The hardest part

Is this what they see from heaven?

Last night I finished the most difficult section of my book. I knew it would be hard that's why I put it off until I was about a third in.

It’s about guns.

How is it that a sixty-or-something so-called humor writer ends up writing about such a serious subject? Because I didn’t always write light hearted, nostalgic, make you smile and feel good stuff. I used to write hard-assed opinion pieces that pissed people off. The letters I received, which proclaimed me an asshole, didn’t bother me. It meant someone was at least reading what I wrote and that, dear struggling writer, is what we do. Write something they will read.

It was about children being murdered in their classrooms.

January 1989, twenty-five year old disenfranchised drifter, Patrick Purdy parked his vehicle behind the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. He set the vehicle on fire and then shot 106 rounds from a Chinese made AKM assault rifle, into portable classrooms.

It was about teachers going to work and never returning home.

I wrote a piece, (which went out over the wire service), defending a citizen's right to own assault rifles. Why did I, the mother of an infant and a toddler defend a killer’s right to arm himself?

It was about how we had to un-list our phone number.

People found me and called me and told me how brave I was to stand up to politicians who were using the tragic event to back their agenda to ban semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. Crazy was on my side, sanity was not.

It was about defending a killer’s right to kill.
Defending the killer was never my intention but once the reader was imbued with that perception there was no going back. I wasn’t ashamed that I had written the piece, my intentions, (which I will not go into here), though misdirected, were noble.

It happened again.

Newtown.

This time my daughter was affected.

It’s odd really, that the Stockton killer, a quarter century before the killings at Sandy Hook,  bought his assault rifle at the Sandy Trading Post in Sandy, Oregon. I cannot write more about what happened here in Connecticut. We have still not picked all the pieces of broken glass from our hearts.

It will never stop.

That chapter, which follows twenty-five years of my thoughts regarding the people’s right to arm themselves, chronicles three pieces, two older op-eds and a new column, each distinctly different in their approach to the second amendment. What happened before, and what happened after each one was published, speaks volumes regarding readers opinions and my own. It speaks to my change of heart. I’m not as anti as some might expect, but I’m sure not as pro as I once claimed to be.

Guns

It’s a four letter word like fuck. How it’s used proclaims its meaning.