Urgent: Send Men With Guns

Reflections from the Burning House

My father bought a pistol during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, a .25 caliber Baby Browning automatic, a gun so small, you could slip it into your sock beneath baggy trousers like men wore back then. It was definitely a spy gun.

I was six years old, and I followed him out to our backyard in what was then rural East Lansing, Michigan. Behind our yard were fallow fields going on for miles. The first one you saw had a rise to it, making it a useful backdrop for catching rounds.

From the garage, Dad grabbed a hammer and a stake about three feet long. He walked to the rear of the yard, drove the stake into the ground, and then moved back about twenty feet. I was standing next to the swing set, and he told me to move behind him.

I peered around him as he raised the pistol.

Blam, blam, blam.

The loudness of it shocked me, especially because it was such a small gun. Three holes appeared spaced equidistantly down the stake.

Being a huge fan of The Lone Ranger, I was immediately aware that my father was a dead eye. Of course, at my age, he was literally also a giant.

I remember looking up as he then ejected the magazine on the tiny gun, checked the chamber, and unloaded all the rounds.

He noticed my fascination.

“I’m now going to take this gun apart, Davy.”

“But why?”

To me, this was a pistol perfect for a kid. It would fit my hand.

“Can I hold it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a toy. I’m going to take it apart and hide all the pieces. You’re never to touch them or play with any of them. If you even try to find them, you will be spanked. And I’m not kidding.”

He looked at me with so much gravity, I’m sure it quieted me. He was an extraordinarily sensitive person, but not particularly empathic toward me. Nonetheless, he noticed I was cowed and tried to explain.

“Right now is kind of a scary time, Davy. But you don’t need to be scared because your mom and I will keep you and your sisters safe.”

“But what’s scary?” I asked.

“There are bad things going on in the world. There might be a war, but hopefully, not. Nobody’s sure, and so I got this little gun just in case I need it. Nobody should play with real guns. They’re dangerous. I just wanted to shoot it to know that it works. Now I know it does, and I doubt I’ll ever take it out again.”

“But I didn’t know you could shoot a gun. How did you know how?”

“From when I was in the Navy.”

“Oh.”

Dad then called me over to the back of the house and opened the cellar door. He showed me the cement staircase leading into the basement. Along all the ledges cans of beans and sardines were piled high. Dad was fond of canned sardines and often enjoyed his children’s expressions as he ate a sardine, onion, and mustard sandwich.

He swept his hand over the cans and explained that this was where our family would hide “if the Russians bomb us.” He reassured me that the chances were very low, but it was better to be prepared.

Along with millions of others, I lived with this fear until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. This old fear resurged somewhat when Putin recently threatened to use “tactical nuclear weapons” in Ukraine. There’s no such thing, of course; tactical nukes are about two to three times bigger than the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dad and I had a complex relationship during the Cold War and for a few years thereafter. It was always more important for him to be honest with me than necessarily kind, even when I was a kid. If he didn’t want me to know something, he wouldn’t talk about it. If he told me something, it was the truth - as best as he understood it.

Thus, I knew about war from my earliest boyhood. I knew it was always men who fought and killed in them, and I would grow to be a man. And I had some understanding of the atomic bomb because Dad had many picture books from World War II. Also, he liked to include me in watching reruns of the “Victory at Sea” documentary series from the 1950s on the U.S. Navy during the War. All this was not so unusual. Many dads were like this then, and I played Combat (after the TV series) with my buddies and had a Combat toy machine gun, which was a highly coveted item.

But Dad’s WWII preoccupation seemed stranger to me as I grew up because, at several points, he mentioned how much he hated his four years in the Navy.

I eventually understood this had to do with the fact that although Dad never actually experienced war, he was always adjacent to it and grew up being prepared for it. His father, my Grandpa Verwin (also called “Bogue” by Grandma Donna, a 1920s term of endearment) was a World War I veteran severely traumatized by combat and being gassed as a regimental runner at age 17. Any regimental runner during the First World War was a highly valued sniper target.

After “invaliding out” of the Army and starting a family, Grandpa Verwin - Bogue - built a shooting range in the basement for his two young sons, my dad and Uncle Ed. This was their “sport” growing up, and he bought each of them a .22 caliber rifle. Beyond this, Bogue remained distant emotionally from his sons, chain-smoking Chesterfields (or Benson and Hedges 100s later on), and drinking far too much hard liquor, which he’d likely picked up as “liquid courage” during his military service.

He was very quiet, and I never knew him well. The inner wounds Bogue carried left him unable to involve himself in anyone’s life. He was very passive too. Grandma Donna “ruled the roost,” and my mother later expressed great sympathy for him, calling him “hen-pecked” (an unfashionable idea today). But I do know that one time during an argument he exploded and shot his pistol four times out of the bedroom window. This was a couple of years after Dad and I’d visited and gone out to shoot that same pistol at tin cans with him. I was about eight years old and had been overjoyed.

