There is a gun manufactured during World War II with Nazi insignia carved into the hammer. A gun with a ceramic grip, cream-painted with delicate roses. A majestic double barrel, a combination of polished steel and lustrous wood. And ten others, all of them shiny, cold, and heavy in the palm of my hand. Each one of them I have to pick up and acknowledge. Turn them over in the evening light. Listen while he tells me each individual history—their makes, values, and how they came into his life.

When we initially met, years earlier, Bob told me about his collection of firearms. We were in bed together, our bodies stretched out post-sex. He told me how he bought his first one in response to the threat of ’80s AIDS paranoia. He and his boyfriend started amassing weaponry together when a proposition calling for an AIDS quarantine was put on the ballot. His boyfriend was HIV-positive. They lived together in this house for a decade. Bob didn’t seroconvert until the early 2000s, though, long after that boyfriend died of an opportunistic infection.

In ’86, even though Bob was mostly closeted, he planned a revenge-killing spree. He wanted to walk up to Jesse Helms in a dark alley and leave his body full of smoking holes. He dreamed of drugging Lyndon LaRouche and leaving him facedown in a blood-splattered hotel room. Of waiting on a rooftop for days to pick out Ronald Reagan’s tiny head from a mass of bodyguards, pull the trigger, and watch the body gently fall to the ground.

Bob came of age with the backdrop of Stonewall and Harvey Milk. He deserves these revenges. His stories fill up the room between us, settling the distance between our bodies. I never ask him what happened or why, instead of going vigilante, he stayed in his job as a scrap-metal executive, flying from country to country to negotiate against unions. It is best practice to not ask clients embarrassing questions. That is part of the role of a sex worker: to let clients remember only the good stories about themselves.

That day was the first time we met, but I decided immediately to do what it took to make Bob my regular, even though doing so would break down the boundary between sex-work life and real life. Bob would be my primary romantic relationship for a couple years, the real reason I couldn’t really commit to dating anyone else.

Bob fucks me like I’m the drink of water he’s needed for a long, long time. In bed, when I lower myself onto his cock, he growls into my ear, “Your body is made just perfect for my dick.” I kneel next to him in the kitchen and drink his piss while he deep fries me breaded eggplant. It isn’t all about the sex though. He is caring and kind of lonely. I am caring and kind of lonely as well.

In the span of our relationship, guns become a focal point of tension. Every visit, we discuss plans to go to the shooting range together. Once a month, he goes with a group called the Pink Pistols. Part of me wants to go with him, but we both shy from commitments that would solidify our relationship in that way. Our ability to be as free as we are with each other runs parallel with the transient nature of our relationship.

After two years, we’ve stopped having sex every time we hang out. A year into our bimonthly overnights, he started to get erectile dysfunction and now has to inject Viagra into the slit of his cock to get it hard. I feel disappointed when we don’t fuck, even though this should be the ideal hooker situation: getting paid to lie around naked, eating and watching TV, while Bob gives me history lessons.

Tonight, though, I am being pushy about him fucking me. Cupping my hand around his cock softly bobbing in saggy underwear. He keeps trying to talk to me about the tactics of Occupy, but instead of letting him play earnest daddy I take off my clothes and climb onto his lap. I suggest we pack a bowl; maybe if we get high, tonight will be like it was before.

The reality is that he’s not into fucking me any longer. He’s started dating a forty year-old goth to whom he doesn’t have to hand a wad of twenties in the morning. The date’s name is Billy. Bob tells me about what it’s like when they hang out: he picks Billy and his laundry up and orders him dinner. Then they get undressed, and Bob puts his fist in Billy’s ass. Billy never asks him about emotions and never wants to hear stories.

Back on the couch, his hand lies idle on my thigh. We start talking about the guns. And then we’re walking upstairs, and I find myself limply obeying instructions to press my finger against a trigger.

Even though the gun is unloaded, I feel nervous. In bed, listening to his stories of desire and revenge was romantic, but here, the connection of death-lust to the solidness of dull grey steel scares me. He wants me to practice holding and aiming. He stares at me, my hips out, and I’m trying to keep my shoulders straight and hands steady. He tells me to practice pulling the trigger. Russian roulette: What if there was one forgotten bullet in the barrel? How many of these plaster walls would it pass through?

I can’t do this with him looking at me. I feel my body absorbing the physical memories imprinted by his hands when he grasped these guns with anger. The desire for his own or others’ deaths. These guns have been held by other men in his life. What right do I have to be here?

I start panting, asking for the barrel against my temple while I suck his cock. I want to feel the muzzle pressed against my ass. Please threaten and fuck me with these weapons. I whine for him to pin me down with them. He says no. These guns are too precious to be clogged up with my spit and cum. It would create something too messy between us. He walks me into the bedroom and jams his meaty fingers into my hole. I pretend to cum but instead I feel empty and untouchable. This is the last time we ever fuck.

***

In New Mexico, where I grew up, everyone owned a gun. It was a ritual to give boys BB guns on their twelfth birthdays. After their parties, I’d sit watching them shoot at balloons tied to hay bales.

Driving down the windy highway, I’d see trucks full of hunters, racks of shotguns covering their back windows. My dad had a gun in the front barn. He said he kept it only for emergencies, but once I saw him shooting at the coyotes that slunk around our apple trees every morning, eating rotting fruit.

Along with gun culture comes a routine engagement with killing, with guts and blood and bullets piercing flesh.

