Me an' My Gun

I was once a gun owner.

My dad bought me a .22 rifle when I was 12. It was a Marlin, with micro-grooved rifling, and it looked like an M1 carbine from World War 2. Though my dad was an engineer for companies doing projects for the space program, he had been raised as a farm boy in North Dakota, so he thought I should learn to shoot a gun. And I liked it. I loved my .22. I kept it oiled and I wanted to get lots more guns once I was older. I wished I could have lived in the Wild West so I could carry a gun around with me.

I also had a little .410 shotgun. I traded an old drum set for the shotgun and a broken Japanese sword someone's dad had picked up in the Pacific in World War 2. My mom sighed when she learned I had a shotgun now too.

We lived in the suburbs, in Florida. We weren't country people. We had a swimming pool. We were middle class. I didn't hunt. But I had a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun.

Just a year or so earlier, a kid I knew from school had been shot in his sleep by his dad. The kid's name was Buck. He lived on the same street that we did. His dad had recently come back from Viet Nam, and at 4 in the morning had shot his wife and kids and them himself. All this in a middle class suburban Florida beach town.

Buck being murdered in his sleep-- shot in his sleep by his dad, really scared me. I made my dad promise he wouldn't murder us in our sleep. I felt pretty safe at night with my .22 and .410 shotgun, though, even though there was no ammo for the shotgun. I ran it through my head how to get to the .22 on the desktop and load it through its tubular magazine and then shoot whoever was coming to murder us in the night, and it seemed like it would take too long, and I wished I could sleep with my .22, already loaded. Also, if someone came in through the window, they would be between me and the .22, and that would be a problem. And if they came in and I didn't wake up in time, that would also be a problem. Then I started thinking my .22 wouldn't be much help when someone came in the night to murder us.

But I had this .22 lying there, on my desktop in my bedrrom, and I wanted to do something more with it than shoot at targets at a gun range. I wanted to shoot something. When I was 16, I had my driver's license and I had a .22 and a friend and I went out to shoot something. We found a spot near the beach with some pine woods. There were houses beyond the woods, though. I decided I wasn't going to shoot at things, because of the nearby houses. My friend wanted to shoot something, though, so he shot at a bird on the branch of a tree. He missed, and the shot popped and hissed-- .22's don't go Bang!-- they pop and hiss-- and a flock of birds flew up making a racket, and he handed me the gun and ran back to the car, and we sped away. 

Not long afterwards, we moved to upstate New York. We lived out in the woods, by the Black River. My step brother took me deer hunting in a car. We drove around through the woods looking for deer. We had a 12 gauge shotgun he had borrowed from a friend, loaded with slugs for killing deer. It was illegal to hunt that way, but that was how it was done, he told me. When we couldn't find any deer we shot at trees in the woods.

When I left home to join the navy, my guns disappeared. My mom got rid of them. I shot guns every once in a while in the navy though. I qualified on the 1911 Colt semi-automatic pistol. I shot an M-14 a few times. I shot a 12 gauge once. I even fired a few bursts from a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the signal bridge of the USS Tattnall.

Then I got out of the navy and I had pretty much detached myself from guns until I got married and met my father-in-law. He really liked guns. He took me deer hunting and I liked it and I got a deer using his 30/30. I lived in the countryside now, so I decided I had to have guns again. My father-in-law gave his old 20 gauge shotgun to my wife. I borrowed his 30/30 every deer season, and he loaned it to me because he had a new .30-06, with a higher muzzle velocity, which made it more accurate at long range, and more deadly.

My father-in-law took me coon hunting a few times too. I came along as an observer because I wanted to stomp around the woods at night. We went on one coon hunt-- a competition coon hunt-- without any guns. It was a competition to see whose dog was the best coon dog, not to kill the raccoon. Our group was walking across a corn field when a big pickup with searchlights mounted on its roof came bouncing and roaring at us. It stopped, illuminating all of us in its lights. I turned and saw a silhouetted figure holding a gun.

"What the hell you doin' on my land!?" the silhouette shouted.

A little hillbilly in the group shouted back, "Fuck you!", and I cringed a little, waiting for a shotgun blast.

Then the judge of the competition called out to the man with the gun, and they knew each other, and everything was okay.

