My father was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, but during the Carter Administration he resigned his membership. He didn’t give up hunting elk and deer and ducks and geese, but he quit seeing himself as a supporter of the Second Amendment.

“Nobody should have a gun who isn’t trained to handle one,” he said. “The NRA wants everybody armed, but there are a lot of idiots out there.”

He also said that if the Republicans made guns an issue, sooner or later only Republicans would have guns. He considered the Republican Party a criminal organization, so it’s possible that he had gotten the idea from a bumper sticker. But he was a prophet, considering that guns have become a staple of identity politics, one where with every mass shooting, some people buy guns and other people get rid of them. One story says guns make you safer from the villains that come in the night to rape and rob you. Another story says that the gun in your nightstand will kill the intruder who turns out to be your kid coming home from college, a neighbor returning your lawnmower, or yourself in a moment of despair.

Statistically, the second story is way more likely to happen. But the NRA has been pushing the first, and they’ve won the narrative battle. We now have far more guns than people in this country. Few of those guns were bought in the expectation that they were going to destroy the buyer.

Gun deaths in 2020 were 45,222. Of those, 24,292, or 53.7%, were suicides, some of them suicides with company.

 

I grew up hunting, because my father was a hunter and he wanted me to learn to put meat on the table. He was a child during the Great Depression, and he knew well the uncertainties of our economic system. You needed ways to eat without money if the money went away, he thought, and he made sure I thought the same thing.

Gun safety came before hunting. Lots of things can go wrong when you’re carrying a gun, even when you know what you’re doing. When I think of the time and effort my father put into teaching me how to use a gun safely, I realize that any parent who lets an eighteen-year-old buy an AR-15 without teaching him when and where to use it is acting out a family death-wish or worse.

“Don’t ever point your rifle at anything you don’t want to kill,” my father said. “Always keep the safety on until you’re ready to pull the trigger. Don’t have semi-automatics. You never know if they’re loaded or not. Don’t own a pistol. The only thing a pistol is good for is killing people. Unload your gun before you get in the car or house. Lock your guns up. Keep them clean. Always assume that a gun is loaded. Don’t shoot at anything you haven’t fully identified. Don’t shoot in any place where there are houses. Don’t waste ammunition. Take care of the meat you kill, and never let it spoil.”

The rules seemed endless, but they all had a meta-rule behind them: “A gun is a tool that will put food on the table. If you love hunting, so much the better. But don’t kill things for the adrenaline rush, and never be careless with a gun.”

Behind all the lessons was a meta-lesson: “I care enough about you to teach you about responsibility, right and wrong, and the possibility that you’ll someday become a competent and contributing human being.”

That was what I learned about hunting before I ever hunted anything. When I killed my first deer at age ten, my father told me how to cut its throat and gut it, and then watched while I did that bloody, stinking, and unpleasant job.

Coming home covered with blood, with a deer in the back of the Jeep, was a new and powerful chapter in my life story. That night I cleaned and oiled the Winchester Model 94 30-30 my father had given me as my first gun. It had become a part of my identity. It represented a step on the endless road to manhood.

I was careful with the gun and never pointed it at anything I didn’t want to kill.

 

My father’s lessons have stayed with me, so much so that a few years ago, when I wandered next to the gun counter in the Boise Cabela’s, I found myself hugging the floor when a young clerk, demonstrating an assault rifle to a customer, swung its barrel in my direction. My reaction was pure involuntary reflex. I picked myself up and went looking for the strike-anywhere matches I had come in for.

I found the matches in the camping gear. A man was standing at the end of the aisle watching me and I told him I couldn’t find strike-anywhere matches in grocery stores.

“That’s because you can break the tips off them and use them to cook meth,” he said. “Grocery stores don’t sell them anymore. People come in here and try to buy all we’ve got.”

I realized I was talking to store security. He looked me up and down and let me buy a couple of boxes because I didn’t look like a meth addict.

I wondered about a retail outlet where the security people hang around the camping gear instead of the guns.

 

The American Rifleman, the magazine of the National Rifle Association, used to have a column in every issue called “The Armed Citizen.” While my father was still an NRA member, it came to our house every month, and I was a faithful reader. “The Armed Citizen” was a collection of news items from across the nation, each of which detailed an incident where a bad guy was killed or arrested by a good guy with a gun. Without the gun, the good guy couldn’t have been a good guy and often would have been a dead guy.

At age ten, I was all for armed citizens, especially ones armed with Model 94 Winchesters. I spent a lot of time imagining myself shooting bad guys with mine. In doing so I was exchanging my father’s story for one supplied by the NRA. In the NRA’s story, I was using my deer rifle to kill evil people who were going to kill or kidnap my family or my classmates in Ketchum Elementary School or innocent tourists in the campgrounds at Redfish Lake.

