Dedicated to the kids of Newton, Connecticut
By Bob Dorn
Growing up white in Arizona put you in touch with all kinds of guns — only your fingers and hands if you were the boss, your more vulnerable parts if you were not. Back then, white boys had the bb gun at the age of 6 or 7, a .22 rifle by the age of 11 or 12 and at 16 a 20-gauge shotgun for doves. Many of them knew something about clips and muzzle velocity and hollow point bullets before they’d even grown up.
I’m saying “white” because that, plus a bit of Mexican culture, is all I remember about Arizona at this point in my life, removed from that state and condition by at least 5 decades. In Phoenix, back then many, but not all, whites were — as Mitt Romney might put it — self-segregated. They chose to be cut off from the rest of the world, which made it possible to be white. You could have some large distortions in your thinking that were rewarded when you expressed them. And if they weren’t why, then, you had guns.
You almost had to know about guns, and their powers. We figured everybody had guns; it was safer to assume that. Guns were known as “equalizers” by the people who had more of them. By the age of 16, many white guys had both a car and a gun. A gun AND a car? Why not a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and a Humvee? That would have been a real entitlement.
An early small tragedy rescued me from a love of guns. I’d borrowed the BB gun for the afternoon from Tony Marchese, a richer kid down the street. It was just too easy to use. All you had to do was drop a small round metal pellet into the opening at the end of the rifle, which you could hear rolling downward toward the firing end toward a magnet that grabbed the pellet with a pleasing “Click” that let you know you were in business. Pump a lever to compress some air, then pull the trigger and a puff of air would send the pellet on its wobbly, uncertain course toward the target. It was called, not very belligerently, a Daisy rifle.
I took the thing into our backyard. A field of cows was beyond the alley, giving the place a kind of rural seclusion that permitted experiment. I knew enough not to shoot at the cows, but there were plenty of birds. There was such a thing as an Arizona Cardinal, intensely colored and big, something like a scarlet blue jay. One landed on the wooden beam of the neighbor’s fence above me.
Maybe it was curious. It didn’t fly away, and seemed not to regard me as much of a threat. It didn’t fly when I raised the Daisy up. I like to think I didn’t intend to kill it, but of course I might later have forced that thought into the status of a memory. I know I was shocked that the bird dropped instantly, backward into the neighbor’s yard. I went into the alley where there was a slat that could be forced open, entered the yard and found the still bird, now only a beautiful thing. It seemed not to have been deformed by the pellet’s entry, but I knew I had killed it, maybe even willed it dead, and I felt like a shitheel as I brought it out of the neighbor’s yard and dug the hole in our own. Out of shame, I didn’t tell anyone.
Shortly after that my mom began taking me on trips to the library Saturday mornings, where I checked out picture books on astronomy, some elementary works on the naturaI world, and Frank Baum’s Oz books, which unfolded a complicated world, but not a deadly one… all of those preparing in me a taste for, well, higher values. By the time I entered advanced English classes I was somewhat prepared to receive the lessons of poetry, and Plato, and The Catcher in the Rye, which a secretly homosexual Jesuit elegantly helped us parse. I was made pretty well immune from the machismo of my epoch. I didn’t like guns.
That still unfolding enlightenment was challenged on one of those hopeless nights spent riding up and down Central Ave., getting ourselves worked up enough to talk to girls doing the same pointless slow drag from light to light. We’d given it up and were passing Town and Country mall on the way home when the friend I’ll call Tom abruptly jerked his Olds 88 into the parking lot of that early, timbered, low-slung, then-fashionable agglomeration of shops and restaurants that most of our parents could only barely afford to visit once in a while.
Tom was not intimidated by the place; his parents had real money. The Olds he drove was a high-powered new coupe and he carried in it a .45 caliber automatic, which they’d also given him. The other guy and I knew it, so did others who knew Tom, which is what gave all of them their bravado when they rode with him.
Were we actually looking for neckers in parked cars, or did we stumble onto them? I can’t remember. But we found two cars not separated by much, two pairs in one, one couple in the other, and I could feel the raw fury rising in Tom and the other guy, call him Warren. Tom jacked the steering wheel and threw the Olds into a few squealing turns, a howling coming from deep in his throat, Warren erupted in a remarkably similar way, as if they’d practiced this display. Tom headed the Olds toward the two, by now terrified, carloads and slammed the brakes.
