TW: Suicide, gun violence, mental distress.
“Uncle Ricky is dead.”
I could tell by her face that my mom was working to control her emotions as I stood processing her words.
“Dead?” I asked, as if I was trying to understand the word. But at age 9, I was only trying to understand why he was dead. Ricky was my dad’s younger brother, in his early 30s–too young to die, but then again, his mother (my Nana Sue) had also died too young just a few weeks prior, in her early 50s. What the heck was going on?
My mother nodded, so I clarified: “What did he die from?” Is there a family curse someone (me) needed to start investigating?
Her eyes shifted up and looked past the hallway, past the walls, past the yard, and farther, as she chose her words carefully.
“He has been sick for a long time.”
Ah, I understood that. Young folks don’t just up and die, but sick ones sure do…until over the next few days I realized that the answer was unsatisfactory and didn’t rule out a curse.
So as we were loading up in our cars after Ricky’s graveside service, I asked an older relative, “What was Ricky sick from?”
“Sick?” she said, confused.
“Yeah, that he died from.”
She scoffed loudly. “Ricky wasn’t sick. He put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.”
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Guns were ubiquitous throughout my family and childhood, but not in the ways that people often assume when I say that I grew up in Alabama. Nobody was big on hunting, at least not in my lifetime, though I did hear stories of past exploits for my Granddaddy Wayne, both with a shotgun and slingshot; he even had several photographs posed with his shotgun.
On the other side of my family, my PawPaw Bill was a farmer, dairy man, tractor salesman, and horse trainer. Of course he had guns; when you have a barn or small business, there are always unsavory critters looking to sneak in and plunder. Plus, sometimes horses and cows get injured in ways that can’t be fixed, and one of the toughest jobs of their caretakers is to kindly put them out of their misery.
What I didn’t expect was that one day in my early teens, while PawPaw and I were running errands downtown, “in the city,” in his fancy long car (not the farm truck), that when I put my hand underneath the front passenger seat to retrieve my fallen purse, I instead came up with a handgun.
I was so shocked that I was inadvertently waving it around, visible to God, passersby, other drivers, and any cops who might be looking. Meanwhile, he was trying to wave me to put it back, not wanting to actually grab it lest it go off, and not wanting to draw attention to the young teenager and old guy “fighting” over a gun in a fancy car downtown.
He finally spit out “Put it BACK!” in a way that broke through my confusion. As I apologized over and over, I started processing again: I think this is his gun, and he knew it was there! But there aren’t any sick animals or sneaking critters here…
“PawPaw, why do you have that in the car today?”
He was driving, but his eyes looked past the road, past the buildings, past the horizon, and farther, as he chose his words carefully.
“You just never know.”
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Well, I really didn’t know, but I knew enough to understand that was the end of the conversation. Later in life, PawPaw become a talker and wanted to have the hard conversations, but while I was growing up, he had too much on his mind for that.
And maybe that’s why he gifted my Uncle Eli a gun when he was 11 and I was 16. That, plus Eli helped out at home and rode his four-wheeler all over the countryside, so him having his own protection from wildcats and the occasional hostile deer was pretty wise. Shortly thereafter, he took me out to his makeshift target range on his four-wheeler and taught me about his new gun, including how to handle it safely, load and unload, hold it, and clean it. I did not retain much, but I sure did enjoy target practice.
As much as PawPaw believed in “you just never know” and arming responsible 11-year-olds, he did not believe that a gun in every hand was wise. In fact, it was his son (my dad) hitting up a close family friend for a gun–”But why do you need a gun, David?”–that finally signaled to PawPaw and others what my mother had been trying to warn folks about.
My dad was in a car accident at age 17, resulting in a significant traumatic brain injury. He was in a coma for six weeks, and when he woke, he was not the same. He couldn’t do many things he had before, in the same ways, and he had some noticeable differences in demeanor. In many ways, he was stuck at age 17, but that wasn’t quite as noticeable at 20, or even 25, as it became later. My dad was 24 when he married my mom, and then they lived up north for a couple of years, until I was born and they moved back home, eventually settling into the house my dad had grown up in. A year later, my brother was born, and then things…became concerning.
