liked being around him. We’d play football with the other guys after school.

Freddie was the kind of kid you would hate as a parent: he was obnoxious and he made your kid more obnoxious and it was easy to tell Freddie wasn’t headed for anything good. Well, one day we went into Freddie’s house to get a Coke after playing football in the street (we were bright kids), and there is a 9mm automatic pistol just sitting on the kitchen countertop.

No one touched the pistol, but we were all transfixed by it. Even my 14-year-old mind knew that this was not responsible gun ownership. Anyway, Freddie told us he wanted to show us his gun. Yeah, you can probably see where this is going. Before you could say “Smith and Wesson”, he’s dancing around his bedroom like a freaking idiot with a single-shot .410. My friends and I got out of there quick. Even we knew that was how kids get killed. Yeah, Freddie was bad news, but he eventually drifted off into his own little world with the other pot-smoking freaks in Iron Maiden t-shirts who sat at the back of the school bus.

A History of Guns: Part Two

This is the second in a personal history of guns in my life. Click here for Part One. Click here for Part Three.

The 1970s
I was born into a God-lovin’, gun totin’, Republican votin’ nuclear family (As my friend Kerry once said, "How the hell did you end up the way you are?" It's a long story.) But I guess it shouldn't surprise that I was fascinated with guns. But while guns were in my house, they weren’t visible. Dad kept his guns locked up and the only time I saw them was when he carried them from the guestroom closet where he kept them to the trunk of his car for a hunting trip. His message was always clear: guns and kids are a bad mix, so leave guns alone boy.

Looking back, I guess it seems odd (to me) that I didn’t grow up with guns. When Dad went hunting, he went with his friends or just by himself. I remember one day him tromping off in the snow into the woods behind our house to hunt quail. I sometimes wondered why I never went hunting with Dad. I used to think it was because I wasn’t old enough. Now I know he just wanted to get away from a couple of kids and a pain-in-the-ass wife. I never really thought anything about it until many years later when I watched my neighbor, a big-time bird-hunter, take his six-year-old son dove hunting with him. I was a little surprised, but that's part of the indoctrination into the gun culture that I obviously missed and maybe explains why I am the way I am. In 15 years, that kid will be one of those guys who drives around in a Tahoe with a Ducks Unlimited sticker and baseball cap. Except maybe not that kid. My wife and I thought the kid would probably grow up to be gay and the parents were just over-compensating. So maybe it's a Subaru Outback and a rainbow sticker. But that's beside the point. It kind of makes me sad looking back. I could care less about the guns and the hunting. But I miss not getting to spend time with my Dad.

Most pro-gun people are quick to bring up the personal defense angle in their defense of firearms. But using a gun to protect house and family from crime wasn’t in my Dad’s experience either. I remember one night when we were worried about a prowler around the house, I asked Dad if he need to get his gun. He looked at me as if I had asked him if he needed a hot-air balloon. He didn't need no damn gun.

Anyway, for me, guns weren’t any more real than the plastic Thompson gun I used to carry playing war games or the westerns and war movies that were the staple of my television viewing. Things didn't stay that way.

A History of Guns: Part One

Lately, I’ve been thinking about guns. Americans love to fight about guns. The stereotype is conservatives love ‘em and liberals hate ‘em. Guns are right there with abortion and gay marriage and Iraq when you talk about hot button issues (check out these comments at Grits for Breakfast if you've forgotten how geeked up people can get on this subject.)

My own feelings about guns have been quite complicated. I've been a gun owner and very pro-gun. I've swung to the other side and been very pro-gun control. Now, I'd say I'm somewhere in the middle. Above all, I'm a civil libertarian, and, as my good friend Mike and that big, fat lawyer brain of his likes to point out, you can't pretend the Second Amendment isn't in the Constitution. Fair enough. So I wanted to track how I got here by doing a personal history of guns in my life. This started out as one post but it got longer. And longer. And longer. So I broke it up into parts that will gun on consecutive days until I'm done (which as of right now, I'm not.) So let's get started.

Before the Beginning
My own relationship with guns actually goes back to before I was born. I had a great-grandfather Hughs who was kind of a bad dude who gunned down several men. He killed three men who tried to rob a barn dance where he was playing fiddle. He later gunned down a U.S. marshal in what may or may not have been self-defense. The government’s side was Hughs was running a still on his property (which he was), and the marshal was murdered when he tried to arrest Hughs. Hughs' side of things was the marshal started firing into the house while his two baby girls (my grandmother and great aunt) played on the floor. We’ll never know the answer because Hughs was gunned down in a robbery attempt before the case could go to trial.

I know. Kind of a bloodbath. Such was life in turn-of-the-century Oklahoma. The culprit in Hughs' murder later killed himself in jail, haunted by the ghost of my mean sumbitch of a grandpa. More family lore: Many years later, there was a drunken murder involving some cousins -- I never got the full story on that one. But that’s my pedigree. A bunch of drunk-ass, mean-ass, murderous Scotch-Irish bastards. That's my mother's side.

Not all of the stories were that sorid. My father was an outdoorsman and grew up poor in the country, so hunting wasn’t just something to do, it was a way to put food on the table. Later, Dad was in the Army, and then made a little money so hunting became a social activity and not about sustenance. But, the fact is he was comfortable with guns. He wasn't one of these you-can-have-my-guns-when you-pry-them-from-my-cold-dead-fingers types, but he was an NRA member.

So that gets us from the dawn of time until the late 1960s. Tomorrow, we talk about my formative years.

Click here for Part Two.