Be aware, I’m going to write about firearms. It’s going to take a while, but I’ll get to it.

A tax code revision allows some teachers to deduct some [more] of their school supply purchases. In response, an engineer announced: “When I was a kid, we were responsible for our own school supplies and if you didn’t bring them to school, you did not participate in the activities.”

When I was a kid, learning disabled kids were left out of school entirely, and even then the wealthy sent their children to absurdly expensive private schools, most people could afford to live a one person’s salary, Russia’s Soviet Union was the ultimate enemy (okay, that hasn’t changed much), and we hadn’t put a man on the moon. Oh! And teachers could deduct everything, EVERYTHING! including travel, because travel is educational. Teachers were treated with respect, and though their pay was poor, the working conditions were better and the perks were substantial, and they were never sued. Most were overqualified first-generation college grads thanks to the GI bill or women with few employment options. Times change.

When I was a kid we didn’t have to wear helmets while on our bikes and some of us got concussed. I had continuous abrasions on my bare knees and elbows from the playground because girls were required to wear skirts to school. Those injuries never healed during the school year from the age of 4 until Junior High when we stopped playing. The Polio vaccine was brand new and a girl I knew didn’t get it in time. In her teens she’d already had a dozen surgeries that allowed her to walk, in pain and only with metal braces. I knew of children who died of measles and probably a few boys who became sterile from Mumps, though that was not something we talked about. Nice girls didn’t pierce their ears.

When I was a kid, the Republican party was still all about individual and states’ rights and defending us all against federal overreach did not extend to expecting individuals to arm themselves for when the government came to get them. The Democratic party was still split between northern liberals fighting for Civil Rights for all and Dixiecrats upholding the Jim Crow South. [It’s why my grandmother from Texas registered as a Republican in Portland, Oregon, but throughout her adult life routinely voted for Democrats.] Social Security was still a relatively new thing and people liked it, the new highway system was popular too, limiting commercials on TV, and the twentieth century requirement that products do what they are advertised as doing instead of poisoning us (over-the-counter meds) or blinding women (mascara).

When I was a kid, we thought DDT was perfectly safe and girls who “got pregnant” had to drop out of school if their parents couldn’t afford to send them to Japan or Sweden for a safe abortion. Single women weren’t likely to keep their babies and married women weren’t allowed to do some jobs, and unmarried women weren’t allowed to do other jobs, and any woman was expected to quit working early in pregnancy. It was required. Divorce in the previous century (the 1800s and before) favored fathers receiving custody of all but preschool-aged children, but by the middle of the twentieth century, women most often automatically gained custodial rights.

When I was a kid, I was the only kid I knew who’d eaten sushi, I loved horses, the death penalty was used all over the world, and everyone I knew subscribed to at least one newspaper that was delivered to their door by a boy on a bicycle. Local children were molested, parents beat the backs of their half-naked kids in their backyard and no one called anyone to report it. (There was, in fact, rarely anyone to call, as I discovered at barely age 18 when I heard the child crying in the night.) Women were routinely called “broad” or “chick” to their face., insulted and cat-called. It was treated as a man’s right and a complement. Adult women with grown children were referred to as “girls” and were expected to be flattered, but it was demeaning to call a man a “boy.”

When I was a kid, I heard ethnically abusive and racist terms spoken by adults that today would cost people their jobs. I heard those words long before I learned anyone say shit or the C- and F-word out loud. I had to ask my parents what words meant. They asked me where I heard those words; they warned me that they were rude and unkind, and I should never repeat those words.

By high school I had gay and Lesbian friends, and I knew enough not to care or pry. When my boss paid me less than the new-hire boys I was asked to train, it was perfectly legal. He was indignant that I suggested it was unfair.

By high school, I publicly advocated for birth control and the right to abortion and brought speakers to my public school to talk about it. I supported gun control and debated my father for the following twenty years about the need for better regulation of firearms. We had guns in our family home, partially disassembled and locked up, but I’d been taught how to disassemble and assemble a handgun, how to clean it, determine if it was loaded, and how to shoot. I also got past every lock anyone put in my path by the age of ten. A gun safe probably would have worked, but that’s not what people had in those days.

In my early twenties, I had two friends who were shot in the spine accidentally while at a party in two different summerhouses. Another friend got drunk, waved a gun around in a California state park and was shot through the spine. All three lost the use of their legs. Scott was the first boy I ever dated and the only point of connection between Scott, the boyfriend of my first roommate Sharon, Richard, and the board member of the Afghan Hound club of which I was President, Ingrid, so far as I can determine, is me. I knew all three of them and all three became paraplegics while we were still in Seattle.

When random shootings began to increase with the radicalization of the NRA, my father changed his mind about gun control.

Does private gun ownership protect individuals against their government? Has it ever? I have read reactionary opinions that Jews should have done more to defend themselves against German aggression in the Warsaw Ghetto. How would that have accomplished anything beyond [quicker] extermination of an entire community? Which it did. Waco, Texas? Ruby Ridge? Eastern Oregon and the destruction of public lands? I’m not on the side of those men and find that the private use of guns (not talking hunting rifles here) has always threatened the safety of gun owners and those around them. (The belief that guns offer protection and special rights makes trouble.)

