American Guns
There is no more draw into nature from the American gun, just a disappearing into nothing.
I didn’t want to write about guns. It seems like such an impossible, intractable topic. But I started this essay after the Nashville school shooting, put it down many times, and finally finished it. Writing it has been a little bit helpful to me, so I figured I’d share it with you.
A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about a gun my son found in a house we were renting (I shared it here and will put it below, too). It was a Glock handgun, the type LA cops carry. In a seven-year-old’s hands, in the house we were calling home, it was as foreign an object to behold as I could ever have imagined.
The gun’s matte black body seemed to suck life out of the room, even unloaded and untouched on a table. It’s latent aggression buzzed. Actually holding it felt like reaching into an abyss, the kind that loom in particularly bad nightmares, where you do everything in your power to wake up.
That initial sensation aside, what occurred to me as I wrote the poem was just how sheltered I felt. There are more guns in the U.S. than people, including an estimated 72 million handguns alone, with millions more produced each year. The Glock is said to be by far the most popular.
So what was so shocking and disorienting to me, is completely normal to a huge number of my fellow citizens. There are likely more Glock handguns alone in this country than cars in my home state of California.
It’s not that I’m a stranger to guns, I grew up with them. My grandfather was a gifted shot and passionate outdoorsman. We have a large painted portrait of him in our house, cradling a shotgun. He passed on his dead eye to some of his children, including my mother. Her old Diana air rifle became the property of my siblings and I, once she thought we were old enough to handle it.
My mother also had antique, pearl-handled pistols of her father’s (eventually sold to a collector during Australia’s gun amnesty). My dad had an old side-by-side, double-barrel shotgun. Another of my grandfather’s shotguns (custom made, to his size and specifications, on a trip to London) lived in the closet of the family lake house, just in case. As a child, when my sister was still a baby, I watched my mother use that gun to shoot a venomous snake hiding in the woodpile by the house. Splattering one half against the brick wall, the other left on the lawn for the kookaburras. It was exhilarating.
My middle brother and I played around with guns in our adolescence. Our mother’s old Diana was used to pick off sparrows in the backyard for a time. There was a rabbit hunting trip and another to shoot ducks with our father. Also occasional visits to farms, where we shot at foxes or whatever else the owners might have wanted culled with a borrowed .22 rifle.
It was all an adventure for a city boy like me. Guns were a draw into nature. But the loud blast of a barrel and the killing that often resulted didn’t particularly appeal (I wrote about all this a little in my micro-memoir We Just Weren’t Animal People). Besides, in urban, peace-time Australia, whether or not I was a great shot seemed largely irrelevant. Better to practice guitar or sports if I really wanted to impress anybody. I eventually learned to appreciate nature without the lure of the hunt and happily, unconsciously, lay down the guns.
My middle brother went on to pass the required safety tests and owned his own guns. Yet those too seem to lay idle in the safe on his farm these days. In case of emergency. He doesn’t show them off, we don’t even talk about them.
Ten years ago my wife and I bought a property out in the Mojave Desert and guns reentered my mind. I’d visited the area as a tourist, but now that we’d be putting down roots outside of town, I immediately thought of needing a gun. Just a shotgun in the closet, in case, like I’d grown up with at the lake house.
My brothers and I went on a sight-seeing trip through the desert around that time and we stopped at a roadside gun store near the new property. I enquired about a used shotgun, nothing fancy. The clerk and one of his associates quickly tried talking me into buying a new handgun instead. Something I could “wear on my hip while gardening”, I remember him saying. I have no idea why he tried diverting my attention. Not much good for hitting a snake, I suggested. At which point he tried selling me on new pistol shells, too, loaded with small BBs, just like a shotgun. My brothers and I looked at each other, bemused. We left empty-handed and unenthused. Hunting down a beer to combat the heat felt much more life-affirming.
I can’t think of a single reason I’d have needed a shotgun in the ten years since (let alone a pistol). I’m glad I gave up on the idea. Instead I reverted to a trusty air rifle (or BB gun, as they’re called in the U.S.). A quiet, non-lethal option for shooting tin cans in the boulders from time to time, lately with my nine-year-old son. Mostly because he gets a kick out of it, but also because I think it makes sense for a kid to understand gun safety and to talk about guns. Particularly in America. Here guns are like speeding cars or pools or hot stoves; just another potentially deadly threat to a child that's ever present.
