My Gun Experience: Up Close and Personal

My closest view of a firearm came on a dark street in Houston when I made the mistake of turning to look at the man who had been holding a 9 mm pistol to my temple and threatening to blow my head off.

I didn’t get a good look at him, but I did pick up a memory that has been hard to shake: the black “business end” of a handgun, which looked as big as a cannon held an inch from my eye.

Defenders of gun rights would say the gun wasn’t the problem on that, the worst night of my life. The problem was the jumpy robber who was holding it. In different circumstances, a knife or a baseball bat could have just as easily been his instrument of control.

They weren’t, though. It was a gun. And a gun has the exact properties that guy wanted. It provides instantaneous deadly force with the squeeze of a finger. The person looking down the barrel, whether she knows anything else about firearms, knows that much and freezes and complies.

That night changed my relationship with a lot of things. Darkness. Trust. Strangers. And definitely guns.

When I see guns, hear them being fired or run across their shells littering the ground on a country walk, my first thoughts aren’t of good guys and safety and constitutional rights. I think of bad guys and terror and the consequences of having one pointed at a human being and fired.

To say that guns scare me or that I “don’t like guns” would be to ignore the complexity of the feeling.

Guns have an absolute power that other weapons don’t. All it takes is a thoughtless mistake, a lapse in judgment or an intention to harm and a gun goes off.

Guns have a destructive power that other weapons don’t. They are designed to blow apart the flesh of animals and to end their lives, and they do it with great efficiency.

Guns are single-purposed in the way other weapons are not. A knife or a baseball bat has a primary purpose that doesn’t involve taking a life. A gun, while it can be used for target practice, is designed to kill.

Killing isn’t why most people own guns and carry them, of course. Outside of hunters, most people would say they have a gun as a defense against violent or predatory criminals. They hope and believe they’ll never use it to kill another human being. They think having a gun makes them and others safer.

And that’s why the debate about firearms, rekindled now by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, seems baffling to people on the opposite sides. When people advocate for more guns – armed guards in schools, for example – they honestly believe in guns as protectors from harm. When people argue for gun limits – bans on assault weapons, for example – they honestly believe in guns as dangers to life. It’s an ocean’s divide.

On that street in Houston, I knew the power of the gun, so I did what the bad guy said, and, when it was over, he let me go, and I ran and never looked back. People say all sorts of things to you when they find out you’ve been the victim of a gun crime. Don’t you wish someone else had a gun that night? Are you thinking of getting a gun so you can protect yourself next time?

Believe me, in the years that have passed, I’ve imagined every script of alternate endings to that night. But none of them included me grabbing a gun and killing to make sure I got out alive.

To own a gun and to practice with it is to acknowledge that, if you must, you’ll use it for what it was intended; otherwise, you wouldn’t have it. And to be willing to kill, in my mind, is to take a step away from humanity, from life.

Agreeing to walk through that door seems corrosive to what we’re on this earth for. It’s a step I can’t imagine taking, and it’s why I don’t want a gun.

I’m convinced from the intimate moments shared by me and my armed robber that it’s no good for the soul to be on either end of a firearm. But only one of us – the one who was willing to pull the pistol out of his waistband and was ready to use it – really suffered that night.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal