(1918 Bolshevik Poster by Alexander Apsit reads "Citizens, hand over your weapons!") Posted on 01/12/2013 2:06:42 PM PST by DogByte6RER
(1918 Bolshevik Poster by Alexander Apsit reads "Citizens, hand over your weapons!")
Why I gave up my guns
• A former firearm enthusiast explains his personal epiphany
Late one night in the spring of 2008, I was jolted awake by the sound of yet another a burglar trying to break into my Atlanta home. We’d already had a series of scary close calls, but this time I was ready: I had staged my shotgun and a box of shells in a broom closet right by the back door, next to the umbrellas.
While my girlfriend called the police, I ran into the kitchen and looked out the window just in time to see a human form rush to hide in the shadows behind my car. I grabbed the gun and fumbled for the ammunition in the half-light, spilling most on the ground, but finally found one cartridge I was able to slide into the chamber.
I worked the action furiously, once, twice, and again, realizing dimly as I did that in doing so I was actually ejecting the shells, unspent, and basically unloading the weapon. But the unmistakable sound of the pump carried to the backyard, and, in a flash, the prowler was gone — a blur of raggedy jeans and tattered flannel sliding across the hood of my car and vaulting over the picket fence into the night.
I couldn’t make out his face or tell if he was armed. The next moment I was in the bathroom, vomiting hot puke all over the floor and toilet, water from the bowl splashing my face and eyes. Later, my girlfriend told me I had made her feel safe, protected. I just felt ill.
I’m a New Yorker born-and-bred, and unlike the just under half of all Americans who keep guns in their homes, I didn’t grow up with firearms. But when I moved first out West, and then to the South, I got into guns big-time. I’ve owned a dozen guns over the years, including a Bushmaster AR-15, and have fired scores more. I’ve put in countless hours at the range, in the woods, and at gun shows.
I’ve made good friends on the range, love shooting skeet, and appreciate how integrally guns figure into the rural professions and outdoor pastimes of many Americans. I understand, also, why so many Americans don’t just like their guns but love them. From the robust kick of firing a revolver to the emphatic, mechanical bursts of shouldering an assault rifle on full auto, I have come to know the rhythm of guns, have felt the addictive thrill of their multi-sensory intensity.
But on that night in 2008, I learned something else. I learned how guns relate to fear, and not just the fear my gun inspired in the would-be-burglar. Owning guns had given me a sense of security, but all that was a fantasy that imploded in a few terrifying seconds.
Sure, I had frightened away an intruder, defended my castle. But I could have just as easily been killed by him or accidentally shot myself or my partner. Hundreds of hours of range time didn’t mean anything in the confusion of the moment.
The ease with which I had bought my guns, fired them recreationally, and even stoically contemplated the possibility of defending me and mine with lethal force suddenly seemed foolish.
In fact, it was almost as if my very closeness to guns had blinded me to the real possibility that they might lead me to actually killing another human being.
Whether we like it or not, in today’s America, we are all close to guns. In a nation with nearly 300 million privately owned firearms, it would be hard not be. But just because we are saturated with weapons does not make our relationship with them mature or reality-based.
Instead, just the opposite is the case: The American vision of gun ownership is dominated by fantasy, and the public discourse around guns is frequently hijacked by a kind of fantasy logic.
Only in fantasy does keeping a gun in the home make you safer; the statistical reality is just the opposite. Only in fantasy is the possibility of even minimal gun regulation a threat “to take away all the guns.” And only in fantasy can arming teachers and abolishing gun-free zones be seen as a reasonable response to gun violence — for only in fantasy does throwing more of a problem at a problem equal a solution.
After Newtown, the predictable chorus of “if-only-I-had-been-there-with-my-gun” included an Oregon state representative, Dennis Richardson, who wrote to some of his constituents that, “If I had been a teacher or the principal at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and if the school district did not preclude me from having access to a firearm . . . most of the murdered children would still be alive, and the gunman would still be dead, and not by suicide.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps the good representative would have been shot dead without having a chance to draw his weapon. Or perhaps he would have been gunned down by confused first responders. Or perhaps Richardson would have taken the best aim he could while under stress, missed, and killed a child or two himself.
If trained NYPD cops can only manage to take down a single gunman by wounding nine bystanders in the process, as recently happened outside the Empire State Building, it seems unlikely to expect much better from the 63-year-old Richardson.
All of these scenarios are equally hypothetical, but that Richardson should offer macho posturing in lieu of constructive reflection speaks as much to what Gov. Cuomo has rightly termed a national “madness” as it does to that madness’ allure. If only the minimal difference between the life and death of 20 children, the only bulwark needed against tragedy, was some decrepit politician playing Dirty Harry.
I had thought I’d be ready to play that role, too. I had my shotgun at the ready that spring night because there had been three break-in attempts on our house in as many months, the last in the early afternoon while my girlfriend was home. I don’t think they realized she was there — the car wasn’t in the driveway — and when they tried to kick down the door, already damaged by someone with a crowbar a couple weeks prior, she called the cops, then me.