The first boy I played footsie with was named Alistair. He was a tall redhead with a plain face. He was one of the few other gringos in our class. In the grade below us was his snotty-nosed sister Abigail, who had to go to the nurse’s office every day to take her ADD medication. Altogether, there were five siblings in the school. They lived outside Taos in one of the houses made from car tires and dried mud, with no electricity.

The third Friday of the month, our classes were driven together from school to the public pool in Española. Alistair was the only other kid who could swim, who needed to swim to avoid getting dunked underwater or standing lonely amongst the clumps of sullen teens smoking in the shallow end, the girls with their immaculate chola bangs and the boys with slick shells of hair under hairnets. It was at the 9” mark he started touching me, rubbing his feet against my ankles underwater, brushing his fingers against my waist lightly.

It was six months later when he shot himself in the face. His parents said it was a gun-cleaning accident. The wound was not fatal. Gossip at school was that, with his finger already pressing down on the trigger, Alistair decided he didn’t want to die. He succeeded in not shooting out his brains, but blasted a hole in his face where his nose once lay. We were given a half-day off to think about it. (When there were drunk-driving accidents and real suicides, we got the whole day off.)

I think about New Mexico constantly. It’s where I always end up in dreams, retracing childhood footsteps. Deep in the stillness of the mountains was the steady promise of adventure. The summers I spent walking barefoot down trails into dense ponderosa forest, taking paths over sharp rocks to a waterfall, a sparkling, clear stream that spilled through boulders the size of my body. I would lie naked on the rock, sunshine shadowed by the ghostly aspens bordering the creek, long skinny trees with arms branching into bright yellow leaves. The winters were full of soft falling snow. I’d walk through the dead pasture, the cold numbing my toes till I couldn’t feel my feet. I’d climb over fences, and the dogs and I would slide across a frozen river, picking up driftwood to break a hole through the glassy surface to the water still flowing underneath.

Life and death in New Mexico is more visceral than survival in San Francisco. Death was not news. It was walking to the school bus every day, past the body of a cow that first bloated up with gas and then deflated into a pile of strewn skin and clean-stripped bones. Bound to these memories of sweet, simple earth are recollections of the fragility of bodies and the constant threat of extinction.

***

Bob wants to take me to the gun range, and I can’t think of a reason to say no.

Everyone tells me that I need to know how to shoot a gun. For when the apocalypse comes. For when the bombs hit and the smoke starts rising and the earth is quaking. When the war starts or when the war ends. All queers need to be prepared so one of us can hotwire a car and we’ll hightail it to a ghost town to live in a commune, away from the storm. We’ll need guns for that. Or if all the rich people shut us in the city so they can be the ones to move out to clean air and open spaces—we’ll need guns for that too.

Bob drives into the parking lot. It’s strip-mall dirty. There’s a river next to it, but it’s less of a river of water and more like a river of mud, churning its sludge slowly.

Inside, everyone looks hard: tight-lipped faces, weathered cheeks. At the counter is a bored-looking woman. Her ponytail is as perfect as a gymnast’s, pulled back so tight it makes her eyebrows arch, every curl slick with hairspray. She hands us liability forms. I’m only allowed in as Bob’s guest. It is against their rules to let any random person off of the streets rent a gun, so as to avoid the suicidal.

Behind the counter are thick, plastic shotguns that look like toys for GI figurines. There are shelves lined with items for cleaning and customizing your gun, there are pepper spray canisters, including pink ones for girls. On the walls are rows of targets to choose from: zombies, black diagrams of bodies, and a picture of a mustached man grasping a skinny blond girl, pressing a gun against her temple. I’m grateful the figure in the cartoon isn’t a black man. In Miami, after the murder of Trayvon Martin, a gun shop started selling targets of a figure in a hooded sweatshirt, Skittles and iced tea in hand. They sold out in two days.

Above it all, a line drawing of Angelina Jolie looks upon us like the Virgin Mary. Her benevolent gaze falls on the altars’ offerings of hunting knives, NRA bumper stickers, and shirts that proudly proclaim, “Extreme Right Wing.”

Before walking into the shooting range, I must put on earmuffs and eye protection. Then I walk through one metal door, which must be completely shut before I can open the second. It feels like entering into a spaceship.

Inside, the range looks like a concrete bowling alley. But instead of bowling balls, every lane is filled with a steady stream of fire and explosion. Every time a shot is fired, I jump reflexively. I’m trying to keep my eyes on everyone, to be ready to duck at any second. I cannot let go of the idea that this is dangerous. I am the only faggot in this room, the only one wearing a purple shirt and nail polish. All the men around me are the type I’ve encountered on Friday nights waiting for the bus, the drunk and surly ones who follow me around street corners demanding a cigarette or an answer as to why I’m dressed so funny. Men I play chicken with, staying cool and impenetrable on the outside while keeping my eyes on their fists. Here, they all have guns in their hands, and even though nobody so much as glances my way, there’s a loop in my brain warning me I could die in seconds.

Even here, with the formality and cartoon targets and lists of rules about proper use, I don’t forget that guns are instruments of death. In the shopfront are hunting magazines covered with pictures of elk vibrantly alive, looking at the reader with poise and innocence against a background of vivid green. None show the felled creature, a limp corpse with blank eyes, the thunderous dance of electrical synapses in its brain dulling into a final, dead silence.

Although I get swept up in the romance of preparing for revolution, the kind of violence that guns bring feels too final, too cold. I’m scared to learn how they work, because I’m scared to tap into the mindset of how they are used.

