Bang

"Happiness is a Warm Gun"  ---Lennon / McCartney


The young man had recently graduated from a prestigious private university.  He was biking across the country in this, his final summer before traveling to Russia, where he had planned to teach English as a Fulbright Scholar.  He made several stops at various waypoints along his route, staying with friends, soaking up the local culture.

It was a warm July night in Colorado. He and a friend decided to catch a movie.  It was one of those mundane decisions that, in the end, would forever change the course of his life.

James Holmes, 24, was in the audience that night.  Before the film ended, twelve people had died and 58 others were injured in what came to be known as the Aurora Massacre.

He was among the injured.  25 shotgun pellets were lodged in his face and neck. But Stephen Barton is a survivor.  His wounds still healing, he filmed a brief ‘public service announcement’ and launched a grassroots campaign to “demand a plan” to end illegal gun violence.  His video message and petition can be viewed here:  www.demandaplan.org.

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We have a problem with guns in this country.  Illegal guns are, of course, the biggest and most intractable problem.  They find their way into the hands of whack jobs.  They get the big headlines.  Waco (1993.)  Columbine (1999.)  Virginia Tech (2007.) The shooting of Gabby Giffords (2011.)  Aurora, The Empire State Building, The supermarket shooter.  All this year.  The trend is not good.

Then there are the accidental shootings, tragic in their own right.  Within the past week, there was the Connecticut man who killed his own son, mistaking him for an intruder, and the young man in Stoughton, Mass, who had just received his gun permit, and was showing his gun to his younger brother when it fired, killing him.

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“Take good care of your mother, son.”  It was a final goodbye.  The boy began to protest, but with that, the EMTs whisked the stretcher out of the house and into the ambulance. It was the last time the boy would see his father.

Hours passed. The boy crawled into bed in his parents’ room.  He wasn’t really sure why.  His mother returned, alone.  There was nothing she could do, she’d been told.  She accepted the ambulance driver’s kind offer of a ride back home from the city in the middle of the night, because the alternatives frightened her.

The inevitable phone call came. Tears flowed. The elderly aunt and the mother comforted each other.  The boy felt himself grow numb. His left arm reached out to the bedside table, the one beside the wall, out of sight of the others. He grasped the loaded gun. 

His father had spent the last part of his life as a paraplegic; he’d kept that gun at his bedside, thinking it might be the only way he could protect his family from an intruder. The boy had always known it was there. It had been drilled into his head for as long as he could remember, he was never to touch the gun.  And until this moment, he never had.

His mind raced.  At thirteen, he was overtaken by emotions that he could not handle. He knew that his mother was in agony, and that he could not help her. He couldn’t envision a future beyond that moment. Within a split second he had decided.  He would shoot his mother, then himself.  He would save them both from a life of never-ending grief.  His grip tightened. He closed his eyes.

Perhaps it was divine intervention.  More likely, it was simple cowardice.  The boy released his grasp on the gun. 

It really, truly could have gone either way.

This happened nearly forty years ago. The wounds of the moment eventually healed.  Lives went on.  The boy’s mother will go to her grave never knowing this story. 

Unless she reads his blog.