A Gentle Man and His Love of Guns

My father has always wanted me to have a gun. The adult me, that is.

When I moved to New York after graduating from college, he offered to buy me a handgun. A small one, ladylike, to keep in my night stand. I told him I did not have a night stand, and he offered to buy me one of those as well.

I sighed and said I did not want a gun because I did not know how to shoot, and should I encounter a member of the criminally inclined, I would no doubt shoot myself in the foot.

My father said he would pay for marksmanship lessons.

You see what it is like in my family.

So I had to resort to clarion honesty. I did not want a gun because I did not like guns. I did not think they were cool or comforting or necessary. I thought owning a gun was part of the problem, not the solution.

This was hard to say because my father loves his guns and I love my father. But when I read about the debate over gun control in this country, I can’t even take sides, I can’t even breathe properly, because with children dying all around us I cannot believe we are even having a debate. I would like to believe that anyone who has the least little interest in owning a gun is criminal, testosterone-challenged or an ill-educated redneck.

But then there is my father.

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He is a gentle man, scholarly and religious, a Yellow Dog democrat who can quote whole passages of the ballad of “Sam McGee” and hardly ever yells. He never goes anywhere without a book. I remember him sitting in the bleachers at my basketball practices, looking out from behind thick glasses and a Barbara Tuchman tome. When he was young, he had wanted to be a priest but didn’t think he was good enough.

He grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the Depression; his father had guns. Just because. During the Cold War, father lounged around the base on Okinawa and learned how to shoot. Very well.

When he and my mother married, he bowed to her judgment on all things, save one. There was always at least a handgun tucked, unloaded, somewhere we kids never discovered.

When we went camping, he would bring a gun with us, for protection and also to teach us to shoot. At tin cans. It was loud and I never hit a thing and the kick almost threw me off my feet, but my mother refused to participate so it felt enough like rebellion to make it worth my while.

Then I got older, and I didn’t have so much truck with the warrior ideal. Who were they warring with? Tin cans? Teenage boys? Children?

My father got older too and retired to New Mexico, where he bought even more guns, finally convinced my mother to join him at the firing range, bought her a gun.

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I did not understand it. Guns did not fit the meaning of my father as I knew him. They sat like an occupying army in the consciousness of a quietly socialist, Catholic humanitarian. I remember when I was a teenager, begging my father to let me see Bonnie and Clyde’s touring “Death Car.” After an ominous silence, he spoke.

“Bonnie and Clyde were self-centered cowards,” he said, with quiet fury that turned the food in my mouth to wax. “They shot people just for money. People with families, with children, people just like your mother and me. If someone shot us, would you want people paying to look at their car?”

How could this man enjoy owning and shooting a gun?

I do not believe that guns alone kill people. But I do believe that Bonnie and Clyde and Lee Harvey Oswald and Son of Sam and the two kids in Littleton would not have been capable of killing anyone if they had not had guns. I believe that guns are made for the sole purpose of killing things; for handguns and assault rifles, those things would be people.

My father does not believe this. He believes in gun control--he is more than willing to register and limit and wait. But he also believes in his guns; they give him a feeling of security and safety. Once, when he and my mother were living alone in our house in rural Maryland, a man--probably drunk--came pounding on the door, shouting, swearing, demanding to use the phone in the middle of the night. My father says he opened the door just enough for the man to see my father’s gun, “and suddenly this guy found his manners: ‘Could he please’ and ‘Sorry to disturb’ and ‘Thank you, sir.’ ”

I know there are violent people out there; I want my parents, who live far away, to have protection as they grow older. But I don’t consider having a gun protection.

And maybe that is the difference between my father and me. For him, a gun is what you used to prepare yourself for battle, to protect your wife and children, the desperate measure you hide in the closet.

For me, a gun is what teenagers use to “accidentally” shoot a 3-year-old and each other; what a man uses to “save” his wife and children after he is made despondent by unemployment. To me, a gun is what enters a situation made volatile by basic human emotions and makes it tragically and irrevocably worse.

But maybe we are not so far apart, my father and I.

A few summers ago, I offered to go with him to the shooting range in the hopes it would cheer him up. He practically skipped as he set out the aluminum pie plates we would use as targets. I took the gun out of the holster; it was a different gun than the one I had handled so many years ago, heavier, sleeker. There was a beauty about it, and recognizing that made the blood sing in my head. My father began loading it, explaining the rudiments, but his voice sounded strange, thick and dry. I looked at him, and his hand was shaking.

“I just realized that here is a gun,” he said, “and here is my little girl. And it makes me feel afraid.” He peered at me through those schoolteacher glasses. “Isn’t that strange?”

I smiled and shook my head. Then I aimed the gun and blew a hole in the center of the first pie plate, and was unforgivably proud.

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Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.