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Mike Kemp/In Pictures — Corbis
In North Dakota, a gun owner displays
hunting paraphernalia in a bedroom.
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THE summer before my sophomore year in high school, I moved into my
father’s house. My father had remarried and the only unoccupied bedroom
in his house was the gun room. Against one wall was a gun case he had
built in high school, and beside it were two empty refrigerators stocked
with rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. My bed’s headboard
resided against the other wall and, above it, a resigned-looking,
marble-eyed, five-point mule deer’s head with a fedora on its antler
rack.
The room had no windows, so the smell of gun oil filled my senses at
least eight hours each day. It clung to my clothes like smoke, and like a
smoker’s cigarettes, it became my smell. No one in my high school
noticed. We all smelled like something: motorheads of motor oil, farm
kids of wheat chaff and cow dung, athletes like footballs and grass,
dopers like the other kind of grass.
It did not appear to anyone — including me — that residing within my
family’s weapons cache might affect my life. Together, my three brothers
own at least a dozen weapons and have yet to harm anyone with them.
Despite their guns (or, arguably, because of them), they are quite
peaceable. As for me, I have three guns, one inherited and two gifts,
and I’m hardly a zealot. In fact I never had much interest in guns. Yet
it is I who killed a man.
It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I
was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to
the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega
parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat.
The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me
his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side,
pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted
my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty,
and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall,
the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the
hammer back a second time it fired a live round.
My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another
friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for
the phone.
The house sat beside one edge of a river valley and I knew that between
the orchard at the opposite side and the next town was 20 miles of rock
and pine. I was a cross-country champion in high school. I could run
through the woods and find my way to my cousins, who lived far into the
mountains. I could easily disappear. But I remained where I was, mindful
that even if I ran, I would escape nothing. So, when the sirens finally
whirred and the colored lights tumbled over the yard and the doors of
the cruisers opened and a police sergeant asked who was responsible, I
raised my hand and patted my chest and was arrested.
Though the charges against me were eventually dropped, I have since been
given diagnoses of a range of maladies, including post-traumatic stress
disorder, depression, anxiety and adult attention deficit disorders.
The pharmacists fill the appropriate prescriptions, which temporarily
salve my conscience, but serve neither my story nor the truth.
Where I grew up, masculinity involved schooling a mean dog to guard your
truck or skipping the ignition spark to fire the points, and, of
course, handling guns of all kinds. I was barely proficient in any of
these areas. I understood what was expected of me and responded as best I
could, but did so with distance that would, I hoped, keep me from being
a total fraud in my own eyes.
Like many other young men, I mythologized guns and the ideas of manhood associated with them.
The gun lobby likes to say guns don’t kill people, people do. And
they’re right, of course. I killed my friend; no one else did; no
mechanism did. But this oversimplifies matters (as does the gun control
advocates’ position that eliminating weapons will end violent crime).
My friend was killed by a man who misunderstood guns, who imagined that
comfort with — and affection for — guns was a vital component of
manhood. I did not recognize a gun for what it was: a machine
constructed for a purpose, one in which I had no real interest. I
treated a tool as an essential part of my identity, and the result is a
dead man and a grieving family and a survivor numbed by guilt whose
story lacks anything resembling a proper ending.
Bruce Holbert is the
author of the novel “Lonesome Animals.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 28, 2013, on page SR8 of the New York Times, New York edition, with the headline: Sleeping With Guns.
An interview with Bruce Holbert.
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