In college my freshman year my roommate and longtime friend, Laura, and I drove up to my family’s one room cabin for fall break. It was in the mountains of nowhere Virginia.

We had campfires and s’mores. We stargazed, skipped rocks on the wide beautiful creek. We went to sleep under a quilt my grandmother made. It was well out of range of phone service and an hour away from any gas station, never-mind grocery store.

It was gorgeous, it was idyllic, it ended abruptly in the middle of the night when the cabin door was violently banged on over and over and over.

I remember throwing my hand over Laura’s mouth when she started to scream.
I can still feel the adrenaline pulsing through me as the fists beat loudly on the only door. There were no windows to see who was on the other side of the wall.
And there were no voices calling out, only the fists pounding, and the pounding of our hearts.
Time stood still. I raced through my mind about what to do.
How I was going to fight my way through whoever was on the other side while Laura raced for my car to go get help?

I started thinking about the sketchy looking guys who had been fishing up on the creek earlier, clocking two teenage girls clearly alone, staying in a one room log cabin with one door.

I quickly searched my mind for what was in the cabin, I was sure there was no gun, but there was a hatchet somewhere.

15 minutes of door banging feels like an hour.
15 minutes gave me enough time to get on my socks and shoes and reach for the hatchet.
15 minutes of hearing footsteps walk around and then come back to bang ever harder.

And if I’d had a gun on this pitch black night, my brother or his older guy friend playing a “prank” might be dead.

America, Home of All the Guns

I grew up in the country, in hunting culture. My daddy had a bird dog, and he went hunting with him, and even me, as a baby with ear protection & a little orange cap. I used to help him clean birds at the kitchen counter as a 3 year old.

But something has changed from those days in the 80s. My dad with his increasingly huge gun collection that isn’t about just hunting anymore. The way we talk about guns in this country isn’t the same either.

I’ve read the words: "America has a gun fetish” many times.

But that’s not quite it.

We have a control fetish …in a world where we are increasingly aware of all the terrible things happening, in a world where we feel increasingly out of control.

We have a world that is often unfair and brutal and shitty.

We’ve known this watching what’s happened in Palestine, in Ukraine, hell what’s happened with people being snatched off the street and our lack of ability to stop the insanity.

We see our lack of control with what happens in healthcare when sick love ones can’t get the care they need because they can’t afford it & they die.
We see this with climate disaster, tragic events wrecking lives, homes, whole communities.

We have a country that’s been built on the idea of faith and rugged individualism.
And they are both lies.

We can’t ruggedly outshoot facts. Worse yet rugged often shoots someone on accident, makes a mistake that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

My daddy narrowly avoided killing his father when cleaning his gun as a young man, and most families that have guns have a story of something similar.

We can’t out-arm or out-pray the problems of statistical truths (like a mess of unregulated guns & ammunition cause a ton of death by guns and ammunition.)

We can’t protect every loved one every minute from every deranged human let loose with fatal weapons.

We can’t protect kids who pick up a gun unknowingly and have an accident. Or who sit on a couch, and the trigger goes off. Yes, that really happened; I’ll never unsee the video of multiple shots firing from a kid just jumping on a couch.

We have to start coming to terms with the vulnerable truth that we are safer in blindly trusting our community, in seeking out how we’re connected, and in doing what’s best with common sense for the whole, even if it feels more empowering to say, “Come into my house and I’ll defend myself.”

I truly understand that it feels more empowering to say what you plan to do to someone hurting you or yours, I really do. But that notion is a form of gas-lighting too.
We’ve been sold the idea that we can own something to make uncomfortable worry go away.

That if we’re faithful to our god and uphold our can-do, I’m-responsible-for-me-and-mine attitude, that the worst won’t happen to us.

But we know that’s not true. In America there are 12 guns to 10 people. There are more guns than people. We aren’t safer. We’re dead-er.

America has a comforting-fantasy fetish, -and it’s about control.

We also have a time honored avoidance of discomfort. Sitting in discomfort isn’t what we’re known for.

Data shows us time and again that chances are you’ll shoot your brother coming round to borrow a tool, or someone knocking on your door because of a broke down car, or accidentally your own self.
Or even worse -that a kid on your property will meet the end that is the reason the number one killer of kids in the USA is guns.

And it wasn’t the last

Laura and I packed the car up and left in the middle of the night those years ago in Virginia.

She was shaking and crying and I was terse.
I can remember my brother & his buddy saying, “Oh come on, don’t go, it was just a prank.”

It would be decades later until our culture had the words or even tipped its head in the acknowledgement that strangers in the night coming to violently bang on the door of 2 young women is sadistic.

Men still debate their perceived insanity of women saying they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear than a male stranger.

“Don’t be such a baby about it!” I remember my brother’s friend saying. “Are you really leaving for real?”

Laura said to me quietly, “I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I don’t trust them”
I said, “I trust them. AND I know. And we’re going home.”
I didn’t need her to explain it. And I knew I didn’t have the words to try to make the fuckery make sense to my baby brother.

I remember the last words I said to him before we drove away.

I said, “You’re very lucky I didn’t have a gun.”

His eyes were wide at first, then relaxed, he said, “You don’t like or own a gun.”

I said, “But the cabin could have.”

I drove off.

It wouldn’t be the last time it was good thing that I hadn’t been armed.

The flag would never rise again

Today I rode by a flag at half mast at our electric co-op and I was angry as hell.

Was it lowered for the kids shot at school yesterday, or how about last week? Did they lower it for the other political assassinations this year? No. They lowered it in homage to a self-proclaimed white suprematist that literally said: some deaths were worth the price of protecting the 2nd amendment. A man that stoked hate and fear.

Hate and fear have been very very good to the gun industry and the political far right industry, and the fantasy we have control industry too.

Trump and his ilk are out there saying that the extreme left has brought about this man’s death -the-only-death-they-care-about. His life is worth something that every other murdered child in America is not.

Journalists are getting fired at pointing out the hypocrisy. No, no, we all have to start speaking up.

We have to start flying our flags at half mast every day a child is lost to guns.

-But it would never rise again, I hear you say.

No such thing as strapped *enough*

2 years ago after a hate sign appeared in our field my overly-gunned father told me he’d come sit in our barn with his piles of guns and protect us.

I said, “What about when you need to sleep? Eat? Take a shit?
You can’t protect us with your ammunition twenty four hours a day.”

We’re not all in the same room, locked away like gold to be easily protected all the time.

And if we were, that analogy sounds more like a prison than a safe life.

Our country is imprisoned and experiencing casualty after casualty to the idea that we can ruggedly, individually, and prayerfully protect each and every human we love with just enough guns.

There aren’t enough guns or vigilance in the world for this fake fantasy.

We’re not asking folks to just believe statistics or hard evidence, we’re asking them to give up a sickly sense of false safety and personal control. It’s not our freedom, it’s a fantasy the 2nd amendment is protecting.

And I’m long since ready for us to wake up.