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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Against maternity clothes
What does a hipster mom-to-be do when she has to trade her leather jacket for pink jumpers? She cries.
By Sarah Madsen Hardy
[10/20/99]

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Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew?
By Helene Stapinski
[10/20/99]

For the bad times
Sometimes a friend in crisis is better than a friend for life.
By Lauren Kessler
[10/19/99]

For all the girls
First, my daughter came out. Then, she took me out with the girls -- to see the Sinatra who packs a dildo.
By Lee Uttmark
[10/18/99]

I cannot tell a lie
What happens when a hooker confesses to her parents.
By Tracy Quan
[10/15/99]

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In junior high, where I met my future husband Dwayne, we witnessed mass fights and riots. I saw girls with razors in their hair and boys with fists. There were more riots in high school; boys fought viciously, one with a tire iron. Fights could be brutal; our friend B.D. got his jaw broken over a quarter in a parking-lot craps game. But no one was killed in school, and no one had guns.

Dwayne had seen guns in his neighborhood. Many fathers there, originally from the South, still hunted. On New Year's, they shot guns in celebration.

But Dwayne never had a gun. When we were newly married, hanging out at my longtime girlfriend's house as drugs really exploded in our city, Dwayne was terrified when my girlfriend's husband pulled out a semiautomatic pistol from under the couch. A potential customer, or killer, had knocked. I was upstairs with my friend and her new baby.

Later in the car, Dwayne told me we couldn't visit them again. "He pulled out a piece. We can't take that chance," he said. "Could be the cops. We could get caught in a shootout." He shivered, I remember clearly, and said, "I heard him cock that baby. Click, click."

Thirteen years later, a shotgun fell on my head as I searched the closet for baby clothes, and my heart leapt in fear, like a small animal tethered to my breastbone. Dwayne hadn't told me about the shotgun, never mentioned we were armed. I suddenly imagined him holding the gun, cocking that baby. Shuck, shuck.

Since college, Dwayne had been working with juvenile offenders at a correctional facility. Many of their crimes involved guns. When I was five months pregnant with our first child, Dwayne worked graveyard shift. One night, a juvenile pretended to take an overdose of stashed pills, and Dwayne had to escort him to the hospital. A man jumped from the bushes and shot Dwayne in the chest with a Taser stun gun. Dwayne staggered, but his size, his sheepskin jacket and his bravery blunted the shock. He punched the man, knocking him down, and ran after the hobbling juvenile headed for a van. Then another man emerged from the van, pointing a .38 at Dwayne's face. Dwayne had no choice; he had to back away.

He didn't tell me. He didn't want me to faint, to upset the baby. But I read about the escape in the paper and then I saw the burn marks on his jacket. When he described what had happened -- to me and later to the court during trial -- I heard what bothered him most: the unfairness of the gun. Bravery and size and loyalty don't match up with bullets.

I confronted him about the shotgun, after gingerly laying it on the floor. I knew nothing about bullets or shells or what the heavy black weapon might do. Dwayne sighed. He said our city had become increasingly unsafe, with car-jackings and drive-by shootings and random violence. He'd gotten the shotgun for protection, for the intruder that might break into our house. He would be ready to protect us -- his little family. He would be a good husband and father; repelling evil was his job.

But I saw him fall in love with the guns themselves, the seduction of the barrels and oil and wooden stocks with carving, the power of caliber. He bought a handgun, then another, and spent hours comparing weapons with our next-door neighbor and my brother. Our neighbor, a very conservative guy, had gleefully told us that he thought a burglar had tested his bedroom window one night. "All he has to do is put a finger over the sill, and he's inside the threshold of my property. I can blow his ass away. It's my right."

My brother acquired his first gun when he was very young, from a recently-fled drug dealer's residence. Now he lived in a rural orange-grove area, and he shot at coyotes who killed his animals, and at drug runners who used the groves for transport. Sometimes he joked that he only shot what moved.

Dwayne began shooting at the range, and shooting in the groves with my brother. Even my brother was impressed when my husband bought a Chinese-made SKS assault rifle. "How many rounds would it take to kill a possum in the yard?" I joked. But I was scared. I didn't want anyone pushing on my window screens, but neither did I want the burden of a dead person lying across the sill.

Next page | Honey, the guns are in the oven ...