My grandfather didn’t care primarily about bringing home game. (When he returned from World War II, he found that his Irish setter was ruined for birding after years of chasing geese on my great grandparents’ farm, and the story was added affectionately to the evidence of what made the setter his own dog—and the smartest dog you could ask for.) What he loved most about hunting was the woods, knowing birds and trees, tracks, how to find your way, what would make cuts feel better and what tasted good, what would kill you if you ate it. In that part of the country, for men, going into the woods meant going with a gun. From my grandparents’ porch, when the maples went red between the pines, you could hear the report of guns from the mountains, shotguns and .22s. My grandparents, even my parents, could identify all the calibers by sound.

My mother wasn’t taught to use a gun—nor were girls allowed to run the motor on the little aluminum fishing boat—but girls were taught about guns, the rules, because guns were another element of the household. Never point a gun at anyone, even in jest. Never leave a gun loaded. Assume every gun is loaded. Keep guns locked and out of sight. If you’re not going to train and practice, don’t have a gun. If you don’t trust someone to be prudent, avoid that person if you know they have a gun on them (no one would have been assumed to be carrying a concealed gun). Never hunt with people you don’t trust. When hunting in a group, never get out in front, never assume you’ve been seen and recognized.

When my parents briefly considered having a gun in the house, for safety, my grandfather’s advice—that guns purchased for self-defense were more likely to be used against their owners than by them—had the weight of his experience and seriousness. He thought training made little difference. A robber (home invasion was the imagined scenario) would in all likelihood be more skilled, more willing to shoot, and have the tactical advantage of surprise. So if you pulled a gun—and you’d better be fast and sure—you had to be prepared to shoot immediately, no questions; shoot to kill, and you were a fool if you thought you knew how you’d react, or that you could predict the circumstances.

***

Talk of Sandy Hook inevitably entered the holiday party I went to the night after. I think we were as relieved as we were glad to see to friendly faces. We were dismayed, terrified. What could be done, even if stringent new regulations were signed into law, about the thousands of military-grade weapons already at large? No one was as alarmed as the one veteran present. The rest of us, as wrenched with empathy as we were, as justified as we were to imagine how we would respond if someone opened fire on us in a store or school, had no comparisons by which to measure our competence, our willingness to take a life, or our judgment about when that would be justified (or, perhaps a better term, the lesser evil).

It is unbearable to contemplate how no one at Sandy Hook was able to do more than hide, plead, luck out, or, heroically, confront the killer unarmed. If only someone in his path had had the means to stop him. But when anyone—whether a respected journalist or the speaker of the Michigan State House—suggests arming teachers in lieu of regulating the weapons the teachers would be arming themselves against, I hear a grotesquely simplified logic: defense cancels assailant, x = y, equation solved, problem over. No doubts about readiness to shoot, no classes suffering lifelong PTSD, no teachers or principals, even supposing one were to somehow miraculously kill only the killer, with the permanent burden of having taken a life.

Arguments for guns in America are couched in terms of freedom—the right (freedom) to bear arms, the freedom from tyranny that bearing arms supposedly guarantees (though good luck with that in the era of the modern security state)—with gun regulation portrayed as a necessary constraint. I don’t know what to call the idea that at any moment you might have to kill someone to stay alive—Hobbesian, primeval—but I wouldn’t call it freedom or liberty.

I hope Senator Feinstein’s proposed assault-weapons ban becomes law. I hope action on guns is federal, so that stricter states don’t have to deal with guns purchased under laxer states’ laws. I hope mental health and social services are funded, and evaluated to best serve those who can benefit from them. I hope we begin a bigger conversation about citizen and state, self and society. Those of us on the left may too easily take self-declared judicial originalism and the Tea Party’s embrace of colonial imagery as evidence that anyone pro-gun and anti-healthcare simply needs to get with the twenty-first century. Maybe certain long-held concepts or images of American individualism are indeed incompatible with a complex, multicultural society.

But I think about the towns my parents came out of, small towns with mills that no one imagined would close within ten or fifteen years, towns where American exceptionalism and all the prejudices that the multicultural movement has striven against went unchallenged, towns where most households had guns. And I think the idea of guns in the classroom would have seemed as alien there as it seems to me. Concealed weapons were for detectives, who were mostly in the movies and on TV, and automatic weapons were for the military (at least, no one else had them). Movie cowboys carried guns because there was no law and order on the old frontier, and everyone was relieved when a new marshal rode into town and put things right, and you always knew the marshal because he wore a star and took an oath, and upholding the law was his job, and in a year or two the railroad would come through, and the telegraph, and real soon they would have progress and civilization, just like the East, where the frontier had long been over. You might daydream about the frontier and enjoy it in movies, but you knew that it would have been a brutal place to live.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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It has been a bloody year.

A gunman enters a school in Newtown, Connecticut where children are supposed to learn, where they are supposed to be safe, and he guns them down. We do not yet know the extent of this tragedy, but we can begin to imagine and it is horrifying.

A gunman enters a mall near Portland, Oregon where people are shopping for the holidays, for themselves, it doesn’t matter. They are supposed to be safe. The gunman randomly shoots. Two are killed, one is injured.

A gunman enters a Sikh temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. People are there to worship and commune. They are supposed to be safe. Six are killed, three are injured.

A gunman enters a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. People are eating popcorn, watching a highly anticipated movie. They are supposed to be safe. The gunman guns them down. Twelve are killed, fifty are injured.

The facility with which we can recite the details of these tragedies speaks to how utterly, shamefully common they have become. We do not have the luxury of wondering if there will be another mass shooting in the United States. Instead, we wait for when there will be another mass shooting. We wait to learn the scope of this latest tragedy. We have to somehow reconcile that while gun ownership is an inalienable right in this country, safety from gun violence is not.

Today, and not tomorrow, we are waiting for you to step up because you are the president. We are tired of tomorrow as the better time to talk about gun control. We have run out of tomorrows, President Obama. We cannot afford to wait any longer.

We are struggling to make sense. We are crying out for change, for a mental health care system that can truly help the people who soothe their inner torment by reaching for weapons of such destruction. We are crying out for gun control laws that, at the very least, make it more difficult for such tragedies to occur. We are sick with grief and smallness and fragility.

How much blood needs to be spilled before you take a stand? How much blood needs to be spilled before you say, “Enough.” You are a father. You have always shown us that your fatherhood is part of what guides you. You are also a human being. You are our leader, the President of the United States. Today, not tomorrow, we need you to lead. Today, we need you to say, “Enough.”

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All across the country, people are having conversations about the insanity of gun violence here in America. Kiese Laymon, a writer and professor of English and Africana studies at Vassar College, details his experiences encountering guns in his stirring essay How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance. The essay interweaves personal narratives of growing up black in Mississippi with references to gun murders that occurred earlier this year – including the fatal shootings of Rekia Boyd, Edward Evans, and Trayvon Martin, all of whom died before reaching the age of twenty-five. It’s a beautifully written, heartbreaking piece about what is at stake and what is already lost.

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“Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

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