And now it is my turn to shoot. Stay calm and pleasant. Pick up the firearm, press thumb against thumb, pulling the trigger, and stay steady for the combustion. The bullets, depending on their size, will squeeze out quiet and civil, or screaming, cursing the world for their expulsion into open air.

The anticipation is more than the action, after many rounds of tension popping my arms out of aim, I learn how to pop off shot after shot. Bob takes a picture of me: it looks like a still from a video game. The roof is crumbling, sheetrock hanging loose from the low plywood ceiling. The figure in the image is trapped on both sides by aluminum walls; above him, a light in a cage almost touches the top of his head. His shoulders are arched back, neck tanned, arms stretched out in front holding the magnum steady. A ball of flames explodes from the muzzle; its destination is the cowboy zombie target, which has its own gun drawn and which is illustrated to have a chunk of flesh already missing from its torso. Spent shells litter the ground.

I lay the gun down and walk outside to smoke a cigarette, staring into the seething brown of the river.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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So he said it: “It’s all right.” Which didn’t work.

We were in our house, a one-room, 300-square-foot converted boat shed that sat in the corner of the front yard of another, normal-sized, house. The whole setup was like some modern-day feudal arrangement, except instead of a lord and lady, there were the O’Reillys. And instead of it being Medieval Europe, it was Queens, 1987.

I was a second grader, my dad was a cop, and we were the serfs. For the past five years, since my parents’ divorce, he had been living in the O’Reillys’ boat shed, mostly because it was all he could find back in his hometown. Broad Channel was a breadcrumb island between Howard Beach and Rockaway, with cross streets that dead-end at the water. In the far, far distance, you could see Manhattan, its familiar miniature metal triangles and squares in a strange frame of fog and reeds.

I spent every other weekend with my dad, and we had a routine. We shared the pullout couch. After he fell asleep, I’d crawl out from the crook of his back to the end of the bed and turn up the heat on our electric blanket. In the morning, he’d tell me not to do it again. Because there was nowhere to go when you got out of bed, we didn’t. Instead, first thing, he’d turn his long white athletic socks into puppets called Filbert and Albert, who were mute and whose only shtick was fighting and making up. My dad could keep them going for close to an hour.

Eventually, we’d have our Cocoa Puffs for breakfast and go to mass at St. Virgilius, where my dad was once an altar boy. On the way home, we’d stop at Kim’s Deli and buy SpaghettiOs or Hamburger Helper for dinner. Then I spent the day playing with Tommy O’Reilly on the docks. By dusk, Tommy’s parents and my dad sat on foldout chairs in the yard, drinking cans of beer and watching us.

Before Christmas each year, my dad would store my toys at the O’Reillys’. On Christmas Eve, while I slept, he’d creep around the tiny room stacking them everywhere. I’d wake up to three hundred and sixty degrees of presents—G.I. Joes on top of the TV, Hot Wheels on the windowsill.

***

My father has always been a devout Irish Catholic. In fact, becoming a cop was his second-choice career. The first was to be a priest. He even went to seminary, fervently hoping God would call him, but as it turns out, He didn’t. No hard feelings—my dad left, and a little while later, he met my mother and they had me. And that was that.

Although he wasn’t cut out for bringing God’s love to the masses, it turned out he was just great at throwing them in jail. A warrant-squad cop, he was essentially a bounty hunter for the NYPD for 21 years.

I was five the first and only time he ran into someone he had put away. Having served his time, the guy was out doing what we were doing: shopping for clothes. A seemingly innocuous thing to do, but when he saw the man’s face from across the racks, my dad instantly took his gun out from its holster. With him unmarried and me his only child, I was my dad’s one true Achilles’ heel. Without a word, he took my wrist and shoved me behind a nearby register to hide. The two met eyes. The other guy nodded and said, “Hi, Clancy.” Hiding the gun in his hand behind a row of suits, my dad said hello back. Then they started to chat.

“It’s gotta be fifteen years. You just out?”

“Yeah, ‘fraid so.”

“You were only supposed to do 7 to 9. Must not have been such a good boy in there?”

“Nope. But I’m back with my wife now. She had two more kids while I was in!”

“Immaculate conceptions, huh?”

They laughed.

The guy didn’t seem like an immediate threat. But when they were finished, as he kept thumbing through the rack, my dad slowly walked away, grabbing me just before he reached the door, leaving the clothes behind.

Not long afterward, he started taking college classes at night, in accounting.

***

I was short for seven, so as I sat at the table, the guns are almost parallel with my eyes.

“Go ahead, Scooter, pick ‘em up.”

There was no locked-bottom-drawer-of-the-mahogany-desk-in-the-study in our house. There was no study. There was no desk. In small places like that, problems don’t hide. They live on top of the dresser, next to your deodorant and a bottle of Paco Rabanne. For that reason, he decided I need to hold the guns and “get it out of my system.”

***

Twelve years later, we sat across from each other at another tiny table, in an equally small room, having just as tense a conversation, in a way stranger town. A lot had changed by then. Dad got his college degree, retired from the NYPD, remarried, and left the O’Reillys’ boat shed for a proper house. His career path now read: priest, bounty hunter, accountant.

He was a white-collar guy living in the suburbs of Atlanta, working as a midlevel accountant for Sara Lee, albeit one who carried two guns at all times and kept a picture of the pope hanging from the rearview mirror of his truck. I was a nineteen-year-old college kid, living in Manhattan’s East Village, watching Woody Allen films, listening to Tom Waits, and planning to move in with my first girlfriend.

