My Father’s Gun
Americans have turned weapons of war into consumer goods.
I own a gun. It’s under a couch in my family room, which is a weird place for a gun, but maybe not for a gun owned by an American. How many stories of children who find a gun and accidentally shoot themselves or a sibling report the odd location where they picked it up—on the edge of a bathroom sink, on a kitchen counter, on a parent’s bedside table? Our country is so full of guns that we’ve run out of places to put them. There can be one safely stowed in a lock box, with the ammo removed, another one half-forgotten in a linen cupboard, and a third one underneath the front seat of the car, loaded and ready to go. Guns have a lot of meaning to many of us, and