Warren turned his head toward me. He was screaming. “Let’s beat ‘em up and take their women.” There was nothing more in it than sheer hatred, maybe the result of too many nights not getting those girls to join us in our cars, or of something worse and not spoken of by 17-year-olds in those days. I heard myself screaming back at both of them, “And then what? The girls are going to fall in love with you?”
One of them called me a pussy, the other roared something I couldn’t distinguish as speech. I told them to let me out of the back seat, so I could walk home.
Who knows why it was enough? They took me home, grumbling at me all the way. I was surprised at school the next day not to have been the butt of mean pranks from the people who were in that crowd I knew back then as friends.
Source
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Bob- I suspect that a number of readers grew up around guns. I certainly did in western PA, where it seemed everyone had a hunting rifle and everyone hunted. For many of us, what was shot was our dinner and we were grateful for that. ( The steel mills in the 50’s and 60’s would lay off men in November so they could get their inventory down.) Hunting season began in November, and 3/4 of my school wouldn’t show up on the first day of hunting season. The other 1/4 were girls.
So I know how to skin a rabbit and check the liver and remove buckshot. I have ground deer meat. My family & the people I grew up around are not about to give up their guns.
But my brother did cancel his NRA membership a decade ago when the NRA successfully supported the legal sale of assault weapons, high capacity magazines and cop killer bullets. For my (Republican) brother this went way beyond hunting and protecting one’s home.
I was back in western PA a few years ago. My nephews still hunt, still have hunting rifles, but my youngest nephew told me that hunting is really just an excuse for going out and sitting in the woods, getting away from it all and thinking. He didn’t really care much about shooting anything- he could buy food at the grocery store.
So this is a long winded way of saying that there are many of us who grew up with guns who are ready to have a real deal conversation about how to reduce the slaughter of innocents. Thanks for telling your story.
There should be no glory in killing for the sake of killing. Automatic weapons are for warfare, purely. I’d bet most members of the NRA by now are either too old to hunt, never did hunt, see the organization as a means of electing empty skulls to local and national office, fear/hate anyone who wants to regulate the gun… etc. etc. Hunting’s not the issue.
We’re allowing military weapons to be more or less freely included in the domestic market. Warfare is being constitutionalized.
I never had a BB gun as a child, I wanted one. Dad had several rifles and a 38 revolver, I got to shoot his 22 rifle once in awhile when he allowed it. He’d hunted a few times before marrying mom.
When I was in the Navy I fell into the crowd that used to take guns, dirt bikes and beer when we temporarily deployed from Miramar to Fallon, Nellis or Yuma, we worked on planes all night, slept till late morning, then went out and found random desert locales to blast holes in anything we pleased (no wildlife but not from desire) drink a few beers and fling ourselves off berms in the sand on YZ250’s or whatever bike someone brought along.
Invariably a local sheriff would drive up, survey the situation with broken beer bottles, endless ruts over delicate desert plants, and brass littering the sand, us hollering and gunshots ringing out, and ask the inevitable question:
“You boys ain’t smoking any mary-jiwanna, are you?”
“No sir! Just havin’ a little fun off duty.”
“Okay, make sure you don’t smoke any dope”.
We’d often see the same cops and say hello at the Chicken Ranch if we were in Fallon.
We used to go past the unincorporated areas north of Black Mountain Road and shoot though right at the edge were signs saying “no shooting in city limits”. One of the guys I used to shoot with always made a point of stopping and blasting holes in those signs, especially when they put a new one up.
When I left the Navy I had a barely legal 12 gauge and a .357, and like my dad used to, I’d convinced myself it was my god given right to drive around with the guns in the car, loaded, in case of “trouble”. This was the 80’s and trouble was everywhere if you looked.
Less than a year later I found that trouble and keeping the story short I had my gun drawn on a “bad guy” with my girl friend beside me, he had his out but I had the drop on him. All that changed when a few feet behind me I heard the “clank” of a round being chambered into a weapon. Inevitably it seemed there was no way to alter the destiny of at least 2 dead, possibly my G/F living, one walks away. Not me.
