I’m one of the lucky weirdos who is both right-handed and left-eye-dominant. I discovered that fact when I was about 10 years old and was allowed to join in the “target practice” in the hills behind my grandparents’ house. When my uncle handed me a light rifle, I took it with my left hand and raised the sight to my left eye. Either my dad or my uncle corrected me, but I responded with something like, “It feels wrong.” Frankly “wrong” isn’t the half of it. It feels downright unnatural for me to shoot right-handed.
I’ll never forget my uncle laughing out loud at his bookish, right-handed nephew shooting like a southpaw. I remember my dad shrugging his shoulders with that “What are you gonna do?” expression on his face.
I share this story to underline this fact — I was raised around guns. I was never one of the cousins who really got a kick out of shooting, but I don’t think of a gun as some sort of mythic creature that can act of its own accord. I haven’t only seen them in movies and on TV. So I can only hope that you won’t write me off when I share this next story.
When I was about 10 years old, I lived with my mother and younger sister off Jackson Avenue in Midtown. We lived in a little gray duplex that, in my memory at least, sat on a small hill.
Late one night, my mom had to run an errand. I don’t remember what the errand was. Maybe she just desperately wanted a Pepsi. My mother has a fondness bordering on mania for Pepsi. I’m not sure where we were going, and I’m not sure why she decided to take us with her. It’s likely this was after our house had been broken into, so maybe she felt safer letting us sit in the car while she ran inside.
So she woke me up and stuffed me into a coat and rolled my sleeping sister up in a blanket like a burrito, and, with me in the lead and my mother carrying my sister, we made our way to my mom’s beat-up old Toyota. I was sitting up front in the passenger seat and my mother was bent over sliding my sister into the back seat when a man ran up and grabbed her purse.
He had a gun, a handgun, and he was pointing it at my mom. She screamed, hands up framing her face like a cartoon character who’s seen a mouse. I was frozen. But the mugger ran off and my mom eventually stopped screaming. This story has a happy ending. We survived, and we lost only a cheap faux-leather purse and its paltry contents.
It can happen so quickly. That’s what I’ll never forget, even though in reality, this is something of a non-story. No one was shot; no one was killed or even hurt. Still, people are shot and hurt and killed every day. There’s the thinnest of membranes between a regular day and the worst day of your life. And, unlike with disease or catastrophic storms, this is a problem of our own making.
I admit it’s not a problem with only one solution. It’s not even a problem with only one symptom. There are so many kinds of gun violence, and so many causes. It will take effort and expense and coordination to fix.
Last week, a 24/7 Wall St. study was published; it cited Memphis as the most dangerous city in the United States. Reports such as that one aren’t helping anyone. Writing off a city — or a community or neighborhood or ZIP code — as inherently dangerous is in itself a kind of violence. It says it’s socially acceptable to ignore that problem, to judge or avoid a place and its people. And of course, legislation like Tennessee’s “permitless carry” bill, which Governor Bill Lee signed into law earlier this year, isn’t helping either. We will have to do challenging work, on multiple levels, from different angles, to have a hope of living in a safer country, state, and city.
There’s no silver bullet.