I got there before they did and found her hiding in the bathtub, the front door in splinters around the hinges and a couple of shotgun shells lying on the porch. Presumably, whoever tried to break in had dropped the ammo while attempting to get inside.
I called my landlords to give notice and took my gun out of its case, removed the trigger lock and put it in that closet. The feeling of safety this gesture gave me was quite real.
The desire to feel secure is understandable, but our fantasies are killing us. America averages 34 gun homicides a day.
For an organization that blames America’s gun crisis on violent movies, the NRA in particular seems deeply committed to cultivating the notion that we can all be the stars of our own personal action flicks.
I got my opportunity to play hero. Not in fantasy, but in real life, the chance to flex my finger with three pounds of pressure and shoot another human being dead in my driveway because he wanted to steal my TV. Right after we moved, I sold all my guns. I never wanted to put myself in that position again.
Enough is enough. In 2008, Japan, which maintains strict gun regulations, saw 11 gun homicides; in that same year, America had over 12,000. This is the world in which we live, which we have made for ourselves, and which understandably inspires fear.
The choice before us now is either to double down on that fear and make the situation worse by arming ourselves further, or to break the chains of fantasy altogether. Blithely wielding the power to kill does not make you heroic, and it will not make you safe. We are not free if we choose to continue living in fantasy, and we are not brave if we choose to continue living in fear.
Blanchfield is a Ph.D. candidate and Woodruff Scholar in comparative literature at Emory University in Atlanta.
Such articles prove it isn’t about homicidal rampages. It’s about getting the bulk of private owned guns out of homes.
Meanwhile would he girlfriend have been writing an op ed this weekend if her boyfriend had been killed by that home invader?
Patrick Blanchfield is now unarmed and brags about it.
Future Darwin candidate?
Every gun I own is loaded all the time; even when I had small children in the house. Every firearm loaded and a firearm in every room. My children's lives depended on it.
This fruitcake doesn't deserve a firearm, a "girlfriend" or anything else. This is the sort I will not defend when SHTF.
THE UNITED STATES IS NOT JAPAN. I really hate when morons like this throw out statistics from a country in which there is a huge difference between that culture and the American culture and equates them as being the same.<pP
I also hate when these liberal idiots demonize firearms by way of a statistic (34 gun homocides per day) without a thorough breakdown of that statistic (as in how many of those deaths were thug-on-thug?), or without a comparison to other causes of death (such as 196,000 deaths per year due to surgeries or medical practices gone bad). There are an average of 88 deaths per day due to traffic fatalities, yet I don’t hear idiots like this demanding private ownership of automobiles be banned.
"America should give up its right to defend itself because I'm a sissy."
This story just doesn't have the ring of truth! He peed his pants and dropped his ammo...this man worm has NEVER handled a weapon.
Funny, when I hear a loud noise at the back door (usu. the damn cats or a coon again), I never have any trouble getting to cocked-and-unlocked with my .380 ... what's his problem? Repeatedly racking his shotgun? -- what kind of numnutz does that?
Good for him. I hope every commie bastard out there gives up his firearms.
I hope his girlfriend found a real man. I know 12-year-old girls with more balls.
Oh, now it comes out some more! Sounds like our boy wants a Ph.D. in "bullsh!tter" too.
Wonder if we've got ourselves another Sandra Fluke here.
Since now he does not have a gun, he will just puke on the robber. Perhaps that he can operate correctly.
Remington 870’s work as he described.
Well, that explains a lot.
“the emphatic, mechanical bursts of shouldering an assault rifle on full auto”
Yep, calling BS here, myself....
When my wife tells me I make her feel protected I don't barf... instead, I see that as an opportunity for her to show her appreciation.
This patrick is a fraud and doesn’t deserve to own
a gun or a girl friend.
I guess Patrick would have prefered to run the burglar
off with nothing but a baseball bat and stark naked too.
That happened to me now I always have a firearm, cocked
locked and ready to go.
Not smart enough to own a firearm if he can’t even operate a pump shotgun in the dark correctly.
I will never forget one day several years ago, Walter Williams was guest-hosting for Limbaugh. A caller asked if he would really shoot and kill somebody for stealing his big-screen TV. Walter said "No, I have insurance to recover the loss of the TV; I would shoot them for violating the sanctity of my home".
There is little more repugnant to me than these lengthy, convoluted, sermons designed to rationalize, normalize, and proselytize the retreat of a coward.
Wow. If this crap is true, I hope girlfriend has exchanged this one for a real man. Dude’s walking ‘round with a shriveled, empty sac there.
Or got her own gun to compensate...
Absolute fiction. Really painful to hear the ‘I always had guns and used them, but now I know different’.
Like the lifelong Republican that voted for Gore, Kerry, and Hussein in the last elections.
“Remington 870’s work as he described”
If they’re broken. Own two of them, you must press the bolt release if you do not pull the trigger after cycling the action.
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