In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head.\u00a0 I\u2019d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad juju all around me. \u00a0Misreading the bleeps on my psychic radar, by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.<\/p>\n
A scant ten minutes earlier, I\u2019d been in a meeting and now was pretending to listen to a Vietnam Vet turned lawyer who fancied himself a lady\u2019s man.\u00a0 Instead I was assessing each pedestrian on Napoleon Avenue.\u00a0 It was a self-soothing technique used when on high alert.\u00a0 Each person was quickly categorized as to safe or unsafe mostly based on their dress and posture. \u00a0This inner detection system had been honed on the New Orleans streets for over fifteen years and had never failed; but that was before I understood how easy it is for some to disguise evil as good.<\/p>\n
As I assured myself all was well, I felt a vibration much like the distortion in the audio when a speaker\u2019s volume is turned up too high.\u00a0 In the nanosecond it took for me to register consciously what was happening, the dapper dressed demon had already closed the space between us loaded and locked and was now shifting his gun from my head to the Vet\/Lawyer\u2019s face.\u00a0 I knew they were both talking because their lips were moving but the information was lost in translation.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I panicked.\u00a0 Clutching my purse close to my chest, I started running away from the lighted street into the darkness of the poorer neighborhoods that exist behind all the old-world charm of uptown avenues.\u00a0 Hiding behind a parked car, I watched and waited for him to come and find me.\u00a0 When he did, he put me on my knees with the gun to my forehead so that I was looking up into dark blank eyes.\u00a0 Smiling, he growled through clenched teeth, \u201cgive me your purse, you stupid bitch<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Two weeks later he killed a tourist who refused him his wallet.\u00a0 Two weeks after that he was caught and later tried and convicted for murder and armed robbery.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never know why he killed the man and not me.\u00a0 What I do understand is that in the time it would have taken to retrieve a gun from my purse, he would have shot me.\u00a0 This was the catalyst for the slow and painful process of opening my heart and then changing my mind regarding gun ownership and gun control.<\/p>\n I suffer no illusions about using guns.\u00a0 My early life was wild and chaotic, filled with mean and nasty characters much like the ones found in any of Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s gothic depictions of the antebellum South.\u00a0 As a Gulf Coast Navy brat born to poor circumstances, guns were the norm.\u00a0 The maintenance of the big anti-aircraft guns mounted on the aircraft carriers used in WWII was my father\u2019s responsibility.\u00a0 Along with the 1950s baby sitter, the television set, those images shape shifted my baby boomer imagination.\u00a0 My first heroes were President Eisenhower, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers – the good guys with guns.\u00a0 Mounted firmly on my stick pony firing my toy guns, I passed days of creative play fighting the Russians and other bad guys.<\/p>\n On my first hunting trip, we came across a mama raccoon and her babies hanging out on a limb.\u00a0 Encouraged by the taunts of my teenage friends, I took aim and fired again and again and again.\u00a0 Eight times.\u00a0 Suddenly, I could hear the high-pitched squeal of a not quite dead rabbit as my grandfather slid a knife beneath its skin.\u00a0 This Silence of the Bunnies<\/em> memory mixed with my slaughter made death real and tangible leaving a metal taste in my mouth.\u00a0 I never hunted again.<\/p>\n As an adult, working my way through undergraduate school tending bar and waiting tables in 1970s New Orleans, I often found myself in the French Quarter after midnight mixing and mingling with the nightcrawlers and the tourists.\u00a0 An uncle with mob connections had given me my first handgun, a hammerless, double-action derringer.\u00a0 His only instructions were if you pull it, you better be ready to use it.<\/p>\n A New Orleans cop gave me a better idea.\u00a0 One evening as I stood outside the same Howard Johnson\u2019s where just three years earlier Mark Essex, a dishonorably discharged Navy man had shot and killed seven people, two men approached trying to coax me to their car.\u00a0 Hey there Baby, need a ride?<\/em>\u00a0 With my muff pistol safely hidden in a cheap purse with finger on the trigger, I pointed it toward the two men and firmly said GO AWAY!<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0As they slithered back into the dark night, they looked back at me saying, Hey now pretty girl.\u00a0 We just wanted to party<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n At twenty-six, I already knew killing someone would drive me over the edge.\u00a0 The lingering guilt of having left that derringer loaded and unattended had been enough to make me rethink my fake bravado.\u00a0 To be the cause of the fear in my son\u2019s eyes as I watched his seven-year-old friend point it at him, shames me to this day.\u00a0 As it should.\u00a0 Just as ignorance is no defense under the law, neither is it with me when taking my own actions into account.<\/p>\n My progun opinions didn\u2019t change then nor when my cousin used a handgun to shoot herself in the heart after chain smoking crack cocaine for a week. \u00a0My uncle had given her a gun too.\u00a0 I can still hear the hum and hollow whooshing sound of the ventilator in her ICU suite.\u00a0 In real life, gunshot victims don\u2019t look like they do in the movies.\u00a0 There is no make-up, no weak smiles, no last confessions; just a physical body doing its best to stay alive with medical assistance.<\/p>\n There were tubes coming in and out of every orifice plus one for feeding.\u00a0 Barely conscious with the intubation tube pushing air into her lungs, she stared out of tear-filled slits for eyes.\u00a0 Looking like she was about to crack wide open like a split tomato left on the vine too long, her body clung to life long enough to recover.\u00a0 That\u2019s how biological life is \u2013 it goes on pitted against death whether the consciousness inhabiting the form is up to the task or not.<\/p>\n Several years later, I sold my last gun in 1995 after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.\u00a0 I still don\u2019t know why this terrorist act got my attention when a Glock 19 held to my head failed to do so.\u00a0 \u00a0What I do know is that for me the differences between owning a handgun, a rifle or a military weapon like an AR-15 are painfully obvious:<\/p>\n One is for protection.<\/p>\n One is for hunting.<\/p>\n One is for killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head.\u00a0 I\u2019d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":4216,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[206],"class_list":["post-4093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global","category-uncategorized","tag-2019may"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}