When I called my dad and told him I was gay, I expected it to go okay for one specific reason: he had a couple of very good gay friends, pals from his local bar in Queens whom he lovingly called “old-school gays” and about whom he sometimes bragged, “And they don’t make ‘em like that anymore!” But apparently the way he felt for his gays didn’t much matter. When I told him I was gay, he flipped out and insisted I fly to Atlanta to talk in person—”Now!” Click.

Three days later, we got in his car and drove, his only words “We’re going to a hotel.” Two hours passed, he and I silent and motionless, the pope swinging left and right. Another hour, and we were on a one-lane road in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then I started to think what you might be starting to think: “Hotel, my ass!” Just as I started to imagine how he’d shoot me—or worse, throw me into some “pray-the-gay-away” Jesus camp—a billboard appeared. A woman not unlike the St. Pauli girl, with blond braids and huge, ahem, beer steins, smiled down at us. Next to her, in giant German Gothic lettering, it said, “Welcome to Helen, Georgia! A recreated Alpine village.”

Somehow, we had passed through an invisible trans-dimensional portal. Having been the lone car on a deeply wooded curvy road, we were suddenly in a long line of minivans rolling through this Disneyland-bad, fake Bavarian town. Whole families wearing matching green hats with feathers crammed the sidewalks. Three elderly guys wearing lederhosen played glockenspiels outside of a place called “Charlemagne’s Kingdom.” And there were windmills. Lots and lots of windmills.

Yes, this was it. This was the place my dad chose to have the conversation of a lifetime with me.

We pulled into our parking space at the Heidi Motel—no shit!—and headed in. For the first ten minutes we sat, stone-faced, drinking Johnny Walker out of our complimentary beer steins like idiots. Then, in one fell swoop, he set out to discover if, how, and why I was gay, in a room that had not one, but two cuckoo clocks.

First he blamed me. “You’re confused, and you need therapy,” he said.

“I need therapy?” I replied. “I need therapy? There is an oompah band outside, Dad!”

He didn’t laugh.

We spent the next six hours drinking scotch and rehashing every argument, disagreement, and previously unexamined minuscule moment of contention we’d had in my nineteen years of life. Like the time he told me not to play in the grass in my Easter dress, so I climbed a tree instead. Or the time I faked my eye exam at school because I wanted glasses. Or when I stuck pencil erasers in my ear, and he took me to the doctor thinking I was going deaf. And then there was my atheism, the worst part of which was that he would miss me when he was in heaven and I was not.

Then, if for only a few seconds, he went from blaming me to blaming himself. “I shouldn’t have bought you those GI Joes when you were a kid! Or the Hot Wheels.”

Suddenly he got quiet, thinking back to our time in the O’Reillys’ boat shed, and said to himself as much as to me, “What did I know about bringing up a girl? I just…I did what I could.” And, a second time, even softer, “I just did what I could.”

And with that, we hugged and broke for dinner across the street at Heidelberg’s Schnitzelhaus.

We made small talk. Awkward, kind of like an ex-con and the cop who put him away for fifteen years, but small talk all the same. It felt tense, but Heidelberg’s Schnitzelhaus is a hard place to stay angry. He confessed that he had asked his new coworkers where to spend the weekend with his visiting teenage daughter. Of course, he neglected to mention the nature of the visit and was as shocked as I was when we arrived in Helen.

Then, somewhere in between the sauerbraten and the strudel, my dad surrendered. He looked up, raised his glass and said, “Ah, screw it. At least now we have two things in common—whiskey and women!”

***

Four years later, my father lost his job in Atlanta and I lost that first girlfriend. For a little while, we ended up living together again, in my one-bedroom East Village apartment.

At 700 square feet, my apartment was palatial compared to the O’Reillys’ boat shed. My dad couldn’t fly with his guns, so they were in his safe back in Atlanta. But still, from my kitchen table, as we sat drinking wine that first night, I could see straight back into the bedroom where he had set his deodorant and Paco Rabanne on top of my dresser.

I met a new girlfriend, Shauna, and ended up spending most of those four months at her place on the Lower East Side. It was getting serious, and soon, she came over to meet my dad for dinner. He had worked at the 7th precinct in her neighborhood in the late 1970s. After she left, he said, “I don’t care how pretty she is, you ain’t moving over there!” Even though my apartment was only fifteen blocks north of hers, he hadn’t been back to the Lower East Side in almost thirty years. “It’s changed, Dad,” I said. “Why don’t we have brunch there this weekend and you can see for yourself?” He was stunned they now had brunch on the Lower East Side.

Spring trickled by. It took a little coaxing, but in June, he came with Shauna and me to the Gay Pride parade. An hour later, he saluted as a group of GLBT cops marched past.

In September, we met up with the O’Reillys in Broad Channel to watch the Labor Day parade. We watched it from the street in front of our old little house, drinking cans of beer.

Come October, we moved out of my apartment. He headed for Long Island. I moved in with Shauna.

When we talk today, my dad still starts our phone calls the same way he did back then, “Hey, Scooter.” But now he ends them with “Love you. Love to Shauna too.” My wife.

***

Sitting in dead silence at our kitchen table in the O’Reillys’ boat shed, the seven-year-old me finally slid the guns off the table. And as I lifted them into the air my dad gave slow, careful instructions:

“Point them down. Fingers away from the trigger. Now, put ‘em back on the table.”

