On NPR, a high school senior talked about how his “support for the 2nd amendment” had not changed after the death of his sister at the hands of a gunman a year before. I wondered about that capacity for changing my mind. My personal experience suggests that people are foolish to place faith in guns to protect themselves. But even I have changed my mind about some aspects of gun ownership.

My father fought in the Second World War. He never bragged about his experiences in France and Germany. He did not, as a rule, talk about them at all. At a Father-Daughter Banquet when I was in high school, the father of a friend was bragging about what a great time he’d had selling on the black market in San Diego during the war. Other fathers compared their wartime experiences. I saw the pulse beating in my father’s temple but he said nothing until we had left the building. “Men who talk about war that way—they did not experience the war I experienced.” [He is not alone in this observation. The pretty, glamorous, and heroic version of soldiering shorts the reality.]  

There were at least four guns in my house while I was growing up: two handguns and a target pistol and a rifle. They were kept unloaded and partially disassembled and in a locked storeroom. I held each one under the supervision of my father, knew enough to determine whether it was loaded and to load and unload, and I was taught absolutely and positively never to point any sort of weapon, not even a toy, at another person. My brother and I were seriously dressed down for playing games with my brother’s toy cap pistols. “Aim at the ground. Never at a person,” he told us, the blood pulsing in his temple. 

In high school I had classmates, wealthy classmates, who hunted all over the world, bringing home trophy heads. The way they talked about their kills was all brags and ugly.   

My brother, aged fifteen and angry that a neighbor’s dog kept wandering into our back yard and sometimes chased our cats, threatened to shoot the dog if it trespassed again. He had our father’s target pistol in his hands. He pointed it. The police arrived, but my brother was not arrested. 

(He was arrested years later for an assault on his wife requiring medical attention, but even though his mental illness and anger issues are pretty well documented, he claims to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He says “carrying” makes him feel safer.)

My high school Chemistry teacher separated from his wife and walked to the edge of Interstate Highway 5 and shot himself fatally in the head. 

My brother’s high school Spanish teacher held up a bank. 

While I was in college, two young men barely in their twenties and in entirely unrelated accidents became paraplegics. In each case, Scott and Dan had attended a party out of town—and in small towns only a few miles apart in SW Washington—where someone else found a hidden gun and it went off in their hands. The guns were pointed down, the bullets passed through the second story floor, and into the spines of Scott and Dan. These young men never knew one another. 

A few years after that, a woman I knew was traveling alone and camping in northern California. She had a handgun for safety, and one night waved it around after having had a too much to drink. Nearby campers were alarmed and called for help. An officer arrived, Ingrid’s gun went off, and the officer shot her through the spine. Another paraplegic. 

More recently, a convicted violent felon was unable to purchase a gun legally in Oregon so his friend bought one and gave it to him. He got drunk one night and attempted to kill his former girlfriend’s mother. (He thought the mother was the reason his girlfriend broke up with him.) He shot at the mom through her kitchen window. No one was injured but Tim went back to prison. 

A friend walked her three-year-old across the street for a playdate, and that other toddler walked out of the garage with a pistol dangling from his hands. He was barely able to hold it, but he managed. 

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When I moved to a rural community and taught students who filled their freezers with a buck or bull elk each year, I changed my mind about what I had considered the evils of hunting. These hunters are not hunting just for sport, they are also feeding their families. I respect that. 

I did not change my mind about arming school teachers. I liked my colleagues, but there isn’t one I would trust with a gun. Even highly trained police officers most often miss their target during a violent incident. And because the likelihood that they would find a rational use for it before some kid found it. And because my brother was a teacher for fifteen years. And because most of us at one time or another exercise bad judgement. 

I do not know anyone who avoided being murdered in their bed by drug-crazed home invaders. I hear that story—usually about their neighbor’s uncle’s friend—but I do not know anyone personally to whom it has happened. Statistically it is not reflective of the reality that the person most likely to be injured by a gun is the owner, and my personal experience suggest that the statistics about gun injuries and death are trustworthy. I know paraplegics, convicted felons, and dead people. I am tired of people misquoting the Bill of Rights. Nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to own what my neighbor has in his closet. 

The Second Amendment to the Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It was written at a time when the United States had no standing army, when “arms” included swords and bows and arrows and muzzle-loaders, and citizens were expected to stand with their neighbors to protect our nation. For most of U.S. history the Second Amendment was not interpreted as protecting individuals from bad government, but as a way to support their country. The emphasis was on “well regulated” as much as “keep and bear Arms.” 

Like most Americans I do not want all guns “taken away” but regulated. I do not want my neighbor to have a Howitzer or a military-style weapon—few people would. I believe that this American obsession with “gun rights” has become dangerous and even foolish. Scary/ People who do not know another word from our Constitution can quote just those dozen words about their right to bear Arms. Quick! Recite the First Amendment, the one the founders put first. 

I’ve read a great deal about gun violence during my life. I know that forty thousand Americans die from gunshots each year, mostly as suicides. I know people who keep an entire arsenal in their attics—these are not the people who butcher a deer each year. I know that every week a toddler finds a gun and shoots someone by accident. Toddlers shoot more people than terrorists in the United States (truth). Sometimes a toddler kills someone else, a sibling or parent. Most often the toddler shoots him or herself, and about half the time that precious child dies.

How I would live with that if my child found my gun and shot himself and died? 

I feel bad for Scott and Ingrid and Dan and their families and friends, not to mention my old Chemistry teacher and the neighbor whose dog was threatened. But I also feel bad for the two people who picked up weapons not knowing they were loaded. I feel for the officer who crippled a woman in the course of doing his duty. How must he feel about that incident for the rest of his life? I feel for people forced to participate in entirely unnecessary violence. We forget sometimes that, as most soldiers who have seen action will tell you, it is not easy to kill someone, not because the death is hard to achieve but because it is not easy to live with having done it. 

This is what I know. Everyone’s experience is different. Mine tells me that a lot of entirely untrustworthy people have way too many guns, that hiding a gun in a place no one will ever find it is a doomed fantasy, and that expecting even good people to consistently handle weapons with care and accuracy is a pipe dream. 

I need a license to drive a car. There’s nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing my right to do that. Our founders did not anticipate cars, and they did not anticipate a weapon capable of firing a dozen rounds in seconds. (Buying a gun in the United States is easier than almost anywhere in the world.)

Near the end of his life, my father changed his opinion about gun registration. “I think they should be regulated.” We had debated this for a decade—debated many things all my life—and this was the first time he changed his mind. 

The rest of the country is mostly on board. According to The New York Times editorial: “Gun makers will face a jury. But it’s the play-soldier subculture they’ve promoted that’s being judged.” Like the rest of us, the gun industry is about to be held responsible for its products and for the way it has promoted them.

It is time.