Bogue made sure his boys knew how to shoot because he felt a father had a responsibility to do so, and he hadn’t had one. His own father had abandoned him and his mother to abject poverty before he turned five years old. The military became the only path with a future for a barefoot farm boy from Iola, Kansas, especially after the Neosho River flooded in 1915.

In the shooting range gift to his sons, Bogue passed down an ancient generational male vigilance for threat - one built from the direct experience of war.

This might be a good moment to notice that the United States of America has never not been at war or in armed conflict somewhere since the nation’s founding, and today marks the 250th anniversary of the “shot heard round the world” fired at the Battle of Lexington which began the American Revolutionary War.

As a young Navy lieutenant, Dad carried a briefcase filled with thousands of dollars in cash handcuffed to his wrist from shore to ship to deliver the payroll. He also had a Colt .45 automatic as his sidearm in case someone attempted to rob him. This is one means of understanding Dad’s vigilance for threat with that tiny Browning he needed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I’m sure he didn’t feel worthy to be in charge of men who’d survived WWII naval combat and seen the death and maiming of their comrades. It’s unlikely he’d have ever spoken directly about his insecurity, even to Mom, but he did tell me once he felt resentment from some of the sailors. I’m also certain this discomfort added to a sensitivity he must have felt for his own combat-traumatized father. War did something to change men, and if only he might understand it more deeply, maybe he might be able to fit in with them, including with his own father.

Becoming oriented to WWII history and experience became part of Dad’s assigned script as a man. He read the huge tome, “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, cover to cover and many other similar books. He watched Victory at Sea again and again throughout his life alongside countless documentaries and movies about WWII.

I know because he often included me. It was a father and son activity, but it was his obsession. Sometimes I will watch some of these same old documentaries to remember him. It was that much a feature of our life together.

I think of the Navy and all of this focus on WWII lying behind the purchase of his little Browning pistol. He was thirty-five years old when he bought it. Later in life, I asked him whatever became of it. He said he sold it for three hundred dollars. It had become a collector’s item.

I remember feeling vaguely disappointed. I thought I might inherit it, or he might give it to me.

Guns can be talismans for boys, given to them by their fathers. They contain the ghostly magic of generations of wounded and initiated men and their blood struggle to dominate or to counter domination.

My own relationship with firearms has always been very mixed. Morally, I disapprove of them. I also have a healthy fear of them. But I am deeply socialized into the same vigilance towards threat as my fathers and grandfathers - all of who owned guns - to the point of having held their guns and fired them too.

I feel this vigilance to threat every day right now. I am wondering how other men are dealing with it because I don’t think I’m alone. Lately, I have been feeling my family and the human family itself may be in mortal danger. I can visualize the people in power who are the perpetrators of this sense of threat, and they don’t appear to be kidding.

My fathers and theirs going back generations taught me that any man should have a firearm and know how to use it in such a time as this. Yet the side of me repulsed by such weapons for killing other humans asks what could possibly be a reasoned and moral purpose for owning one?

I recently attended an introductory workshop on Kingsian Nonviolent Resistance, and somewhat awkwardly, asked this same question of my co-participants and facilitator.

I was surprised to hear others struggling similarly. That is, they didn’t just dismiss the urge for weapons out of hand. They too were wondering. The overall sense I heard was that the need for self-defense and to protect others were matters of careful contemplation, especially now.

There is a threshold for violence in response to perceived threat in all of us, remarked the facilitator, “and it’s a highly personal matter where that threshold actually lies.”

Firearms are just highly lethal tools of metal and chemistry that fit somewhere alongside this contemplation. There are, of course, many others.

In 1783, the citizens of Boston passed a city law to reduce a fire hazard: the keeping of “canon, swivels, mortars, howitzers, cohorns, fire-arms, granades, and iron shells of any kind . . . in any dwelling-house, out-house, stable, barn, store, ware-house, shop, or other building.”

It’s amazing to consider so many of such items lying around way back then that it had become a local fire hazard. Apparently, owning arms has always represented a known feature of home and family endangerment in the U.S., yet this fact has had little effect on the proximity and availability of firearms or the incidence of extreme violence in our society.

And bizarrely, while assault weapons are under highly justifiable scrutiny due to their use in umpteen mass murders, historian Clayton Cramer notes that it’s still legal in the United States for any citizen to own an unregistered, antique, black-powder cannon capable of discharging grape shot at a crowd just like in 1783.

They are just no longer a popular means of killing people.

So I’m not really writing this post about firearms. I could write instead about grenades or knives or slings. No, I’m writing about a culture inhabiting men which men also inhabit. I’m speaking to a culture inside me and my father, my grandfathers, and my sons.

