bang bang

Growing up we had guns. I remember the time my brother Scott got shot in the thigh with a BB while he, some friends and my brother Matt were goofing around with an airgun. The BB embedded itself in his skin and likely stung like hell.

When my dad took us camping, sometimes, in an open field, we’d practice shooting cans and bottles set on top of a log or hanging upside down on sticks. He kept a pistol in a felt-lined box on the top shelf of his closet. At least once, he showed me how to load the clip full of bullets into the butt of the gun, how to cock it, sending the bullet into the chamber, and how to release the clip for safe storage. It’s weight surprised me and, as if it were made of solid gold, it strained my skinny wrist if I held it outstretched in one hand.

One weekend when I was fourteen, not long after some jerk had exposed himself to me at the top of our street, my parents went out of town for a night, perhaps to bring one of my siblings off to college, though I don’t rightly recall. I asked my friend Wendy to stay over and, because I felt somehow safer sleeping in my parents bed, Wendy slept in the bottom bunk in the room across the hall.

Around midnight the phone rang. In a daze, I answered and heard a man panting on the other end. Immediately, I hung up thinking it was just a prank. I was about to doze off when the phone rang again. This time, my mind began racing, thinking he was looking at my address there in his phone book, knew where I lived and might come to get me. The hair at the back of my neck pricked with heat and sweat. Without a second thought, I reached up into my dad’s closet and grabbed the felt-lined box, fished out the gun, loaded it and kept it in my grasp. After a long time, the phone stopped ringing, and I laid awake in the dark as long as I could, waiting and afraid.

So many Americans believe the myth that we are safer if we own a gun. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The presence of a gun makes it five times more likely domestic violence will result in murder. And if guns are loaded and kept nearby for self defense, children find them and shoot their parents, their siblings, their friends, themselves. Guns discharge accidentally in stores, parking lots and homes, and kill or maim innocent folks. Guns kept close at hand are easily triggered by an impulsive finger when their owners—or their owners' relatives—are provoked, angry, afraid or suicidal.

Some argue that it is our inalienable right to own a gun when perhaps it should be thought of more as a privilege, one in which we must earn the right, like driving a car; they're simply too dangerous. The second amendment, after all—believe it or not—was crafted to suppress southern states’ slave revolts, not to allow unfettered access to assault rifles and automatic Glocks.

The modern obsession with guns in this so-called great nation of ours is nothing short of sick, particularly when, due to mass shootings, suicides, homicides and accidental deaths, someone dies from a bullet every sixteen minutes. Guns have been fetishized to such an extent that men—and perhaps a handful of women—strap them on like some phallic accessory and swagger around in public as if to say, “I'm potent!” Makes me wonder.

When I discuss reasonable gun control measures with others, I often hear the defense that law-abiding citizens should have the right to own a gun. And while I think most of us should consider getting rid of our guns (I like the idea of a government buy-back program—melt 'em all down!) I don’t necessarily disagree. The problem is that most gun-toting citizens are law abiding ... until they aren’t. Think of the guy who shoots his girlfriend during a domestic dispute, or the curmudgeon who fires at a car full of kids because they are playing their music too loud, or the barroom brawl that goes south and ends with a bullet in someones head, or the man who mistakenly shoots his son thinking he is an intruder. Besides, things like universal background checks, thirty-day waiting periods and the implementation of a terrorist no-gun list, do not deny most of us the right to own a gun if we want. But the NRA and its lobbyists, with their fearmongering tactics and stranglehold on politicians from both parties, though mostly republican, have many Americans scared shitless and believing in debunked myths.

Presidential candidate Ben Carson said after the mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” I imagine if that body belonged to his wife or child, he’d relent. Other politicians have responded only by encouraging prayer. And while prayer is fine and restorative and good, if there is a God, it doesn't appear as if She's listening; we've had at least one mass murder every day in this country and 33,000 people have died from gunshots in a year.

You might ask, why am I writing about this on this blog? I write because I don't want Calvin or my husband, or any other person for that matter, to be another sad statistic.

Nothing happened that night when I was fourteen, but I shudder to think what I might have done if my friend Wendy had startled me by entering the dark room. Might I have shot her thinking she was the creep who had been breathing into the phone? I can never know. Odds are, though, in some town, perhaps today, things like this are bound to occur as long as we remain idle and silent, watching the clock tick until the next sorry incident involving a gun.

Holly Ballard Martz
bang bang (I cannot second your amendment)
cast wax, encaustic, mixed media