I also hate and fear guns. The .22 in my pocket had one purpose: to take a life. That reality was never far from my mind, and the thought that I might have to kill an attacker—or that an attacker might somehow take the gun away and use it to kill me—was deeply sobering. Then and now, it seemed almost absurd that it had taken me several months of study, practice, and testing before the State of Kentucky saw fit to give me a driver’s license, yet it had taken all of 30 minutes to pick out, purchase, and take possession of the gun I now carried in my pocket. A gun is as destructive in its own way as any automobile.
While organizations such as the National Rifle Association may see themselves as protectors of the Second Amendment, what America’s gun culture has cost in wasted human life is impossible to deny, even putting aside the horrors of events like the Sandy Hook shootings. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2008, 31,593 Americans were killed with a firearm, including 12,179 people who were murdered and 18,223 people who used a gun to commit suicide. The figures include 2,037 children and teens murdered with a gun, and 748 kids who used guns to kill themselves. In ten states—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and Washington—you are now more likely to die from a gunshot wound than in an automobile accident, according to figures from the Violence Policy Center, an advocacy group.
And while gun rights organizations are quick to trumpet anecdotal stories of gun owners who’ve successfully used a handgun to defend themselves or stop a crime, those numbers pale alongside the number of gun deaths. According to the FBI, between 2005 and 2009, only 975 deaths caused by civilians using firearms were justifiable homicides—killings in response to the commission of a felony. (...)
I discovered that in many ways life with a gun was more stressful than without. I quit reading on the subway, instead paying rapt attention to the other people in the car, looking to see who got on and off the train, and re-evaluating the threat level after every stop. There was also the ever-present fear that, in a moment of carelessness, the bulge of the revolver might be visible through a jacket pocket, or through the rear pouch of the small grey camera bag I used to carry it when the weather got warm.
The more I carried the RG, the more I also realized how little it afforded in terms of real protection. Carrying a handgun in your jacket pocket or your waistband on the streets of New York City is vastly different from keeping one for target shooting. Only the former poses the question: “Can you kill?”
This isn’t simply a question of whether you’re capable of taking a life and living with the ugly consequences. It’s a question of how well you understand the other implications, the hidden subtleties, inherent in the decision to carry a handgun. Can you read a situation quickly and accurately enough to gauge whether your life is truly in danger and whether drawing it is justified? Can you keep an assailant from taking your gun away and using it against you? Are you prepared to go about your everyday life unable to relax, scanning every face you see in the street or, in my case, in the subway, for any sign of danger?
The gun in my pocket was a declaration that the city had broken the social contract.
All police cadets are trained in the use of deadly force, especially how and when it can be avoided. The training often involves role-playing: other cops (or hired actors) play out scenes an officer will likely encounter in the line of duty, such as a violent family dispute or a car stop. A key purpose of these exercises is to convey to a trainee how complex and chaotic these situations usually are, and how vastly different from what he may be expecting. A drunken husband may be beating his wife, also drunk. As the officers pin the husband to the floor and try to handcuff him, the wife might try to grab a gun from a cop’s holster and draw down, screaming at the officers to leave her man alone.
In my personal experience, violent crime had come quickly and unexpectedly. Someone stuck his foot in an elevator door and began asking for directions; a few seconds later, a confederate stepped up behind him and pulled a revolver out of a shopping bag. Someone suddenly grabbed me from behind and pinned my arms while another man stepped in front of me and punched me in the face. There was always a moment of hesitation on my part before reality sank in, hesitation that gave my attackers control of the situation. I constantly asked myself whether having a gun on those occasions would have made a difference, whether I would have been able, both physically and psychologically, to draw the weapon and use it before events spun completely out of my control. I tried very hard to believe the answer was yes. The truth was there was no way to know.
by Hal Stucker, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: photobunny