There have been “successes”. You might count the Revolutionary War. But we had the French as allies and while not all of us supported the armed rebellion, we had Brits were on our side too, according to my historian father.

Count the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, which was certainly an action of great courage, but between 19 April and 16 May hundreds of thousand of Jews were captured or killed, about half of those dead were burnt alive or suffocated, and 110 Germans injured, including 17 killed. The Ghetto was obliterated by the Germans and it a concentration camp built on the site.

Count the French Resistance during WWII, though they could not have succeeded alone. They had early support from other nations and the Allies crossed the English Channel, the Russians threatening from the east, an entire world at war with one powerful invasive nation who had great faith in their bullying aggression.

[All of Czechoslovakia could not hold back Hitler or Russia. Remember, France hadn’t been able to resist Hitler either, although their capitulation was also influenced by the terrible destruction the nation suffered in the previous World War, the one that was supposed to end them all. “The War to End Al Wars.” Later the West allowed Russia to grab other nations unable to defend themselves, and that would bring us up to today.]

Fidel Castro’s guerrillas from 1953-1959 eventually overthrew the Baptista government, and the Zapatista Uprising in 1994 negotiated some improvement in rights for indigenous Mexicans. Success.

Entire nations and nationalities have fought off invaders, though often they don’t. Ask any indigenous people how they came off when confronted by European invaders. The US took Hawaii. It isn’t just “the other guys.” Fire power wins and then insists on their right to do it. The ones who win write the history books. Does the best man win? In games. Sometimes.

Can individuals or even small groups succeed against better-armed government forces?

I don’t know. You decide.

Our best defense against our own government is to participate in it, to demand accountability, to listen to one another and to ensure trust and fairness rule.

That’s not been happening. We’ve promoted fear and hatred and anger.

Even my dad did a 180° after decades of military service and gun ownership, target practice and teaching his daughter (me) to safely handle, clean, and fire his guns. He decided gun control was sensible and necessary.

A family member who has been hospitalized with mental illness bragged online he had a concealed weapons permit. This doesn’t make his wife safer—he’s been arrested for and found guilty of domestic violence. I prefer to think he lied about the concealed weapons carry. I prefer to think they took his guns. [How is his gun possession more important than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the rest of us? How does our safety not come first before his paranoia? How does anyone reason this way?] I tend to think the right to possess a tool useful only for shooting people should not be allowed for people with such a history, not allowed for—forgive me for the word—crazy people, not for people too scared to walk outside without the means of killing others. Those are the people who shoot the unarmed girl who comes to their door to ask if she can borrow their phone. So yes, I have a lot of investiture in this issue.

But here we are. It’s more important to people that they own handguns than ending tens of thousand of deaths every year. Their right to feel strong and to indulge their fear of government overreach is more important than children feeling safe at school.

A former student is concerned that her autistic five-year-old is incapable of hiding silently as he is required to do during school “shooter” drills. In what other free country are five-year-olds required to practice hiding from a live shooter?

Gun sales and shootings have both been dropping, from over thirty-six thousand in 2023 to over thirty-one thousand in 2024, not counting the 1133 killed by police. The American tolerance of this violence is waning, but there were still 499 mass shootings in 2024 and that’s down from 2023.

Am I afraid of a mass shooter? Not as afraid as I am of a child with the family gun.

Years ago, a dear friend in Canada watched a neighbor’s toddler walk out of their garage, dangling a handgun she’d assumed would be too heavy for a child that age to lift. Needless to say, this is an incredibly rare event in Canada where guns are tightly controlled. In the U.S. there are statistics for shootings by children. Most often they shoot a family member.

Every week, it seems, there is a shooting, often by a man who wants others to die in order to work up the courage to kill himself. [My husband always says, Why not start with the suicide? which is not funny and he’s not kidding and I just want to cry.] It is mostly men who kill themselves with guns.

The tone of comments about the recent assassination abruptly shifted thanks to Governor Cox and recognition that the killer was not a left-wing radical, but a reactionary right-winger who is likely mentally ill. There is no philosophy or religion in the world that does not condemn murder. Unless facing the death of oneself or another person, an individual killing another individual is murder. Some people and most nations in the world regard the deliberate execution of an individual for any reason to be murder. I can’t say. I will say that “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword” is not my idea of justification for anyone’s killing. Nevertheless, a rational stance on possession of guns would certainly help keep us safer and we really do need to tone down the anger that is eating our country.

On a related issue, Agatha Christie seemed fond of women as poisoners, labeling women sly and secretive. It’s true women rarely choose to shoot themselves or others. In fact, worldwide, mass killings by women in the last one hundred years are estimated to be 6% compared to men at 94%, and murders in the U.S. by women using any method are rare—perhaps one in twenty murders is committed by a women, 5%. Mass shooters are even less likely to be women here, only one in fifty, 2%.

Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.

It’s almost always a man who shoots, usually another man, but if it’s a woman who dies, it’s usually a woman he’s supposed to love, especially the girlfriend or wife who leaves him, who is unfaithful, who divorces him and moves on, who disrespects him.

When I was a kid, that was pretty much considered his right.*

A recent t-shirt warns: Be glad we want equality and not revenge.

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• Gary knew a woman who was killed by her ex-husband. With an ax. In front of their little children. He was charged, found guilty, and sentenced to four years in prison. When he got out, he sued his former in-laws for custody of those children.