The Gun in My Hand

From a young age, I knew I didn’t like guns. This made me an outlier growing up in the 1960s in Mission, on the Texas-Mexico border. That realization came to me through a three-day ritual around Labor Day: the white-winged dove hunting season in the brushy fields, orchards and muddy roads along the Rio Grande. My mother, younger brother Cooper and I would go with friends to these massive social occasions. The shotguns boomed, the birds fell and I hated it all. I didn’t mind the killing so much as the noise. To this day I startle easily, and every shot made me cover my ears.

Guns were integral to the culture. Guys at Mission High School had gun racks in their pickups. Photos of the homecoming bonfire’s stack of wood showed my peers guarding it with shotguns. It seemed like just teen macho posturing then, but insanity now. Would they start blasting away if boys from McAllen High School tried to ignite the bonfire early?

McAllen, Texas, July 2011

Local members of the National Rifle Association held safety instruction at my Boy Scout troop, so I knew the basics of gun safety. First rule: treat every gun as if it were loaded, even if you think it’s not, and never point it at anybody unless you intend to shoot. I Iearned early on the risk of ignoring the rules. A teen showing off a gun shot and killed the brother of an acquaintance of mine.

Accidents are one form of gun violence. I felt the visceral pain of another form. My family was very close with another family. Gretchen was my mother’s dear friend, and her son John was a year older than me. We played baseball, rode bikes, shot hoops in their driveway and shared Sunday lunches. I didn’t know Gretchen’s husband Melvin much. He was a mostly silent, disabled oil field worker who read the NRA magazine American Rifleman.

In the early 1970s, Melvin used one of his guns to commit suicide. We had rushed to the house before John arrived from somewhere and Gretchen had to tell him his father had killed himself. I remember John walking in and looking around, wondering why people were in the house.

John struggled in high school, joined the Navy and eventually worked as a PE teacher at an elementary school. Then one day he disciplined some girls over something. They accused him of molesting them. He didn’t but the accusation was devastating. Soon, John killed himself. Did he use a gun of his father’s? I don’t know. I have learned that if you’re suicidal and have access to a gun, most likely you’ll succeed if you shoot yourself. Almost 90 percent of attempts are fatal. No other method is as lethal. As we’ve all learned far too often lately in places like Uvalde (almost 300 miles northwest of Mission) the combination of guns, poor impulse control and mental health issues is a witch’s brew.

I’m still aghast at an example of my own gun handling. Home from college in 1976, I drove with Cooper down to the levees south of Mission for target practice. We used his pistol, a Colt Woodsman .22 that he bought from a friend of our mom’s for $30. Photos show I’m clearly enjoying myself. In one I’m aiming the gun right at Cooper. I cringe to think of that instant, when everything could have gone terribly wrong. I failed to treat the gun in my hands with the respect a weapon always demands. 

Mission, Texas December 1976

Fast forward 27 years to 2003. I visit Cooper in Houston. He takes me to a shooting range. I’d never been to one. The sound is deafening. Thousands of brassy shell cartridges fill barrels and crunch underfoot. I’m hesitant at first but I shoot at targets with a Glock pistol and then a rifle. 

Again, more photos. This time, no fooling around. Something about the novel action of hefting, aiming and firing that Glock stirred me. I had a very memorable time with this peak male bonding, so wildly out of my comfort zone. It’s worth noting that on the same trip I bought my first digital camera, a one megapixel Vivitar Vivicam. I instantly became a fan of digital photography and I’m always packing a camera.

That was my first and only session at a shooting range. None of my gun-savvy friends and family who’d want to take me shooting live within a thousand miles of my home. Anyway, I’d rather hold a digital camera in my hand than a gun. The contrasts between cameras and guns are stark. Cameras make way less noise, I can keep shooting until I get the result I want, I can fix mistakes with editing or just delete them, it doesn’t matter if somebody points a camera back at me, and I’m much better at aiming a camera. I’ll take a Canon over a Glock any day of the week.

I never wanted to pluck and eat whitewings, anyway.

Houston, May 2003