Should I Buy a Gun?
After falling victim to a string of traumatic crimes, Amanda Fortini considers a controversial means of protection
By Amanda Fortini | January 12, 2012
Print One afternoon four years ago, my then boyfriend strides into the den where I’m reading a book and shows me a gun. A metallic silver handgun still wrapped in its original plastic, it lies there, impotent, in a small metal lock box, but it terrifies me anyway. My boyfriend, who I’ll call R., lifts the top of the box gingerly, like he’s displaying a rare and delicate treasure, a Fabergé egg that might shatter if jostled. He wants me to know there’s a gun in the house. I wonder when he decided he needed it, where he bought it, whether he applied for a permit to render the thing legitimate. Is owning a gun in Los Angeles even legal? Then, growing irritated, I ask myself: How did he manage to do this without my knowledge?
I’d never seen an actual gun, except in the holsters of police officers. To my mind, guns were verboten, menacing, violent. They were unpredictable contraptions beloved of white supremacists or paranoid meth heads in creepy desert hideouts. My formative years were spent in Illinois, where gun control laws have long been some of the strictest in the nation. I lived in a middle-class suburb, where mall-going was the chief recreational pastime and there wasn’t a culture of hunting or shooting for sport. My mother, who raised my two sisters and me alone, was a champion worrier—she forbade us to ride in cars if there was so much as a hint of “precipitation” and hired babysitters for us until I was well into high school, to my great dismay. But she certainly didn’t keep a gun at home for protection. Whenever she heard a suspicious late-night noise, a creak or crash that convinced her someone was climbing through a basement window or lurking around our deck, she called George, the sturdy, mustachioed cop who lived with his young family across the street, to sweep through the house and give her the all-clear.
http://www.elle.com/Life-Love/Society-Career-Power/Should-I-Buy-a-Gun?src=sem&mag=elm&dom=outMuch more at the link.
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