If this sounds like a scenario only a ten-year-old could dream up, that was because I was ten when I dreamed it. But I had help from armed citizens all over the country, who had given flesh to my fantasy, as it were, by staying alive by killing people.

If I have trouble visualizing the horror of child soldiers of various African militias, kidnapped and indoctrinated and sent out to terrorize and kill without conscience, all I have to do is remember myself when I was ten years old.

 

I have not killed a deer or elk in thirty years. My current hunting ground is the Costco meat department. It’s expensive but not near as expensive as the gear, gasoline, and camo that are now required to bring home wild game.

The story my father told when he was teaching me to hunt—the one about my gun putting food on our table—hasn’t been about me for years. I gave the Model 94 to a cousin and sold most of my father’s other guns.

I still have a beat-up rifle that could put meat on the table if the money goes away, although it might be hard to find an elk or deer left in Idaho after that first hard winter when nobody has any money. I have an old 12-gauge pump shotgun that was my twelfth birthday present. In violation of my father’s rules, I purchased a cheap semi-automatic pistol in a pawnshop. It cost me $250 and twenty minutes of my time for a background check. I’ve only used it to kill a packrat that was nesting in the woodpile.

All these guns are locked away, and if any bad guys break the door down while I’m sleeping I’ll have to ask them to wait until I get dressed and try to remember the combination to the gun safe in order to hold up my end of a shootout.

 

I dreamed of being a sharpshooting hero when I was a child. I don’t anymore. That story has been replaced by white cultural narratives called Self Defense or Standing Your Ground or Getting Them Before They Get You. It’s a story that requires you to look at yourself as a victim unless you’re armed. You need to protect yourself from nighttime intruders, black-clad Antifa anarchists, Mexican rapists, Black Lives Matter militants, nasty neighbors, federal agents, drug dealers, rogue cops, and Chinese students who ace their SATs.

These are crappy stories, ones that pretend to say that defending against all the dangers in the world is possible. Their real purpose is to create, somewhere in your reptile brain, a deep fear of other religions, races, tribes, or political beliefs. They pretend that a gun can protect you from a pandemic or from the destruction of your rights or from economic collapse or fentanyl. It can’t.

Here’s a hint: if your plan for a secure future depends on killing thieves, there are better ways to find them than when they break into your home and hearth. Voting them out of office is better than killing them anyway.

Self-defense may be good for business, but over time it creates a nation of demented agoraphobics peeking out from behind their curtains, ready to blow away a porch pirate or, if the light is dim, the neighborhood UPS driver.

I’m watching myself for the moment when I unlock pistol, rifle, and shotgun and place them in handy places around the bedroom. Under my pillow, for instance. In a holster hanging on the bedpost.

It will not be a great day for sanity in our neck of the woods.

 

As a nation, we haven’t had a great day for sanity for some time. Across this country, in a futile attempt to make themselves real, suicidal young men with assault rifles are shooting people who can’t shoot back. These are events that defy explanation, which is to say that when you look for the story behind them, you can’t find one, beyond the video-game convention of winning meaningless points if you destroy enough pixels on the screen.

Killing people on a screen and killing people aren’t all that different if pixels are what you’ve come to believe in. For a lot of young men, pixels are more real than their chances of getting a decent job or finding a mate.

The screen-raised generations that we’ve produced in the last couple of decades can be forgiven for thinking that life is a video game. But their fathers aren’t forgivable. I don’t know the level of parenting skill it would take to know that when your kid is suicidal he shouldn’t have an assault rifle, but I don’t think it’s a high bar.

Again and again, we’ve seen fathers who have abdicated their responsibility to their kids. Children need a story if they’re going to make sense of their lives, and it should be a story that ends with them smarter and kinder and more aware than they started out. If that story is beyond a father’s capacity for invention, he shouldn’t be a parent.

These young mass murderers have lost the plot. Not that they ever had one.

 

My father saw the election of Ronald Reagan as a tragic turning point in this country’s history. He saw, behind Reagan’s folksy patter and friendly smile, a murderous narcissist who would wreck the American working class.

He didn’t use those words. He called Reagan a phony and a crook and a hypocrite.

My father took small satisfaction when the criminal indictments came rolling in for Reagan’s cabinet and cronies. He saw, in the Republican abuse of the public trust, a deliberate destruction of the American project. But he stopped short of adopting the doctrine of Getting Them Before They Get You.

As he aged, my father began to say that the best days of this country were during his working life. I know that’s what old people say when they get nostalgic for their youth, but I’m not sure he wasn’t right. I’m glad I got to spend a bunch of those good American years with him.

As for his guns, I sometimes regret selling them, but guns aren’t for hunting anymore, at least not in this house, and there wouldn’t have been much use for them otherwise. I hope that’s always true.