Loaded

Daughterhood and motherhood in a gun-addled country.

“Florence with Gun” by Louis Fleckenstein, Getty Museum.

I learned how to shoot a .22 caliber rifle at an all-girl’s sleepaway camp, probably around the age of eight or nine. I loved the metallic smell of the range, and the satisfaction of seeing the lollipop sight perfectly eclipse the bullseye, and for a kid, I was a pretty good shot. “Riflery” became my favorite camp activity, and I’d often hunker down at the shooting range for hours instead of going to Rock Wall, or Canoeing, or even Blob.

At the end of camp, I was awarded an embroidered patch that said Junior Marksman and, stitched around the edges like a halo, National Rifle Ass’n. I brought my best paper targets home, peppered and pockmarked with bullet holes, and hung them on the bulletin board in my bedroom next to the N*Sync posters and horse collages.  

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My dad loved guns. I don’t know why it started — he wasn’t a hunter, except for the day he ran downstairs while fumbling to load a pistol (and dropping bullets down the steps as he went) so he could shoot a copperhead on our front porch. 

Like most of the things in my family that started off rather pedestrian and then careened wildly off the rails (arguments, substances, divorce), it seemed to begin as a weird quirk and, with time, spiraled into something else. His collection of firearms lived in a “gun closet” in the basement, right next to the playroom where my brother and I took turns shooting Russians with sniper rifles in Goldeneye for Nintendo64, and where I had slumber parties. I don’t remember whether there was a lock on the closet door. 

Among many questions I have for my father, I’d love to ask him what was up with all those guns, and I’ll never be able to. But my best guess is that for my father — not an NRA-simping, rebel flag-waving, giant pickup truck-driving country boy, but a small and brilliant man in pleated khakis — the guns weren’t about a hobby or collecting, but a fetishization of power, and later, a means of control.

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Things acutely deteriorated in our household during my teenage years as my father’s behavior became more erratic, more menacing. But it was a gun that finally catalyzed my parents’ separation: worried about my father’s mental state, my mom had taken his pistol from his nightstand drawer and locked it away from him. She came home to find the lockbox picked open, and a note in his jagged handwriting warning her not to touch his things. We quickly moved out a few days later.

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The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.

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A few months after we moved out, following a flurry of bizarre letters and creepy drive-by’s and even a vaguely slanderous billboard, my dad got caught outside the windows of my mom’s new apartment late at night with what appeared to be a gun in his hands. Later on, in the criminal trial for his stalking charges, his defense argued that it was not a gun at all, but binoculars. To this day I don’t know why, but the question of gun versus binoculars somehow became the central issue of the case, and the stalking part suddenly didn’t seem to matter at all. He was acquitted.  

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In Georgia, when you go to the courthouse to get your marriage license, you follow signs for “Pistol and Marriage Licenses,” because those two types of paperwork are handled by the same probate court. Some couples are tickled by the irony, the juxtaposition of love and violence. Georgia is ranked 10th in the nation for its rate of men killing women.

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After living through my father’s reaction to our parents’ divorce, the rest of us became pretty invested in protecting ourselves. A picture of him at the front office of my high school. A German shepherd. Guns. Years later, when I moved to my first house in Atlanta, my brother gave me a .38 special.

For a while, I cavalierly stashed it in my nightstand, loaded. With time and distance from the events with my dad, the gun felt less necessary. As my ambivalence toward it grew, I moved it from my nightstand to a locked safe stored on a very high shelf in our closet, making it mostly useless in the face of an intruder (“hold on, mister robber, let me just get my stepstool and keys first!”) but still objectively unsafe (the gun was still loaded because, frankly, I couldn’t remember how to disarm it, and was scared to try). 

A few years later, we moved to Grant Park, and the pistol followed along, a small and heavy albatross. I became less clear on why it was in our home, and that lack of conviction evolved into discomfort. Then I had a baby, and that nettling grew every single day. The baby started rolling over, and I thought about the gun. He started crawling, and I thought about the gun. We have to get rid of the gun, we said to each other.

Right after Sandy Hook, a coworker posted a photo of a melted mass of what used to be metal. He’d taken his pistol somewhere to have it smelted. I wanted to do that, too, but quickly learned that there aren’t many options for getting rid of a gun. Even police departments might simply resell your surrendered weapon to the public, adding them back into the pile of the 393 million guns in circulation in the U.S., or distribute them to their own police officers, which certainly doesn't preclude violence either.

