It’s a commonly held belief among pro-gun advocates that more guns make us safer. On Friday, it came to light that one of the most famous proponents of this belief – John Lott, author of The War on Guns – had fudged his data. This is no surprise to me. I know that, when you are being shot at, your first thought is to run away – not shoot back. Any claims to the contrary were always bound to be wrong.
When I was 18 years old, a dear friend of mine – we’ll call her Katie – was in the process of breaking up with an ex-soldier who had been sectioned out of the army and was a bartender at a strip club. One night, while he was at work, she asked me to come help her move the last of her things out of his apartment.
We were at the end of the task, making the last trips to my battered red Subaru sedan when the boyfriend – we’ll call him Mike – unexpectedly came home. He was drunk and angry and had the wild-eyed, blown-out-pupils look of someone who has consumed large amounts of speed or cocaine.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded of me. He asked if I had been sleeping with his girlfriend.
Katie told him to leave us alone and let us get out of there. “I don’t want to call the police and you don’t want me to, either,” she said.
They left the room for a moment to argue in the kitchen. I kept putting records into a crate, my heart pounding in my ears and my hands shaking. I was worried he would try to hit one or both of us.
Moments later, Katie exploded through the kitchen door, white as a sheet.
“He’s got a gun!” she said. “Run!”
We ran out of there as fast as we could. I was halfway to the car when I heard the first gunshot. I hit the dirt and frantically scrambled along the ground, crab-walking to the open driver’s side door.
“Get in the back seat!” I shouted at Katie rather than having her run around the car to the passenger side and expose herself to more gunfire.
CRACK! CRACK! Two more gunshots sounded and two windows on the car parked next to mine blew out.
With wildly shaking hands that felt like slick, cold balloons, I jammed the key into the ignition and peeled out of the apartment complex parking lot, leaving a trail of hot tire rubber on the asphalt.
Later that night, before the police came, Mike died by suicide. By then, Katie and I had filed a police report, meeting officers at the Denny’s where all of us punk rock and goth kids and other misfits hung out at all hours of the night.
I remember sitting and talking to the kind-eyed female police officer, still shaking, my hand wrapped around a boiling-hot mug of Denny’s coffee, but still freezing cold. My voice sounded to me like it was coming through a tinny speaker somewhere far away. My chest ached from where my heart had lurched, then pounded wildly when my brain dumped adrenaline into my system.
There was no feeling of “exhilaration” – just a cold, spent-adrenaline state of after-shock, a bitter acid taste in my mouth and the sick realization of how close I had come to dying.
Too many people who shouldn’t have guns in this country have not just a sidearm or a hunting rifle, but whole arsenals at their command. This is a fact. Sadly, as the evidence shows, only a tiny fraction of these guns will ever be used for home defense. They are much more likely to be used for suicide or against a family member in a domestic dispute or they will kill or injure someone when they fire accidentally.
Sadly, I think too many Americans believe what they see on TV, that when the powder ignites and hot lead begins to fly, everything will slow down into The Matrix-style slow motion and they will be able to magically dodge bullets and shoot fast-moving human targets with a marksman’s precision. Guns are not toys. They are machines designed for the express purpose of killing. And the stories we tell ourselves about them making us safer are just daydreams that have little to no application in a real life-or-death crisis.
