A Shot of Jack #44: A Personal History of Gun Violence
So I took the week off last week and forgot to tell you I was doing that. Sorry about that. I needed the time to assess my projected workload in the coming months.
In this issue:
A Better Lie Subscriber’s Edition News
A Personal History of Gun Violence
Links - Good news, bad news, and the worst speech in history
One Last Thing - Outlining Advice
Originally this issue was going to have my reviews of Dune and Dune 2, but life got in the way of my seeing Dune 2. So this week you get a reworked essay about gun violence.
Bad Pennies
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A Better Lie Subscriber’s Edition
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A Personal History of Gun Violence
I’m maybe six years old. We live in a house on five acres of wilderness about twenty-five miles from Tacoma. There are a group of cans on a fallen log. My dad has his 30.06 rifle. He shows me how to use the sites to aim. I pull the trigger. There’s a loud sound. One of the cans is no longer on the log. He tells me “Loaded or unloaded, you never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy.” It’s a good rule I won’t always follow.
I’m seventeen. My dad takes me and my friend target shooting with a few of his friends. We fire pistols, rifles, and shotguns for most of the day. One guy has a .50 caliber pistol. It holds and fires only one bullet. My dad and his friends fire this gun from a chair. I stand in front of the chair, aim, pull the trigger and find that I’m now sitting in the chair directly behind me thanks to the kickback. My friend gets a gleam in his eye as he fires. He’s never fired a gun before and he loves the feeling.
I’m eighteen. My parents have gone to Hawaii leaving my little brother and me home alone. He has a friend come over who starts a fight with me. I get him pinned down. He says, “I’m going to kill you when I get up.”
I promptly get off of him, go into my parents’ room, unlock my dad’s gun case, take out the .38 Taurus five-shot pistol and point it at my brother’s friend. I tell him since he’s my brother’s friend, I’ll let him take his threat back and leave and if he doesn’t I’ll shoot him as an intruder. He leaves. I don’t stop shaking and I don’t let go of the gun for another hour.
I’m nineteen. My parents are on the verge of divorce. One day I come home to find no one home and three of my dad’s four locked gun cases unlocked and empty. I have no idea what’s going on. So I lock the doors, unlock the fourth gun case, load the old 30.06 inside and wait. My dad returns home a few minutes later with the three guns. I ask him what’s up. Turns out my brother let him know that a guy was driving my mom around in my dad’s car. My dad knew the guy and went over to his house, but the guy wasn’t home. Now he was home and realizing how close he came to doing something really stupid.
I’m twenty-one. I purchase a 9mm Makarov pistol. It’s a Russian gun. With the end of the Cold War, I’m fascinated by all things Russian. I start carrying it on a daily basis. My new wife doesn’t like this.
My wife is working night shift as a waitress. I often visit her there. One night there is a table of belligerently drunk guys making lewd comments and gestures. One of them grabs her butt as she walks by. I’m a young hothead and I think about shooting him in the head and then decide to leave, disturbed at the thought.
I decide I don’t like having a gun. Though I had originally bought into the common line that it is better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it, I realize that in reality, at least for me, having a gun leads to situations that I would otherwise avoid. I don’t want to sell it because I might change my mind. So I give it to another friend to hold on to for a while.
One day that friend loses his job. He gets drunk and high. His girlfriend gets home and finds my pistol on her coffee table and gets angry with him. He picks up the weapon. He says, “I don’t know what you’re so mad about. It’s not like I’m going to shoot you,” and he points it at her. He continues, “It’s not like I’m going to shoot myself,” and he hits it against his head and it goes off. It hits him just behind the right ear and kills him almost instantly.
I’m still twenty-one. I attend my friend’s funeral. I walk with his girlfriend from the chapel at the cemetery to the gravesite.
I decide I’m never going to own a gun again.
I start researching gun violence. I listen to interviews, watch documentaries, and read articles, studies, and books on gun violence. Among the things I learn:
We are nearly 40,000 gun deaths every year in America and it’s currently going up.
When Australia enacted strict gun regulation after a mass shooting, gun murders went down by 70% and gun suicides went down by 80%
For every time that a gun owner uses a gun in self-defense 34 innocent people die.
I’m thirty. I start a website called TacomaStories.com. I write about every homicide that happens in my hometown of Tacoma. About 80% of them are committed with a gun. (Check out TacomaStories here on Substack!)
I’m forty. I spend hours every week arguing with people on social media about gun violence. I learn that most people are fine with common sense gun regulation like background checks, required training, licensing, and registration. I also learn that while most people agree, it isn’t something they’re willing to do much of anything about. And I learn that those who do own guns, every single one of them that I’ve ever talked to, believes that they are a responsible gun owner no matter how unsecured their gun is or how little training they’ve had. Lastly, I learn that those against strict gun regulations will not be swayed by facts, studies, or experts.
I’m turning fifty in December. These days I largely avoid arguing about gun violence anymore. I’ve accepted that there is a contingent of people who will allow any number of men, women, and children to be destroyed by bullets as long as they continue to have easy access to a weapon twice as likely to kill the owner as anyone else. It’s modern day unwilling human sacrifice. The Aztecs had their pyramids. We have lax gun laws.
Click On The Links Below For A Good Time
The worst speech in history was 20 minutes long and destroyed a jewelry store empire.
While everyone is focusing on Israel, Haiti just got overrun by criminals and escaped convicts.
One Last Thing
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I’ve found that spending my time online reading newsletters is more rewarding than spending my time reading social media. Comic book write Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations newsletter had this little piece of advice from Warren regarding outlines.
Outlines can be good and useful things for some pieces. But they’re not writing. Writing is in how you tell your story. Outlines can lock you in and stop you from telling the story properly. Sometimes I use a technique I call milestoning. I remember once trying to describe this to Idris Elba of all people, and him laughing in a way that suggested he had discovered I was a good deal less clever or sane than he’d previously believed.
You’ve got your list of events that need to happen in a certain order for your story to unfold and make sense. Write them out simply. Those are the milestones. It doesn’t matter how you reach each milestone, nor from which direction, so long as you tap them in the right order. You can invent any route through the woods you like to hit your milestone, and the direct line isn’t always the most interesting one.
Next time you’re stuck, don’t outline it to death and drain all the juice out of your story: write your milestones out as a list, as bare as you like, get your walking stick out and wander in their general direction. Sometimes, structure is just there to stop you drowning in a bog. Everything else is fair game.
- Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations 03/10/24
As a guy who outlines things often to meticulous degree, I needed to hear this. Sometimes I find I’m using outlining to avoid writing. This is a reminder to get to work. I figured I’m probably not the only writer who needed to hear it.
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