The only rational choice immediately hit me. I deliberately and steadily unchambered the shell in my gun, tossed it in a lazy arc to the guy in front of me, who caught it, and said to the both of them, “Well, we’re leaving. Gonna do anything about it”? and my G/F and I drove off.
I got rid of the other gun and never wanted to own a gun since. I recognized we only survived that because once disarmed I was no threat to these people and they weren’t about to shoot an unarmed man.
For this reason I have been a gun control advocate ever since as I realize that every single pro gun argument is based upon just stupid misbeliefs. I only put myself in that situation because I felt the empowerment of having a gun. They would only have shot me because I had the gun. Ridding myself of it made me of little concern to them. Moreover several earlier incidents also saw me considering solving disputes with a gun. My god had that happened I’d have been in prison for years.
Undeniable: Stats show if you own a gun you are far more likely to be killed by a gun, not necessarily yours.
It’s a lot like martial arts which I was also dabbling in at the time. Some do it for “confidence”, some for security. You had better be careful because some day all those neat moves you learned will come in handy, and someone who messed with you will go down just like that and you may do just like you trained for over and over. Many people train in moves which, if you are strong enough and the subject is taken off guard, one strike causes a reaction you exploit then another, and within a few seconds their life is yours to take.
And what are you gonna do when you are standing over some guy with a crushed windpipe, his nose smashed up into his brain, as he’s choking on his own blood and vomit and his life is draining out of him and you can’t stop it… yeah you were a real badass huh. You won! You get the all expense paid trip for 15-20.
Do gun advocates who preach “protecti0n” of property, really want to take a life, over petty theft? Trespassing? What if all those macho dreams come true? What if the burglar is the neighbor’s kid? What if the neighbor shoots yours? I offer this quote whenever the issue comes up:
“Guns…. are tools of the weak.”
-Henry Rollins
John- this is a riveting story, laced with all kinds of irony. It deserves a post of its own.
Yes. Even after I killed the Cardinal I went out to the desert a few timeswith “Tom” and “Warren,” to plink at rocks (not rabbits) with “Tom’s” .22 lightweight. In fact, being once again in the backseat on one occasion — this time, in Tom’s jeep, his other car — I was thrown out when Tom drove straight though a gully and the jeep bucked me up in the air. I could see the .22 below me, smoke coming from its barrel. It had fired as my finger was ripped from the rifle. I woke up with “Tom” and “Warren” standing over me, giggling. Bruised and scratched all over my body.
Kids. With guns. It’s their right to “bear arms,” isn’t it?
Are there many more enticing items than a gun for young males seeking empowerment, especially since American history is so littered with examples associating heroes with guns?
As Anna detailed, in many rural areas families who fed themselves through hunting saw teenagers hunt with the men and many families I knew in the mountains of Tuolumne County up north had guns. They weren’t toys and the matter was approached with respect- if their dad caught them playing with the thing they’d never see it again.
What would be the ratio of such young men who reached adulthood and were responsible, stable people who treated the gun as a tool- as my father generally did-(though the gun under the car seat thing was a bit much) and those who were sociopaths of some degree and possess them as a representation of power and destruction they could unleash if and when the day comes they go off the deep end? How many are a little of both?
Doubtless the one thing that should be common sense is the more guns we have the more trouble there will be, but even more troubling is the kind of guns. Who needs an assault rifle to hunt, or even for home protection? You’re best off with a shotgun for that so the bullet doesn’t go through 3 walls and kill a neighbor.
I think assault rifles could only appeal to a sociopath dreaming of the day some bizarre calling requires him to live out a Rambo fantasy. Maybe a paranoid schizophrenia fueled fear of government oppression, like “Obamas’s going to take my guns away!”.
Well maybe he should.
One thing felt was profound in your story Bob and appreciated was your experience with the bird, the way you recall it in such detail reveals you still probably never have overcome the regret for it. Even though my younger years saw some pretty wild experiences with guns, probably by accident I never did shoot an animal with one. Surely for the better.
BTW here is that 20 second Henry Rollins spot from MTV: