Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views
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tthomasuscu on 02 Apr 18Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
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What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
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Should this be changed to prevent criminals from buying guns from private sellers? How is something this dangerous allowed to take place?
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so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
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I felt uneasy
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He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
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There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
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We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
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Rarely do we mention what we carry
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I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
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Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
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or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
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had a gun put to my head
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I can remember that
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steel
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I can remember
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In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
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surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
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I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
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I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
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his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
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I stood there trembling while they apologized.
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Jackson County
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I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
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hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
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Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
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A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
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centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
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the .308 blew apart the morning.
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There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
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Life is sustained by death
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the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
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would feed me for a year
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I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
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He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
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As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
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situation was re
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All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
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versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
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It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
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Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs
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This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
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There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
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firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
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I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
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they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
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as they wait for the end of the world.
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they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
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step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
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None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
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They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
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I understand what’s at stake
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I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
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changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
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an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
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a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
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He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
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I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
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question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
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Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
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As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
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there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
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ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
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The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
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The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
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I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
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Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
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I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
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I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
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I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
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we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
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How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?
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