On another coon hunt, this time with guns, my father-in-law and his friend took us out onto someone else's farmland. The farmer cornered us in the woods, shining a high beam flashlight at us. He had a pistol in a holster, and warned us to get the hell off his land. We did, and continued the hunt, and the dogs got the scent of a raccoon, and it went up a tree, and my father-in-law and his friend got the raccoon in the beams of their headlamps, and you could see the big coon huddled on a limb, its eyes shining from the reflection, and they fired shot after shot at the coon with their .22's, and at that moment I thought about where those bullets that missed might be heading, because though it was countryside it wasn't all countryside, but mostly I marvelled that an animal could be so full of .22 caliber rifle slugs and still manage to stay up in the tree, and I thought also that that animal was going through a living hell, and it finally dropped to the ground, and the dogs ripped into its belly and pulled out its intestines, and it was still alive enough to fight, and I watched in horror until one of them finally put a bullet in its head. That was my last coon hunt.

I had a nice neighbor there, out in the countryside in Maryland, who had a 16 year old son who wasn't so nice. His son shot the other neighbor's dog from his bedroom window with his .22, and killed it. The kid told us he had gut shot it, and it had died slowly, and he had had to apologize to the family. I told him he had better not shoot Clyde, my beagle-- that I wouldn't just accept an apology-- and he told me not to worry-- he wouldn't shoot Clyde because he liked us. Later he told us about the people living in a trailer with stray cats everywhere, and how he had offered to shoot the cats, and they had agreed, and he had had a big day hunting and killing stray cats.

The next door neighbor whose dog had been shot also had a gun. We didn't know he had a gun, though, until he used it late one night. We'd been awakened by a loud argument between the man and his girlfriend. Then there was a gunshot and frantic sobbing from the woman. We peered out the window at their house, crouching down. It seemed to be quiet now.

"I'm calling the cops," I said, whispering for some reason. 

"Okay," said my wife, also whispering.

I called 911, the emergency number, and I told the lady a gunshot had been fired at the home next to ours. I also explained the circumstances. She said that state troopers would be sent out right away. Back in our bedroom, I crouched low to peer out the window again, where my wife was still peering.

"They've made up, they love each other again," she said, no longer whispering.

On their front lawn, the man and his girlfriend were hugging and sobbing. I called the highway patrol and reported the new development, telling them they needn't come.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to save enough money to buy a few more guns. A 20 gauge shotgun is kind of a wimpy gun, really. I wanted a 12 gauge shotgun, and a lever action .45 rifle using the same shell used in a .45 pistol. I killed all my deer at short range, so the rifle would be good for that, with a lot of short range knock down power. Also, I could later buy a .45 pistol for home defense, because of all the whackos around carrying guns.

When we lived there, in Cecil County, Maryland, everybody had a gun. You really had to be careful who you offended. Once, while driving my GMC pickup truck, I cut somebody off in traffic. They held down the horn behind me. I put my hand out of the window and gave them the finger. They gunned their engine and roared past me and cut me off and hit their brakes a little, forcing me to hit my brakes and slow down. The guy in the passenger seat held a pistol out of the window and waved it around. My wife was afraid I would stop to confront them, but I was as scared as she was, and I thought about how to get away from these guys when they roared away instead.

Dan Hanby also had a gun, a 12 gauge shotgun. He was a driver for Maryland Portable Concrete, where we both drove concrete mixers. He was a quiet guy-- polite. He was having some problems at home, though. He'd been caught driving drunk, so he couldn't work as a driver for a while. I saw him hitchhiking as I came home from work, and I gave him a lift, and he explained that he'd just bought the shotgun from K-Mart.

"Going hunting?" I'd asked, and he'd said no and then been quiet. He explained that he had had a vasectomy, but his wife had a little girl when the vasectomy should have prevented that from happening, and I had joked that he'd better sue that doctor. I hadn't understood where his mind was, telling me about that out of the blue. I had taken him to his house, not far from mine, and I'd wished him a Merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks later I drove my mixer into the lot after having done the final load of the day, and I heard the boss on the company radio say something about Dan, and hostages. When I went into the dispatch office all the drivers were there, listening to the boss talking to Dan on the telephone, telling him not to do anything crazy. As we all discovered later, though, it had been too late. Dan had used his new 12 gauge shotgun to shoot his wife and little girl. Apparently, he'd suspected the little girl wasn't his. After murdering his family he had gone out onto the front lawn and shot himself in the stomach, but he had botched it-- he was still alive. His wife's family lived next door and her brothers came over and tried to beat him to death as he lay on the grass but the police came and then the ambulance and he was taken away.

A few days later I was pouring concrete and the construction crew, who had known Dan and all the other drivers, was talking about what had happened.

"I kin see shootin yor wife, but not yor little girl," the foreman said. And the others all agreed very solemnly.

Dan eventually recovered from his wound, and he was sentenced to life in prison, and though he was considered a suicide risk, he managed to hang himself after only a few months in prison.

We had a baby-- a little girl-- not long afterwards. My wife had some roots in Portugal, so we moved there to live. We had a little girl we wanted to raise. I haven't had a gun since.