My history with guns

My mom was afraid of it, that much was clear. Long after my father died, she kept his shotgun hidden, wrapped in a blanket on the back of the top shelf of the hall closet. Her fear passed down to me. As a kid, the discovery of this weapon during a typical foray into the normally unreachable areas of my life was a complete shock and made me look differently at my mysterious father who disappeared from my life so early that every thing about him seemed mythical. What had he needed a gun for? He didn't seem like a criminal or even a hunter, nothing about him suggested he had any interest in killing anything. But I couldn't ask my mom, to ask would have been to reveal I knew of the gun's existence. And so it was re-wrapped and tucked back into place. At times when I knew my mom was gone I would occasionally take it out and look at it and wonder about it and my dad.

As a young adult on a trip to our cabin in the desert, a friend brought along a .22 rifle. He showed me how to load it and fire it and we plinked at tin cans. I confess my fear of guns made me feel nervous but being able to hit a can from a distance was, well...fun. I was good at it. I felt like my fear served me well, my cautiousness was directly proportional to my sense of safety. A few years later, when Susan and I were wed, we lived twenty miles out of town at the old cabin. Here, response times for the sheriff would be 45 minutes or longer so my brother-in-law thought it prudent that we should have a firearm. And so, for the first time in my life, I owned a gun. Susan's family had always had guns but this was knew to me. I learned to use it and clean it and it became a possession that I was mindful of, like a pet Anaconda, not otherwise dangerous but it could kill you if you weren't careful.

Now, these many years later, my sons have learned to shoot and we have gone to the range together. They seem to enjoy shooting different kinds of weapons and they seem to have the same fear/respect for guns that I do (for which I am thankful). Still, I confess that my enjoyment is tinged with confusion about the general morality of guns and the recognition of gun violence which seems both so pervasive and destructive. I fully recognize the strong feelings people have both for and against gun ownership. But I do not subscribe to these, I like to think that I could hunt if I needed to and, in a different life, I might have been good at it. I find little harm in knowing that about myself.

I "shot" this image of 30.06 rounds from the last time we went shooting with our sons.

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