When I moved down to Austin I bought a little house with a big backyard, and an overgrown creek behind that. One day a few months later I went up to the local sporting goods store and bought a BB gun, not for protection, but just because I thought it would be fun to plink empty soda cans behind the house. This was a slightly transgressive thing to do: my parents hadn’t allowed us to play with toy guns when we were children, even if they just made noises (when I was 11 or so I bought one on the sly: my mother found it and was livid), but there was no real thrill in that. I simply thought it would be an entertaining way to while away a half an hour on a lazy afternoon.
The one I bought looks very much like a real pistol, as almost all of them do. It has a (useless) laser sight and it operates on compressed air cartridges, which means the BBs come out reasonably hard, nowhere near as hard a real gun, of course, but hard enough to put a hole through a thin piece of aluminum. I don’t know if it would kill a squirrel, of course I never tried, but it whacked those cans pretty well, and it was indeed fun, for a little while, and then it got tiresome and I left the thing on a shelf in the mudroom at the back of the house and moved on.
A year or two later I got a Lab puppy, my late, beloved Homer, who was supremely good-natured and perfect company, and whom I miss every day. To be sure, he wasn’t much of a guard dog. At first my mailman was frightened of him, because he was frightened of all dogs; within a few weeks he was bringing treats for him, cooing and petting his head. But then, I didn’t need a guard dog, I never worried about that kind of thing, and anyway, I figured my job was to protect him more than vice-versa. Then one night I was in my office and I heard him barking, angrily, in the front room. I’d never heard him sound angry before (and would never hear it again), so I went to see what was up.
The people I’d bought the house from had installed lights on motion detectors all around the outside, so the front yard was lit up, and there was a kid lifting up my front window as he tried to get into my living room. He was white, maybe 25 or so, vaguely hipster-looking, and when he saw me come into the room, he took off -- only instead of leaving, he started around the house to the back.
I ran back through the house, saw the BB gun on the shelf, grabbed it, and found him trying to climb up onto my back porch. When he saw me, now waving a gun, he took off towards the front again, so I went back through the house and stopped him in my front yard, where he was trying to figure out how to open the gate (it sticks) on the picket fence that surrounds it. I told him to stop, and he kept fumbling with the latch, so I said, “If you don’t stop, I’m going to shoot you.” Then he turned around, walked a few steps towards me, stopped, and said, “God, just shoot me, will you? Put me out of my misery.”
Well, that wasn’t what I expected, and it definitely put a hitch in my giddy-up, though my momentum was still forward. I paused, confused, and when he started for the gate again, I walked towards him and grabbed his t-shirt by the back. “What do you want from me?”, he said, sound genuinely aggrieved. “I want to know what you were doing in my backyard!” I said. “What are you talking about? There are, like, a hundred people in your backyard”, he replied.
And this, too, threw me. Of course, there was no one in my back yard, or in any back yard on the block, and it was becoming clear to me that he was either on some drug he shouldn’t have been on, or off some meds that he should have been on. Still, I was furious, the whole thing had only lasted about 90 seconds, not enough time for me to calm down, and I didn’t let him go. I said something about calling the cops, and he simply ripped out of his shirt, opened the gate, and started walking, shirtless and slow, down the street, leaving me holding some shreds of cloth in one hand, and the BB gun in the other. I stood there, trying to figure what was happening, and then I stepped out onto the sidewalk and shot him from about 20 yards away.
I could tell by the way he reacted that I’d hit him in the ass, which was a feat, and no doubt pure luck; and then he took off running down the street. I went back inside and called the cops, told them what had happened, leaving out the part where I shot him, and suggested they simply cruise around my neighborhood, looking for a white kid with no shirt on. It took them about 5 minutes to find him, and then an officer called me and asked if I wanted to press charges. I balked at that, and asked what she thought I should do; she said it was up to me, but that they had run him through their database and he had no record. I asked her what would happen if I didn’t press charges, and she said they’d hold him overnight in the drunk tank and then let him go. That sounded about right to me, and I told her so. I never heard from anyone about it again, so I assume that’s what happened.
But here’s the thing: I’m certain that if I’d had a real gun, I still would have shot him, in the back while he was walking away. I hadn’t even thought about it: I just aimed the gun and fired. It was a very, very stupid thing for me to do, and if I’d actually put a bullet in him, I would have hurt him badly, it would have been criminal, and I’d have gone to prison, because I would have deserved to go to prison.
It wasn’t a real gun, it shot BBs, and no one got hurt, which lends this little tale a distinctly melodramatic tone, I know. But I thought about the whole incident a lot in the following weeks. I had been blind with rage, and, in a way which is hard to explain, deeply offended. “How dare you do this to me” was what I was thinking. “You don’t come into my yard, and try to come through my window into my house, and then just walk away when it doesn’t work.” So even though I had the upper hand, the whole thing was over, and he was leaving, I’d wanted to...get him.
This is not something to boast about. I do have a temper (though not a physical one), but so does almost everyone, and anyway, this wasn’t an example of that. It was something even more destructive. My pride had been contradicted, and even though it happened very quickly, I should have known better. Back when I was in my early 20s I was walking down 107th from Broadway towards Amsterdam, heading to my apartment, when the front door a neighboring building flew open, and a man threw another man down the front stoop, and then followed him down to the sidewalk and started punching him in the face. I told him to calm down, and he said that the other man had been caught trying to rob his apartment. “I get it”, I said, “but no property is worth someone’s blood”. That was enough time for the other man to get away, so it worked out all right. But when it happened to me, I wasn’t any better.
For a long time I was mildly against gun control, for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to me that the 2nd Amendment is pretty clear, and I remind those who focus on the clause about militias that it really doesn’t matter. Logically speaking, falsifying the antecedent doesn’t falsify the consequent. It could have read, “The moon being made of green cheese, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” and the latter part would hold even when the former part was disproved. The Declaration of Independence says that we have rights because they are “endowed by [our] Creator”, but we still believe in rights even if we don’t believe in God. Moreover, I’m uneasy about living in a country in which only the police have guns. And the general liberal stance is to interpret the Bill of Rights to expand upon freedoms as much as possible: the 1st Amendment wasn’t written to protect internet porn either, but that’s how we’ve used it. We treat all the Amendments that way, enlarging their scope – except the 2nd, which even the ACLU won’t touch.
More generally, the American experiment rests on the belief that the government doesn’t tell us what we can do: we tell the government what it can do. It can’t tell you that you can’t have an abortion. It can’t tell you that you can’t own a gun. I wouldn’t own one myself, then or now, for all sorts of reasons, but for a long time I believed that others should be able to. Far more people, I often point out, die of drug overdoses every year than die in gun violence, and yet most of us are for legalizing or decriminalizing drugs, and cracking down on guns. Why? I can’t help but think that at least part of it is that people like us do drugs, but don’t own guns (though a lot more people like us own guns than you might think).
I’ve since become, at the very least, ambivalent about it all, because I understand a little better how easily these things can go awry – understand how easy it is to use a gun out of a momentary anger, to right wrongs with greater wrongs, to solve problems in a way which undoubtedly causes more of them. You will say this is obvious, and indeed it is, but it doesn’t sink in, at least it didn’t for me, until I found myself exactly there. If I can do it, I say to myself, knowing it’s wrong, imagine how easy it would have been if I thought it was right.
For a moment I thought you were going to shoot out your neighbor’s landscape lights, something I’ve often wanted to do. Great piece.