Mostly, I remember how small the gun was—tiny enough to fit perfectly in my 5-year-old hand. It lay in the locked, shallow, “secret” drawer built into the carved molding of the old dresser. It fascinated me. I asked to see it over and over.
My mother told me it was a lady’s purse gun. No one remembered whose it had been or exactly where it had come from, somewhere back on my father’s side of the family.
As far as I know, that tiny, bullet-less purse gun was the only firearm in our household by the time I was growing up. But my father had been in the Army and remained in the Army Reserve. And both my brothers, who were much older than I, spent decades in the military. So I heard the family stories, and guns played a big part in them.
I heard about the time my father shot at a prowler. Steel mills were the lifeblood of my hometown, and threats flew between unions and bosses. Dad had been warned his house “might catch fire.” So when he heard a noise in the backyard late one night, he fired his handgun into the darkness. There was a scream. The intruder was not a would-be arsonist but a neighbor girl cutting through the yards on her way home from the bus stop. Luckily she wasn’t hurt, just terrified.
I heard about the time my brother Konrad—firstborn son, destined for West Point—had a furious argument with my sister Edith and said he’d kill her. To show how angry he was, he fired his .22 into the ceiling. The bullet went straight through and narrowly missed Mrs. Parks, the elderly housekeeper, who was upstairs.
One New Year’s Eve, Konrad shot his gun up the chimney to celebrate. It brought down a cloud of soot that blackened everything in the living room.
From near misses to tragedy
My siblings told those stories with hilarity—what a wild bunch they had been, back before I was born. But they turned serious when they talked about the Walters family who had lived next door.
Mr. Walters was careful to keep his gun in the attic, away from his children. Then one rainy day, his two little boys went up there to play, and the 6-year-old shot and killed the 3-year-old. Even decades later, when we’d go to the cemetery to visit our family graves, my sisters would walk over to find the grave of the little Walters boy.
For a long time, I shared the same outlook as my siblings. We saw no connection between the exciting near misses in our family and the tragedy in the family next door. It’s only lately that I’ve wondered: What if my father’s shot had hit the neighbor girl? Or what if my brother had shot Mrs. Parks? For those families and for mine, everything from that moment on would have been very different.
I never had a gun of my own, although I took riflery at summer camp for several years and loved it. Girls didn’t get BB guns or .22s in the 1950s and ’60s, at least not in my small, suburban town much like Harvard. But guns were never far away.
In my senior year of high school, our classmate Eddie shot his father. Eddie had been with us since first grade. The principal and several teachers knew that Eddie’s father beat his family, but they didn’t report those things back then. So one day, when Eddie’s father was beating his wife again, Eddie found his father’s gun and killed him. Our English teacher went to court and spoke up for Eddie, and the judge sent him to the Army rather than to prison.
At a reunion a few years after we graduated, I heard that the girl who had been valedictorian the year before us had been shot and badly injured by her husband, who then killed himself.
Another schoolmate, Bob, stayed in our hometown and had a family. He was building a new, larger home at the far end of his property, and some teenagers were using the half-built house as a nighttime hangout. So Bob began to sleep out there with his gun. One morning, his wife sent their preschooler out to wake Bob up for breakfast. The little boy picked up the gun, pulled the trigger, and killed his sleeping father.
My office mate’s 18-year-old son killed himself with the heirloom gun his father had recently given him. No one is sure whether it was an accident or suicide.
A gun story not heard
All my life I’ve heard gun stories, but there’s one kind of story I’ve never heard. None of my family members, neighbors, or co-workers has ever told me about using a gun against an intruder, a carjacker, a mugger, or any other dangerous stranger—not one case of self-defense among all their stories.
I don’t think any of these people believed they were putting themselves or their families at risk when they acquired their guns. Maybe they even thought having a gun made them safer. I’d bet they all considered themselves responsible gun owners. Certainly my father and brother were responsible people by most standards in our society. But they made terrible mistakes with guns.
Most gun owners are responsible—until the moment when they are too angry, too frightened, too tired, too drunk, too depressed, too forgetful, or just a little too careless. And then the gun is right there to turn the moment fatal.
* * *
My sister Mary Jo is elderly now. She and her husband want a gun for protection. They are afraid of home invasions. I ask if there have been many of those near them. “Oh no!” Mary Jo says, horrified at the idea. But still they are worried—there’s so much crime in the news.
Mary Jo is becoming a little forgetful. Her husband, Niels, is fairly deaf from years of working with heavy construction equipment. So, what if she forgets he is puttering in the garage, and he doesn’t hear her when she calls, “Is that you, Niels?”
What’s the worst that could happen?
