Posted on 08/19/2002 5:14:48 PM PDT by BraveMan
The gun that he held six inches from my daughter's face was not real.
In fact, it wasn't a gun at all. It was the kind of "gun" you make with your fingers, the kind kids make when they're running around playing cops and robbers.
Only this guy was no kid. He wasn't a cop. He wasn't even a robber. He was a man who appeared out of nowhere and confronted me and my daughter on the corner near our home where we waited for the bus.
As he approached us, my first thought was that he would ask for a cigarette or money. He was clearly agitated, and he stepped right into our personal space, way too close for comfort. With his bulging eyes, his leered at my 17-year-old daughter, asked "How ya doing?" and then, with one swift motion, brought his imaginary gun out of his pants pocket. He aimed it right between my daughter's eyes.
"I've got a gun! Take it easy!" he yelled, with a rage brought on with no provocation.
Then, as quickly as he had come, he was gone, turning away from us and heading down the street. He turned back to wave and grin a crazed grin at us, which did nothing to ease our tension and fear.
Actually, it increased it. For this was the grin of someone clearly disturbed or high on drugs and undoubtedly dangerous. If not to us, who? If not now, when? What type of mind, what type of man would do such a thing? And why?
Yet what was even more disturbing to me was the thought that popped into my mind immediately after he had turned his back and began to walk away from us.
Me, who had been in the process of developing an essay critical of the use and availability of handguns in this community. Me, who could not understand why people would want to own a gun. Me, who had intended to write that gun ownership, even by well-meaning, law-abiding citizens, only increased senseless violence and did nothing to abate it.
My first thought as I saw this creep, this sicko, put a look of horror such as I had never seen on my beautiful daughter's face - and a hook of terror in her heart where there had previously been none - was that I wished I'd had a gun. If I'd had a gun, I thought, I would have aimed it square at his back, and I would have killed him.
My thought was that by doing so I would relieve society of a tragedy waiting to happen. For the price of a bullet, an innocent such as my daughter would be protected and justice would be served, instantly.
All of this emotion over the mere threat of violence to one of my children has shaken me to my very core. It has twisted any rationality I may have had regarding the ownership and the use of guns.
What am I suggesting? That we resort to a wild west type of society, where vigilante gun slingers roam the streets taking the law into their own armed hands? Not at all, although, after reporting this incident to the police, I can certainly see why that scenario might be preferable to some.
To continue the story: Hours after this event, after we had caught that bus we were waiting for, kept my daughter's optometrist appointment and further digested what had occurred, we decided we needed to report the incident to the police.
After all, the woman who had, years earlier, demanded me to give her all of the money from the cash register of the bakery where I was a clerk, had later been caught and charged with armed robbery, even though it had been determined that the "gun" she had pointed at me from inside her jacket pocket had actually been a comb. Because she claimed to have a gun, because she had threatened to use it, she could, in the eyes of the law, be charged as if she had had a gun.
We took the car this time and drove a few blocks from home to the police station, just a few blocks from the bus stop where we had our confrontation. As my daughter and I got out of the car, she screamed, "Mom, it's him!" and, incredibly, it was. He was walking diagonally across the police station parking lot, looking as crazed and aimless as before. He saw us and recognized us, but kept walking casually in the opposite direction.
We ran into the police station and quickly told the officer at the front desk what had happened, pointing out the man who was getting further away. Foolishly, I half expected this officer to leap over the counter and run down this man or at least, commission a squad to do the same. Instead, the officer wrote down some information and disappeared into a back room. Moments later, another officer came out with him and asked us to repeat our story. Then, astoundingly, in a tired voice, the second officer asked, "What would you like us to do about this, ma'am?"
I realize that this police station needed to operate the way emergency rooms do - that is, to treat the most serious matters first. After all, this man had not shattered my daughter's face with a loaded firearm. He had only pretended that he was going to. What kind of reaction could we reasonably expect?
But urged on by our exasperation, disappointment and shock, the officer did put a call out to the area squads. He gave them a description of the man (now long gone) and told them that he had a gun. The officer then told us he would call us if they needed any more information.
He had done his part. We had done ours. Hopefully, this sad man will get stopped and, hopefully, he'll either be detained or given mental health treatment.
But the sad truth is that, in all probability, nothing will happen until something happens.
Which left me to wondering: Something would have happened if I had been one of the estimated 70 million people who own, and often carry, handguns. I would have easily, in a split-second decision based solely on the raw passion I have for my child, shot at this man for pretending that he was going to shoot and kill her.
That makes about as much sense as anything that I have read from the various pro-gun advocate literature and Web sites I have perused. Combined, these readings essentially conclude that a safe society is an armed society, that rational, law-abiding citizens shouldn't have their freedoms challenged by gun-buying waiting periods or by specific weapons restrictions. These advocates argue that citizens should be trusted to use their rationality to know when, and if, and how, to use a firearm for their own personal protection.
And it is this logic that frightens me. Prior to having my daughter threatened in this bizarre manner on a street corner near the home I have lived in for the past 18 years, I was such a rational, law-abiding citizen. However, if a gun had been in my hand during that moment of fear, anger and confusion, I would have used it to do something illogical and irrevocable. I would have crossed the line of reason. I would have easily become that thing I have claimed to hate.
And in spite of everything, I'm not sure if that's a right worth protecting or a pernicious alternative best eliminated.
I do agree too that I'd like to walk up to these folks and point my finger at them, though...or maybe just a menacing stare, in case they might be able to react by shooting me in the back...(BTW, wonder if the thug in question was a homeless fellow?!)
Yup, SOMEBODY slipped into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn't looking!
As usual, the hoplophobe uses projection to legitimize his or her fears. Since they would exhibit so little self-control, they assume that everyone would be as out of control. Nevermind that her daughter was in very real danger of becoming this guy's plaything, she's more wrapped up in her irrational fears. And those fears make her want to lash out, but not at the guy who actually threatened her child.
Instead, she's going to lash out at anyone who might have had the courage to take a firearm and actually defend themselves against this guy. Since she feels inadequate as a result of her self-imposed helplessness, she wants to make sure that everyone around her is similarly helpless. Their ability to defend themselves is a threat to her. But of course, the real threat to her was close enough to smell; not some imagined phantom of what she'd have done "If I'd had a gun".
The woman could not ask the man to stay away because she had no means of backing up the request with force and did not want to provoke the man into becoming more angry and possibly violent.
The man undoubtedly relies on the fact that most people are conditioned to be civil toward others and expect civility in return, while relying on either safety in numbers or the police to keep order. In this case, the woman had neither.
Here is the cusp of the article, in my opinion:
But the sad truth is that, in all probability, nothing will happen until something happens.
The author apparently suggests that some civilian will take it upon himself to rid society of the "disturbed" "dangerous" man, in vigilante fashion, without sufficient cause and outside the law.
Thus, the "disturbed" man, who she perceives to be a criminal (reinforced by the alleged acceptance of her side of the story by the police and the issuance of a report for the suspect), becomes the victim, and those who she imagines might have the means to respond with lethal force via a gun become the perpetrators.
She resurrects her sense of morality, not to mention her political correctness in the eyes of her editor, via writing that "That makes about as much sense as anything that I have read from the various pro-gun advocate literature and Web sites I have perused."
Many, apparently including the writer, the editors of the newspaper, and the "disturbed" man, have been conditioned from an early age that they should never defend themselves or their loved ones when threatened, and that they should always rely on government services to protect their persons and possessions.
The one person in the story that in fact seems to understand the irrationality of the anti-gun conditioning and its unintended consequences, paradoxically, may be the person who was labeled as disturbed and dangerous.
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