I did.

“And don’t ever touch ‘em again.”

I don’t.

There was no locked-bottom-drawer-of-the-mahogany-desk-in-the-study in our house.

***

You can watch Tara tell a shorter version of this essay for The Moth.

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

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This American Life highlighted the school in a two-part episode a few weeks ago and have now set up a donation page to help the school out financially.

If you’ve already listened to the episodes, you know money can go a long way in this situation, including by employing the social workers who we heard counseling students with an almost palpable level of love and support. And if you can’t donate, it’s still so worth it to hear the school’s story—not as an educational experience (though you’ll probably learn a lot) but as a very human story about love and struggle in a particular community.

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This American Life addressed the issue with a two-part episode about the daily lives of students and staff at a Chicago high school where twenty-nine students were recently shot, eight of whom died—not in one large event but in isolated shootings over a series of months.

The episode hasn’t become as ubiquitous as, say, discussions on the Newtown shooting, but it is equally important to hear. If a killer indiscriminately opening fire on children is the stuff of nightmares, so is a neighborhood in which gang affiliation is not optional and kids walk in the middle of the street to stay safe.

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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’s A War Zone Around There”

I cite the Model 70 as a counterexample to firearms strictly made for killing people. However, the rifle, considered one of the best-designed guns ever made, proved quite effective in dropping the most challenging quarry of all. The U.S. Marine Corps employed the M70 as its primary sniper rifle through the 1950s and 60s, most notably in Vietnam, where Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock became a legend by using it to amass 93 confirmed enemy kills. But after all, the first bolt-action rifles were designed for war, the nursery of all firearms innovations.

Having served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, I’ve fired thousands of rounds out of various pistols, rifles, and machine guns. I put together a list:

Colt M1911A1 .45 pistol

Beretta M9 9mm pistol

Browning 9mm hi-power pistol

Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum long-barrel pistol

Walther PPK .32 pistol

.22 rifle (various makes)

Springfield .30-06 bolt-action rifle

Colt M16A1 and A2 assault rifles

Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle

Uzi 9mm sub-machine gun

Fabrique National M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) light machine gun

M-60 medium machine gun

Browning M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun

An infantry officer must be proficient with the weapons his soldiers use, as well as his own. Familiarity with the enemy’s weapons helps too. As a young lieutenant, I could disassemble and reassemble any weapon in minutes, fire it with reasonable accuracy, and recite by rote its effective range and specifications. Technical know-how will always win your soldiers’ confidence. It’s also vital to having any real sense of what your unit can do on the battlefield. If nothing else, being able to sling your M16 and work an M60 machine gun may also contribute to your personal survival.

I did most of my shooting with M16 rifles, beginning with the A1 model which I fired in college ROTC. The M16 uses a 5.56mm bullet, a standard munition among NATO forces. But standardizing ammunition with America’s allies, while practical, was not what impelled the Army to choose the round. In the 1950s, ordnance experts pored over literally millions of combat accounts from both World Wars and concluded that the greatest factor in generating casualties was simply how many bullets went downrange. Killing the enemy boiled down to quantity, not quality. Their task: design a weapon that spewed lightweight rounds, making it possible for an infantryman to carry and shoot more ammunition.

The 5.56mm NATO bullet is essentially the same as an American .223 Remington round. Early on, critics scoffed, calling it nothing but a glorified .22 caliber. But what do these numbers mean? Well, take a brand-new No. 2 pencil and sharpen it. The shaved wooden cone is roughly the same size and shape as the projectile that comes whizzing out of an M16’s barrel at over 3,000 feet per second. It’s called a spitzer round (German for “pointy”) because of its aerodynamic shape, and it weighs 4 grams; a nickel weighs 5 grams.

It’s a small round. But at that velocity it inflicts devastating wounds. Larger bullets, such as the 7.62mm, which has twice the mass, will often poke clean holes through a body. But because of its relative light weight and spitzer design, the 5.56mm NATO round bounces around in the body, ripping up flesh and organs in its path. Po-faced ballistics experts describe this effect as the projectile’s tendency to yaw in soft tissue. The bullet often fragments on impact, greatly multiplying internal damage. Enthused by these findings, the Army has recently introduced an “improved” round with an extra gram of lead to burst into shrapnel when it hits home.

When I reported to the 25^th Infantry Division in 1990, the Army had moved to the M16A2, which had better sights and a more accurate barrel. It also had a new selector switch with safety, semi-(automatic), and 3-round burst. Ordnance experts – perhaps the very same ones who advocated a sheer volume approach – had studied years of firefights since the original M16 debuted. They found that soldiers tended to flip the switch to “auto” and spray lead at the enemy. Naturally, most of these rounds never hit their intended targets. To increase accuracy and conserve ammunition, they removed the fully-automatic option, replacing it with a mechanism that dispenses three round-bursts with one pull of the trigger.

The Army’s penchant for acronyms applies to shooting. Every soldier learns BRAS, which stands for Breathe, Relax, Aim, Squeeze. It works. Looking downrange with the rifle stock pressed to your cheek, take a breath and exhale. By not breathing again until after you’ve fired, you prevent movement caused by your ribcage. Don’t squint your non-aiming eye yet, just get calm. Now peer through your sights, lining them up on the target. Gently, pull on the trigger. Don’t yank it, just slowly squeeze . . . bang! The report should almost surprise you. If it did, you’ve probably made an accurate shot.