This culture extends to many other people as well, even if it mostly began with fathers and sons. Sure, it’s a deeply-embedded phenomenon in masculine socialization and psychology. Just like firearms, it seems it can be regulated but not eliminated.

In recent studies, white, politically conservative, gun owners report feeling more “empowered” by possessing firearms during economic downturns. As well, the lone American white man - or woman - effectively fighting off an armed criminal assault with their handgun has become an iconic conservative trope. That’s not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, California Governor Ronald Reagan moved quickly to enact gun control measures when Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began advocating black men should bear arms in public. Here was the double standard of white supremacy front and center.

Malcolm X met with wide public condemnation when he highlighted the Second Amendment to his followers. And today’s Black Guns Matter, Huey B. Newton Gun Club, and National African American Gun Association are extending the symbolism of protecting against threat across the political spectrum and beyond the dynamics of its roots in masculine socialization and psychology.

Becoming armed now means a great deal to many people here in the U.S., and it’s no longer the purview of just the conservative crowd. In 2010, voting Republicans owned guns at more than twice the rate of voting Democrats - 45 percent to 20 percent - but this gap was shrinking rapidly by late 2024 with 29 percent of voting Democrats reporting owning a gun. The rising tide of gun ownership has other progressive and marginalized people engaged, including women and the LGBTQ+ community. Black Americans currently purchase firearms faster than any other ethnicity. Liberal Gun Owners has grown to more than 5,000 members, and together with similar groups, helps the more progressively-inclined work through their discomfort and learn to practice and safely use firearms.

Ironically, one of the factors causing me to think about whether I need to buy a gun is the idea that so many people may be capable of shooting at me or people I love.

Well, do I own one? I do have an old but pretty powerful single-shot air rifle.

I still can’t seem to rule out the possibility I might need something more. It’s like I’m waiting to see where things go. I’m watching this rising tide.

Whenever urgent alerts move around social media about the current administration possibly invoking the Insurrection Act and the possibly of martial law, or I read about innocent people shipped off on the basis of a tattoo to a prison camp in El Salvador, or students on visas, or U.S. citizens mistakenly and unjustly detained by ICE agents, or Proud Boys or recently pardoned January 6th felons being considered as possible militia-partners to Project 2025’s agenda, these are times I think I might need to be armed.

I am not a pacifist, even if I respect those who are. Frankly, I don’t consider it a practical and survivable world view. I have had to use violence to defend my life. I literally shook for hours afterward as the adrenaline dissipated. I’ve been thoroughly beaten up and had guns pointed at me on four occasions, three times by police officers, only once when I was actually doing anything questionable.

As to getting beat up or attacked, my mind moves between recollections of the powerlessness of being completely overpowered by an assailant, and my horror at the prospect of doing physical harm to someone, let alone taking a life. I know well that there are highly ignorant people in the world armed to the teeth who’d not give a second thought to reflecting about these matters in the way I am. They appear currently ready to be provoked to cross a line that I’m not willing to cross.

But I also have not yet discovered where this line to respond to threat with violence actually lies within me. And I truly don’t relish knowing, even if I feel I should. It’s the difference between me and them.

As gun sales continue to grow, maybe my misgivings become moot. Maybe it just becomes more prudent for everyone except the most moral or principled to become armed. I am deeply concerned about this possibility because a similar state of affairs happened just before the American Civil War.

In 1859, and in what became a “dress rehearsal” for the U.S. Civil War, John Brown, an evangelical Christian abolitionist, armed himself and his followers for a raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia to carry out the “sacred obligation” of destroying slavery by stimulating a Southern slave revolt. Before he was hanged, leaving behind his wife and twenty children, Brown famously remarked:

“I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”

I have many ancestors in this abolitionist story. In an old-fashioned sense, this is my bloodline.

I wonder how those people, faced with the prospect of violence in their lives and toward their loved ones, thought about this same question when they first began challenging the enslavement and owning of human beings.

As they were threatened and intimidated for trying to end slavery, did they too struggle with the question “should we arm ourselves?”

I wonder so very much what all my ancestors would say about how to live rightly and morally in a time of growing violent threat.

Is it better for our own sakes to lay low and not risk being subjected to violence when innocent people are being made to suffer right before our eyes?

Do we step forward on their behalf unarmed? There are organized and highly effective approaches toward doing so, as Dr. King and his followers demonstrated so effectively.

But what of “buying a gun” for protection of home and family as this abiding sense of violent threat grows? Would I be condemned to repeat the ancient errors of my forefathers? Would I just contribute to yet another overall escalation of human struggle toward the inevitability of war and killing?

Perhaps these ancestors might say it’s for all of us to figure out our own answers very soon. I still can’t say I won’t buy a firearm. And I can’t yet say I will.

But maybe such questions themselves are even more important right now because so few people seem to be asking them and are going out and buying a gun anyway.