So my sense of being sheltered doesn’t so much stem from a naivete about guns, perhaps, as it does from existing in a society so utterly infiltrated by guns. A lot of my fellow Australians don’t understand America’s complex relationship with guns, and why we can’t just break it off for the greater good. But they also don’t know these guns. Handguns. “Assault” guns. Laser-sighted guns. Pump-action guns. Concealed guns. Fully-automatic guns. Movie guns. Military guns. Armor-piercing guns. Murder guns.
Millions and millions of guns. American guns.
Guns like ants. So many hidden all around you that when you hear the total mass, your brain simply cannot comprehend it. It sounds completely impossible, and yet palpably threatening. So you block it out. Until the ant hill erupts, again. The inevitable death arrives, the news reports it, and you pray it's far from your door. Again. This time. And the next and the next and the next.
When I see a matte black Tesla, or an American flag rendered in black, I think of guns. Men stuffed into black bullet-proof vests by the doors of grocery stores and malls, their thick black shoes at the end of starched black slacks, remind me of guns. The black panels of a beaten old cop car, its white flanks scarred and scuffed in black, too, are guns. Dark, wrap-around shades from a gas station. The shiny black top of a vinyl-covered barstool. The label of a Jack Daniel’s bottle, and space where the tooth of a man drinking it once was. Ink on fingertips. A black can of energy drink. The handle of a gas pump. The black box of a cheap TV hoisted in a shop corner. A twisted shard of blown-out tire on the highway. The supermarket conveyor belt. The eyes of a chained-up dog. Black lines on a yellow school bus.
Guns. Guns. Guns. Guns.
Each of these things sucks the life out of me, too. Just like that discarded, matte black cop pistol did. We are sinking into an abyss. A place where going to school or the supermarket, or jogging, or knocking on the wrong door, is enough to suck you in for good. Into the black. There is no more draw into nature from the American gun, just a disappearing into nothing.
What I took for a naivete about guns at first, now feels more like part of a vision. Only seen when you step back from the object long enough. A vision of a horrifying American landscape, with holes blasted out of it and nothing but darkness underneath. More and more holes appearing at every moment. More and more black.
It’s a haunting thought and one that has me constantly questioning my chosen country, where I set out each day to raise children. I look for hope in statistics, but it’s hard to find. It’s hard, too, to escape the feeling that just beneath America’s love of its guns lies a smoldering death wish. A craving for a silence that will make all this stop.
If I’m lucky, I will never hold another pistol in my hand, or an assault rifle, or anything like it ever again. I don’t need to. Almost all of us don’t. Surviving in America without a gun has become an act of defiance. I won’t yield.
Perhaps I’m not sheltered after all. It’s not too few American guns that I have seen, but far too many.
Gun on W 25th
by Toby B. Hemingway
You found a gun in the living room
and what can I say?
In the house on West 25th,
where we are,
for the time being.
It wasn’t loaded, which was some relief.
Some.
But still...
Now there’s a gun above the kitchen cupboard,
in a grocery bag.
But what I need
is a diner and a liquor store.
And a Mexican place and a guy to fix my shoes.
Also a running route and a local bar,
maybe a hardware and a spot with good donuts, cheap.
Mostly though, I need each other,
and I’ve never been more glad to have us.
Last night I let your sister know that ghosts aren’t real again
and that mom was, and you, and me,
and that was all that really mattered.
And I think for once in my life I was right.
And she slept through and so did I,
but when I woke up my back was killing me.
Because I don’t look after it like I should
or maybe it’s just the mattress.
In an old house full of burned-out candles,
and other people’s things,
and the roof slowly peeling away.
Where parking’s a real bitch, and everybody knows it.
And the neighbors all keep orange cones
on the curb outside their homes,
like a threat.
And watch you park or take out the bins
and don’t care that you watch them watching.
And I can’t blame them because
Who am I?
Just another white dad passing through,
with 2.0 children and his own damned worries.
And enough beer in the fridge to bring down a horse.
And you found a gun in the house,
and so what?
You never seen a Glock before?
It wasn’t even loaded.
And I know all that.
But still...
Then I look up and I see the palm trees.
Just like the ones in the old neighborhood across town,
by the old house,
watching from high, high above.
Over the power lines and the freeway lights
and the sound of someone peeling out on a nearby block.
Over the friendly folk and the ones who look down at the sidewalk
passing by
and the dog walkers, and their dogs.
And us. I can’t forget us.
I know the palm trees see us,
too.
Silently swaying as they do.
Old friends.
Just look out for falling fronds,
and lost guns.
And a thousand other things
you’ll never see coming.