The standard Army qualification range challenges the shooter with 40 pop-up targets arrayed from 50 to 300 meters. The targets stay exposed from three to seven seconds; the closer the target, the sooner it disappears. Shortening the time a soldier has to acquire a target makes up for the relative ease of hitting a silhouette at closer ranges. You shoot 20 rounds from a foxhole position, which allows you to rest the front part of the rifle on a sandbag, and 20 rounds on your belly, with nothing to brace the rifle but your shoulder, palms, and elbows. A soldier who hits 23-29 targets earns the “marksman” badge; 30-35 “sharpshooter”; and 36-40 “expert.” Each young private who graduates infantry basic training must at least qualify as a “marksman” – not surprisingly, the most generous standard with a seven-bullet spread.

I’ve always had better-than-average eyesight, which may explain why I always qualified “expert” with my M16. Through late grammar school, high school, and college, I was always shooting some kind of gun, whether it was during one of the countless BB-gun wars my friends and I waged in the woods or on trips to rifle and pistol ranges. Once I began ROTC, I received more formal marksmanship instruction.

When you hit a 300-meter target, there is a distinct pause between squeezing off the round and seeing the target drop. There’s also a keen sense of satisfaction; to put a lead cone the length and width of a pencil point through a man-sized silhouette over three football fields away gives you a sense of earned power, a measure of rugged competence that even the most primitive hunters must have felt. Anyone might wing a target close-up, but as the distance increases, tolerances become acute, the margin for error miniscule. Luck gets ruled out; it becomes a matter of skill.

Of course, almost all the killing done with firearms occurs at close range. In war, depending on terrain and vegetation, combatants typically fire at each other between 20 and 200 yards, unless it’s urban fighting, where firefights can rage between rooms. In 1970, the New York City Police Department implemented a reporting procedure for the detailed analysis of gunfights. In 1979, they took a retrospective look at all NYPD officer gunfight deaths going back to 1854. Of the 250 officers slain, 205 were killed within six feet of their assailants. The FBI conducted a similar study of law enforcement officers nationwide killed between 1991 and 2000. Half of the 601 officers were within five feet of their killers, 71% within ten.

Gun lobbyists are fond of the old cant, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It is a specious argument. No one rails against the manufacture of axes or baseball bats. There are no campaigns to ban the sale of broadswords or Bowie knives. With a bolt-action rifle and a telescopic sight, I can put a bullet through my neighbor’s chest as he crosses in front of his living room window though his house is a hundred yards away. With a Glock 17 pistol stashed in my briefcase, I can walk into a boardroom, coolly dispatch a dozen executives, and still have five rounds left in the magazine to deal with security guards.

To put it another way, Jared Loughner doesn’t kill six people and wound another thirteen, including his intended victim, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, if he brandishes a meat cleaver instead of a Glock 19 with a 33-round magazine. Virginia Tech doesn’t happen if Seung-Hui Cho heaves a cutlass in Norris Hall. Columbine never occurs if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enter their high school wielding Louisville Sluggers. Charles J. Whitman doesn’t kill 14 people and wound 31 others if he takes up his sniping position atop the 32-story tower at the University of Texas at Austin armed with a longbow and a quiver of arrows.

A gun’s power is arbitrary and wildly inordinate to its price, size, and ease of use. It bestows terrible sway – the ability to selectively kill at a distance or wipe out dozens close up – on any person holding it. Before the advent of firearms, becoming dangerous meant years of training, if not a lifetime’s upbringing in a warrior caste: the American Indian with tomahawk or bow and arrow; the medieval knight with sword and shield; the samurai with katana. Using his credit card, Seung-Hui Cho paid $571 for a Glock 19 pistol and a box of fifty 9mm bullets. At 30 ounces, a Glock 19 weighs slightly less than a quart of milk; it measures just under seven inches long. Its operation is simple: load, point, shoot fifteen times, reload. In nine minutes, Cho killed 30 people and wounded dozens more.

The phrase “the great equalizer” originally applied to the first revolvers, an innovation of Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company. The slogan plays to a kind of David and Goliath sensibility. You picture a colossal brute leveled by a scrawny, Charlie Chaplin-like figure toting a silver Peacemaker. But of course, guns don’t make people equal, they make them unequal: they make them dead. And quite simply, it shouldn’t be so damned easy to kill another person.

***

When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, sales of pistols, rifles, and ammunition rose noticeably around America. In the days following his election, those sales soared. Gun store owners and their reactionary patrons dressed this ugly knee-jerk in political terms: they feared “overreaching legislation;” they perceived “a dangerous threat to their prerogatives;” and they worried that a liberal President would restrict what they believe is their right (often qualified with the phrase “God-given”) to own Berettas, Glocks, Uzis, and M16s.

An ominous euphemism heard repeatedly as justification for the purchase of an assault-rifle or high-capacity automatic pistol is that “it’s an insurance policy,” ostensibly against some imminent breakdown of society. For the last 230 years, the Constitution has proven a more than adequate insurance policy against all manner of catastrophe, foreign and domestic. But I can’t help thinking that anyone who buys a gun as an insurance policy secretly imagines themselves as Charlton Heston’s character in The Omega Man, Dr. Robert Neville, an Army colonel who battles murderous mutants in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Neville’s undoing comes when his sub-machine gun jams and he’s killed by a spear. Is there a message?