But I wanted to melt it, to snuff out its lifecycle so it couldn’t do the same to someone else. 393 million guns in America. What difference could it possibly it make to have one less? And: 42,000 deaths from gun violence in America every year. What a difference it might make to have one less. 

I ended up just giving it back to my brother, a responsible gun owner. I was relieved it was no longer in our house, and unsatisfied that this was somehow the best I could do.

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My son is only a few months out of diapers when he experiences his first active shooter lockdown, and it isn’t a drill: it’s the day a man guns down five people in a doctor’s office in Midtown Atlanta. The next day, the parent WhatsApp group is lit up with concerned parents whose kids are suddenly talking about “hiding from bad guys.” A couple moms share resources for “how to talk to your toddler about active shooter drills,” a sequence of words that, in a more merciful world, wouldn’t make a lick of sense.

That afternoon, the preschool sends out an email, subject line: “Regarding Wednesday’s Lockdown Experience in the Ladybugs Class.” I stare at the string of words and try to make them cohere. The school arranges practice drills for every class the very next week. He is two-and-a-half. 

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At the library near our house, if you sit on the couch in the children’s section to read to your toddler, you can look through the big windows and see the pawn shop across the street. They change out the plastic letters on their sign from time to time (AMMO DEALS, GUNS AND GOLD), but for almost all of last fall and well into the holidays, it simply read: GLOCKTOBER IS HERE.

This past summer, he came home from preschool with a new word — “bullet-gun” — and a new way to say he doesn’t like something (like bedtime, or vegetables, or consequences): “I’ll shoot [it] with a bullet-gun.” We’ve always talked about the difference between toys and tools, and now we introduced him to the concept of a third category, which is weapons.

It feels way too early for this conversation, and at the same time, inevitable, even though his television consumption is limited to Mr. Rogers and Frog & Toad, even though we don’t have guns (toy or otherwise) in our home. It’s like it’s in the water, or in the air, or on our playgrounds, or across the street from our libraries where we sit with our children to read “The Gruffalo,” or in our childhood homes.

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On a beautiful spring evening, I put my kids to bed and walked outside to water the plants. While soaking the bronze fennel, I heard a series of explosions in rapid succession, then sirens.

The next morning I watched the news segment from the gas station down the street from my house where three bystanders had been injured in a shootout. In the surveillance footage from inside the gas station, people instantly dropped to the ground, crawled behind shelves, and flattened themselves to the floor in a practiced way that looks instinctual and feels distinctly American. 

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Uvalde was the deadliest mass school shooting after I became a mother; my son was two at the time. School shootings have never been anything but ghastly, but motherhood saddled me with a new lens, one that invokes the kind of anguish that threatens to swallow one whole. 

By Winder, that same son is 4 (and has a chubby little baby sister, too). His baby fat is gone; his slender body seems to be constantly darting around and slipping through my grasp like a minnow in a stream. The cornsilk wisps of his hair have become darker and thicker. Where I once felt his weight in my arms every night before bed, now it’s mostly just after skinned knees or hurt feelings. He can write his name and play three chords on his little guitar and he, like pretty much every other kid his age, wants to know the why of everything. Why do we have a ceiling? Why don’t worms have arms? He’s on that precipice of babyhood and boyhood: pedaling away from me on his bike one moment, crying over a popped balloon the next. 

Still, to him, in this fleeting moment of his sweet little life, the depths of human cruelty so far are largely unplumbed, mostly limited to a classmate stealing his basketball on the playground or his baby sister knocking down his Lego creation. The day four people are shot and killed at Apalachee High School, I look at him and wonder if this is the last school shooting I’ll be able to get away with not telling him about. Wonder when the teachers’ language will become less vague and more specific in describing what, exactly, the class is hiding from in those drills. (May they only ever be drills.) 

And when he inevitably asks that most loaded question, why — what will they say to him? What will I? What might my father have said to us?

What do we have to say for ourselves?   

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Donate, learn, and act: 

• Victims of Apalachee school shooting

• Moms Demand Action

• Georgia Moms for Gun Safety 

Resources for unwanted firearms: 

• National Center for Unwanted Firearms

• Raw Tools turns unwanted guns into gardening tools