Late on a recent friday night, I had a personal introduction to terror. My 11-year-old daughter and I were playing Scrabble. My husband had just phoned to let us know he was grounded in Dallas by bad weather. A moment later my front doorbell rang loudly and repeatedly. I stood up, wondering who in God’s name was ringing at 1 o’clock in the morning. Then I heard the sound of shattering glass. Someone was breaking into my house.
As I grabbed my daughter and dashed out the side door to my neighbor’s to call the police, she began to cry. “Mom! What about the boys?” My three sons–3, 4 and a mentally handicapped 8-year-old–were asleep upstairs. I had made a split-second decision to leave them and run for help. To go to them, or the phone, would have taken me right into harm’s way. Being eight months pregnant, I couldn’t carry them two at a time to safety. The minutes it took until the police arrived seemed like years. I wasn’t permitted to enter the house until the officers had secured it. I stood on the sidewalk, fearing for my sons’ safety and worrying about their reaction if they awoke to find armed policemen trooping through their bedroom. Blessedly, the boys slept through it, and the would-be intruders ran off without entering the house.
In the aftermath of what was for me a horribly traumatic experience, my husband and I considered and once again rejected the idea of buying a gun for protection. Police officers have told me a gun is not a particularly good defense strategy, especially where there are small children in the home. If the gun isn’t loaded–or the ammunition isn’t very nearby–it’s not likely to be much help in a situation needing a fast reaction. Yet if it is loaded and handy, it poses a serious threat to children–and others.
Like most residents of Baton Rouge, I have strong views on gun control. Unlike most, I am for it. You have to understand that this is Louisiana. We have been characterized humorously, but I fear accurately, as a society of good ole boys who consider the shotguns displayed in the back of the pickup as a God-given right and a status symbol. We don’t much care for being told what to do, especially by the government. During the recent trial of Rodney Peairs, acquitted of killing a Japanese exchange student who he mistakenly thought was invading his home last Halloween, a local news program conducted a telephone poll on the question of gun control. At that time, 68 percent of the respondents opposed stricter controls. Such measures routinely fail in our legislature, as they do in Congress.
One result is that we have criminals armed with semiautomatic and assault weapons and a police force that is seriously outgunned. Our options, as I see them, are three: maintain the status quo; make it more difficult for criminals to obtain these weapons, or provide them to the police as well. The status quo is to me unacceptable, and the notion of a police force armed with assault rifles roaming the streets of Baton Rouge does not bring solace to my soul. It terrifies me, That leaves the option of gun control.
Why does this prospect engender such hysteria? I do not propose to outlaw guns–only to make them more difficult to obtain. No one with a criminal record or history of violent mental illness-and no child-should by law be able to purchase a gun. And no one has a compelling need to buy an assault weapon.
None of this may make a hill of beans of difference, directly, in the case of a homeowner protecting himself from real or perceived threats. But indirectly it can. We should rethink our cultural heritage and the historical gunslinger’s mentality of “a Smith & Wesson beats four aces.” We’ve outgrown the frontier spirit and the Deed of weapons for survival. In Baton Rouge, I am a definite oddity in Dot allowing MY children, including my normal, rambunctious little boys, to play at shooting people. I don’t want my children to think of guns as problem solvers. Nor do I favor the simplistic depictions of good guys versus bad guys.
What really frightens me is that if I were faced with the prospect of imminent harm to myself or my children and had a gun at the ready, I would reach for it, despite my feelings against using firearms for personal protection. Panic is a compelling emotion and basically incompatible with reason. It is tempting fate severely to keep a powerful weapon available to deal with panic–inducing circumstances. The police are trained in when and how to shoot, and innocent people can still fall victim to an officer’s adrenaline surge.
I will for a very long time remember the sound of glass breaking and feel all over again the fear mingled with disbelief of that recent Friday night. If I’d owned a gun, I undoubtedly would have used it-probably to my own detriment. I do not know if the young men who so thoroughly violated my sense of safety were armed. I do know that if I’d had a gun, and had actually confronted them, they would have been more likely to harm me, and my children. it would have been I who escalated the potential for violence, and I would have had to live with the consequences–just like Rodney Peairs.
Although I have felt the terror of helplessness, owning a handgun is something I cannot do. And the “Shoot first, ask questions later” approach is an attitude I don’t want to teach my children. Guns are like cars. We are so inured to their power we tend to treat them irresponsibly. We see them as commodities that we have a right to own and use as we please. Instead, we should limit the “right to bear arms” so that only trained, responsible citizens can buy guns for sport, recreation and protection–while those who would be most likely to use weapons detrimentally will have a much harder time getting them. Most of all, we need to reconsider our–guns and the ways that this passion destroys innocent lives.