Gun sales also went up with Bill Clinton’s election. In pre-apocalyptic L.A. alone, his threat of a ban on assault rifles in 1994 did more to sell guns than the race riots that followed the Rodney King incident in 1992. But while there are always doomsdayers who re-stock their armories whenever a politician left of Attila the Hun gains office, you have to wonder how many of the recent “investors” were motivated by racism. It’s hard to imagine that these rabid consumers of AR-15s and AK-47s would demonstrate the same zeal (or at least justify their purchases the same way) if Al Gore or John Kerry had been elected President.

In the field of genetics, scientists speak of gene “expression” to refer to how inherited information in our DNA gets converted into working proteins in our bodies. DNA is a vast charter for the governance of our cells; how that sprawling code of conduct expresses itself is often a matter of interpretation. And where there is interpretation, there is error. Errors in genetic expression are called cancer.

America has a cancer, an interpretative error that originates in our government’s genetic code, the Constitution. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an errant interpretation in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, exacerbating the old misconception that the Second Amendment somehow grants individuals the right to own and use firearms. The Supreme Court boasts a fine history as America’s ultimate bulwark of justice, but it has, on occasion, been utterly mistaken. The court’s triumph in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, for example, doesn’t happen without first getting it horribly wrong in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Gun lobbyists fall back on the Second Amendment as the cornerstone of their supposed right to buy and own firearms. They recite the amendment’s second half as if it was an incantation, a spell that renders dumb all dissenters. But while the syntax of the amendment may be anachronistic, its meaning is clear. And the men who drafted the Constitution were not given to bombast or excessive verbiage.

As presented to the first session of the First Congress, the original text of what became the Second Amendment read:  “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Clearly, the men who drafted the Constitution placed gun ownership solely in the context of organized military service. They wished to highlight the distinction between local and state militias as opposed to a federal army. State militias were seen as a safety measure against the possible use of a federal army to impose centralized tyranny.

The founding fathers eventually whittled down the amendment’s verbiage to the treacherous, 27-word version with which we contend today. Brevity, as Shakespeare wrote, is the soul of wit, but in legal realms it courts a sea of troubles.

Still, if the Constitution’s authors had intended the Second Amendment to affirm individual rights to gun ownership, they would not have begun even the final edit with the phrase, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” And clearly, a “militia” looking after “the security of a free state” is not the same as a private citizen strolling into Wal-Mart to purchase a 12-gauge shotgun and three boxes of ammunition. More importantly, it does not pertain to the paranoid fringe stocking up on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines in reaction to the peaceful election of an American President.

***

Behind the gun lobby’s smokescreen of red, white, and blue propaganda lies the heart of the matter: green. America didn’t become the world’s most heavily-armed nation by chance. Guns are big business. Even as the country recently reeled from recession–even as Detroit’s automakers, those iconic brands of American industry, faced bankruptcy, bailouts, or extinction–sales of guns and ammunition went up by more than 8%, based on federal data.

According to 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Remington Arms Company, the nation’s largest firearms manufacturer, had net sales of $591.1 million in 2008 (the most recent available filing.) In 2012, Smith & Wesson reported annual net sales of $411,997 million, up 20% (about $70 million) from fiscal 2011. Sturm, Ruger & Company, the fourth largest gunmaker in the U.S., saw over $328 million in total sales in 2011, pocketing $40 million in net income. Since 1990, Colt, America’s most famous gunmaker, has been a privately held company. In 1987, the last year that Colt held the Army’s contract to make M16s, the company posted $1.6 billion in total sales.

The Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Report prepared by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) records the number of guns made in America each year by type and maker. (BATFE embargoes the data for one year, so 2010 is the most recent report available.) In 2010, American firms made 2,774,789 handguns, 1,825,774 rifles, and 743,362 shotguns. Of those, 105,327 handguns, 76,504 rifles, and 43,361 shotguns were exported; the rest remained for domestic sale and use.

To put these numbers in context, think of Busch Stadium, home to the St. Louis Cardinals. Last year, attendance averaged just over 42,000 per game; the Cardinals could have given every fan who entered the park a pistol, rifle, or shotgun for the entire season. Among the largest firearms producers, Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. each made just over a half million handguns – enough to supply every current member of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

Unlike computers, televisions, or even automobiles, guns are simple machines that stick around for a long time. You’ll never find a rifle jutting out of anyone’s garbage can. A pistol might get intentionally chucked in a river by its nefarious owner, but it won’t end up on the scrap heap just because it’s old or broken. Even in the most innocent circumstances, a gun winds up wrapped in an old sock in a closet shoebox or stashed in an attic alongside a pair of ancient skis. Besides, you can’t simply throw out a shotgun even if you wanted to; you’d have to saw it into several pieces to render it inoperable. It’s not like leaving an outdated stereo by the curb.

As a citizen and former soldier, I acknowledge the grim necessity of firearms and their manufacture.  Just as in the days of the Constitutional Convention, the security of a free nation requires a well-regulated military. But making firearms available to the military vastly differs from making them available to a public of over 300 million people. Consider the disparity of the vetting processes. In order for someone to get their hands on a rifle as a Marine, they have to join for several years and undergo thirteen weeks of a famously arduous boot camp. In Pennsylvania, a cursory felony check is all that stands between any 18 year-old and an AR-15 (the civilian version of an M16), unless, of course, the rifle is purchased at a gun show, where no background checks are required.

