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The Loaded Decision of Buying a Gun
What is the perfect weapon for a break in shared reality?
Once again, I was thinking about buying a gun to cope with the possibility of having to protect my family from the armed white supremacist militias of which my state has plenty. But the morning I was headed to the gun show, it occurred to me that I’m a depressive sort with a fair amount of obsessive thinking and that if I had a gun in my house there’s a possibility I would start to think about blowing my own brains out. Before I even had the gun I found myself thinking obsessively about where the gun would theoretically be stored in my house, and I was already imagining how easy it would be, how little time it would take, to load it up and end this whole thing. It’s not that I would want to forever, it’s that with a gun you only need to want to long enough to do it, and by then, of course it would be too late. If future generations find themselves wondering what it meant to live in America in 2021, I think it’s somewhere in there.
I told several close friends about my rekindled interest in owning a firearm, all women and all of a generalized lefty-peacenik variety, expecting them to be horrified. But all of them responded the same way. “Yeah. Makes sense.” My ex-wife and the mother of my children was one of the first…
