Today I talked with my Little™ about guns and gun violence.
Shoot to spill
I didn’t plan on it, to be clear. It’s not something he and I typically talk about. Heck, it’s a big, fraught, hairy subject for anybody, let alone a child. But later on that day, thinking about what I had said, I felt a kind of satisfaction. Like, I had shared my perspective in a way that landed. And then I thought it might be worth documenting and putting out into the world as one example of how this kind of conversation could go.
As we were starting our day together, walking out to my car, he showed me his new soft pellet gun. A matte gold plastic replica of a Desert Eagle (“point five oh”).
Seeing it caught me off guard, I didn’t know how to react. As a former kid who spent a lot of time playing with toy guns—rubber band guns and Nerf guns and laser tag guns and video game guns—I was curious. (“Woah, cool!”) As a new dad, as a Big™, I was anxious. (“Woah, not cool.”) So what the heck was I supposed to say?
I took a beat, my mind searching for words, and I said, “You know, the other day I was in the car stopped at a red light, I saw a cop zoom through the intersection, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Further down the road I saw another one turn around in the middle of the street and start following the first one. You know where they were going? Two kids were shooting at each other on the playground in the park by my house. I mean, 16-17-18 year olds. But still. Kids, with real guns.”
This was a true story, unfortunately. And just the latest example that came to mind. Not even really out of the ordinary. A not-so-simple fact of life in America.
“Where’s the orange tip?” I said. “You’ve got to have an orange tip on the end of it because that’s how people know it’s a toy.” This is what I grew up believing anyway.
“Oh, I think it came with one,” he said, “should I go and get it?”
“You better go get it. Just to be safe.”
He came back empty handed, saying maybe it got tossed in the garbage by accident. We got in the car and started on our way.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to be a bummer or a downer. When you grow up and you read the news, you end up reading a lot about guns and gun violence. I’ve read stories about kids who were playing with toy guns that looked like real guns, and the cops got involved, and those kids aren’t around anymore.”
“You’ve got to be careful. I know you wouldn’t do anything bad, but what happens when a neighbor you don’t know, or a stranger passing by, sees you and calls the cops? Then the cops are gonna show up and they’re gonna treat it like it’s a real gun. They’re going to roll up and act like you could shoot them, and they could end up shooting you.”
Later in the day, in the car on the way back, he was fiddling with the toy gun. I said, “Sometimes I think about whether or not I should own a gun.” I didn’t need to say anything. What was I thinking? “I really don’t want one, but sometimes I feel this pressure to have one.”
“Why?”
Should have seen that coming. “Well I feel like, if something bad happens then I want to be able to protect my family.”
“Some people have guns as a form of protection. They think if they have guns, it’s going to scare away the criminals. But then the criminals get more guns or bigger guns. And then we go and get more guns and bigger guns. And where does it stop? It’s just too many guns. I’d rather live somewhere where there were no guns at all.”
More than anything, I hope it made him think and feel comfortable thinking through something complicated. To hear an adult express a strong opinion with a level head. But also to hear an adult express their inner uncertainty. I’m proud of him for how he engaged with me.
Kids with guns / Kids with guns
Taking over / But they won’t be long
They’re mesmerized / Skeletons
—Lyrics from Kids With Guns by Gorillaz
I often cite Demon Days by Gorillaz as my favorite album of all time. (One day I’ll write about it, I swear.) There’s a track, Kids With Guns, that has been going on repeat in my head while writing this post. When I went to grab one of the lyrics I wound up reading some of the curated annotations:
The generations that begin in that chaos will not know that there was a safer past, an oasis of happiness that their ancestors destroyed.
This line means that this generation of people who know no safety, no happiness, will then be in control of the human race, so they will continue to feed the chaos that is humanity.
It goes on like that. But I found it thought provoking, to look at something I’m so familiar with in a different light. It reminded me of how much I enjoyed that kind of critical analysis during my brief stint studying English literature in college. Where you’re assigned a story or a passage from a longer book. You read it, you write about the meaning and the symbolism. What you think it all means, what the world was like at the time the author wrote it, and how it influenced what they wrote.
Got me thinking, for those eras before photography and moving pictures, that kind of close reading is about as close to time travel as we’re going to get. Maybe paintings, artifacts? In any case there are limits to how we can interpret the past. How we can interpret anything at all really.
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