As public policy, the ease of obtaining firearms in this country represents a case of stunning negligence. You would think that politicians, especially those on the national stage, might literally be gun-shy. Four American Presidents have been assassinated, three with concealed pistols, the fourth, Kennedy, by rifle. Barack Obama is our 44th President, so 9% of American Presidents have been killed with guns. Ronald Reagan narrowly avoided being killed when a bullet fired by his would-be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., missed his heart. An attempt on Harry Truman’s life in 1950 by two Puerto Rican nationalists armed with German automatic pistols (a Walther P38 and a Luger) resulted in the shooting deaths of White House Police Officer Leslie Coffelt and one of the assassins.

Between the manufacturers quietly pocketing profits in the background; their shills in Congress trying to legislate restrictions into oblivion; and strident gun-rights advocacy groups, most notably the the National Rifle Association, the industry’s Ministry of Propaganda; the gun lobby is a well-organized, well-moneyed, and well-entrenched camp. Their mandate, while flawed and misinterpreted, is, nevertheless, a Constitutional amendment.

What’s worse, the courts have often abetted the gun lobby’s reckless agenda. The Supreme Court’s disastrously wrongheaded decision in District of Columbia v. Heller is only a recent example. Thomas Delahanty, a Washington, D.C. police officer, was seriously wounded when David Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. In 1989, Delahanty sued the manufacturer of Hinckley’s gun, the German company Röhm, which made what Americans would call Saturday night specials. In Delahanty v. Hinckley, the wounded officer’s lawyers made an incontrovertible argument: cheap, concealable pistols have only one real use: killing.

Nevertheless, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled against such logic:

We reject application of the ‘abnormally dangerous activity’ doctrine to gun manufacture and sale. . . .  The marketing of a handgun is not dangerous in and of itself, and when injury occurs, it is not the direct result of the sale itself, but rather the result of actions taken by a third party.

Despite its highfalutin tone, the court’s decision simply restates an old piece of gun lobby rhetoric: guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Still, the best chance to reverse the negligence of both the gun industry and our government resides in the courts. If I had suggested in 1993 that a series of class-action liability lawsuits would break the tobacco industry’s back, people would have said that I was smoking something other than Marlboros. Who could have imagined that seemingly invincible tobacco companies like Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds would pay billions of dollars in settlements? And who could have imagined, by extension, that by the mid-2000s, every bar and restaurant in New York City would be smoke-free or that smoke-free policies would become standard in public spaces across the country?

Many explanations have been offered for America’s peculiar and, quite simply, perverse relationship to guns. They usually involve a thesis based on the brutal realities of colonial life, the savagery of the frontier, and intermittent war. As proud as many Americans may be of our violent heritage, it is not unique. Compared to Europe’s upheavals of the last three centuries, America has enjoyed unusual peace and relative calm.

No, what makes America unique is its citizens’ long-standing tolerance for unparalleled levels of domestic gun violence. Sadly, there is an explanation for that phenomenon: human beings have an uncanny ability to grow accustomed to chaos and lunacy. Even if the drafters of the Constitution really intended the Second Amendment to grant private citizens the ability to own firearms, hasn’t the price of such a dubious freedom called into question the amendment’s relevance if not undermined its legitimacy outright? How many Columbines and Virginia Techs and Auroras, how many thousands of annual gun-deaths will it take before Americans decide to dismantle the gun industry and unseat its Congressional lackeys?

Grim statistics and senseless massacres seem incapable of changing the American public’s opinion about guns. Somehow the very essence of our relationship to firearms must change. Somehow, Americans, especially those exalted arbiters of justice in the Supreme Court, must realize what this former soldier has: a gun is a mechanical device used to punch holes in people and other animals in order to kill them.

***

Top Illustration by Mike Keefe, The Denver Post.

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The suspect has been identified as Wade Michael Page, a 40-year old Army veteran and white supremacist. More on the man’s involvement with white-supremacy can be found here.

“Racism holds a terrible logic, for a concept with no grounding whatsoever in science or morality, yet too many white people don’t see any patterns.” Colorlines has an important piece on post 9/11 targeting of Sikhs, and the deadly mix of race, guns, and madness.

Mother Jones mapped out mass shootings in the US over the last 30 years. They also charted the 132 guns owned by the killers – more than three quarters of which were purchased legally.

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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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The suspected shooter, James Holmes, is an Aurora-local and former University of Colorado-Denver graduate student in the School of Medicine. He has not yet stated a motive and has no previous criminal record. He did tell police that there were explosive booby traps in his home, which police say may take days to dismantle.

The largest gun control advocacy group in the U.S., The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, issued a statement expressing sympathies to the victims’ families and wounded. They’ve also started a petition to demand action from Congress in response to the tragedy.

The movie’s Paris premiere was cancelled and the stars of the film have cancelled promotional events and interviews. Warner Brothers and Cinemark have responded to the shooting. WB has pulled trailers for Gangster Squad, which has shown at some Batman openings. In the trailer, men are seen shooting into a crowd at a movie theater. Cinemark, the nation’s third largest theater chain is reviewing its security procedures and other big theater companies have released statements.

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Rudolph Labs has released an open source tracking sentry gun system that uses household items such as your webcam, computer, and paintball gun or airsoft rifle. The sum of these parts is a militant surveillance system that scans the scene, reports movement, and launches into a rapid fire attack once locked on target. Costing only $110 and all your free time (according to its makers), it seems likely that independent sentry operations are the way of the future.

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