Over time, loved ones noticed more of my dad’s behaviors, as he seemed to become suspicious and irrational, especially when it came to my mom. He worked and she stayed home with us, and they would have friends over for food and games, but now back home in Alabama with her family and old friends, my mom would occasionally socialize with them in the evenings, while he stayed home with us. Or like on one memorable occasion, got his toddlers out of bed to go with him to the skating rink and verify where my mom was, who she was with, and what she was doing. I was maybe only 3 but sure did know how awkward all of that was. But neither I nor anyone else really knew how bad it was for my mom, even though she had been trying to tell others that something wasn’t right.
It finally took my dad seeking a weapon to get other people to see how serious things were. Again, everybody was too busy with their own trials and tribulations, but thankfully that was a big enough red flag that people took action. The family friend did not give my dad any weapon, but he did alert my PawPaw and my mother. Very soon after, my mom, brother, and I were whisked off with some of our stuff back up to the city, to my grandparents house. Everybody worked together to keep us safe and to get my dad help, such as it was in the early 1980s.
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I did not learn all of these details until I was older, in college. But one piece of family lore had been shared many times and was a favorite, and it was about my Granddaddy Wayne’s mother, Mamie.
Somewhere in the early 1920s–my granddad might not have even been born yet–she was home alone with the children with my great-grandfather was working a night shift in town. They lived in a house about half-a-mile from neighbors, but many of their neighbors were relatives, so even though it was a bit remote, they were not isolated.
On this particular night, Mamie and the children were going about their business, when suddenly the locked door handle began to turn and rattle, like someone was trying to open the door. No one answered when they asked who was there, but whatever was on the other side kept rattling and trying to get inside.
Mamie finally got fed up, pulled out her shotgun, and hollered: “I have a gun, and I know how to use it!” She counted down from three and shot through the door. The rattling stopped, but no one dared to open it or even peek outside.
Luckily, various neighbors had heard the shot and were on the scene within 10 minutes. They said that they tracked a blood trail down to the creek and then lost it. No one could determine if it was man or beast, and it remains a mystery.
I loved that story for many reasons, until in my adulthood I learned how Mamie died. Many years later, her husband having already passed, she learned she had cancer in her early 70s. Not wanting to be a burden to her family, Mamie calmly wrote a note, stepped out on her back porch, and shot herself.
Now, I just always wonder if she used the same gun to protect her family from her “burden” that she used to protect her children that night.
Uncle Eli may have had a gun at 11, but I also recently discovered that Granddaddy Wayne had one at 8. And he tried to use it, when he caught his dad embracing a woman who was not his mother in their barn. His older sisters and Mamie tried to calm him down, but the Sheriff ended up having to come out, and took Granddad down to the station.
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Right now, in Alabama, Tennessee, all of Appalachia, and across the country, states are grappling with finding the right balance between gun rights and gun responsibilities. Gun law reformers have most commonly proposed Extreme Risk Protective Orders (ERPOs), safe storage requirements, universal background checks, and closing gun show/private sale loopholes. Many have also proposed prohibiting assault weapons and dangerous hardware.
When I look back at this sample of my family’s gun-related tragedies and near-misses, I see how common sense gun laws could have changed my own history. Ricky and Mamie could have been helped with extreme risk protective orders (ERPO) protections; they were both known to be dealing with depression and grief. My dad was kept from doing harm exactly because he sought a gun, and people who knew him were concerned–an informal red flag intervention, that was actually just luck. Safe storage might have kept me from waving a handgun around in my PawPaw’s car. Probably.
But what you can see from these Appalachian life snapshots are that even while guns wreaked damages across my family tree, we remained so dependent on them. We keep them around for occasional sport but also for bogeymen, tangible and amorphous. Protecting ourselves is front and center–even when we don’t exactly know what threatens us–and despite how easy they make it to hurt even our own selves, we don’t like the idea of not having them handy.
Jon Stewart has made the point that “inconvenience is not infringement,” and this is something that makes sense to me when thinking about how my families view any perceived restrictions on their Second Amendment. The Constitution does not entitle anyone to unfettered access to any weapon, and it calls for regulation. Regulation–though inconvenient–is certainly not infringement of our rights. Those who can not demonstrate that they are “well-regulated” are not entitled to chaotic gun ownership.
The Appalachian approach to guns is that they are necessary–even if we don’t know what for, and even though they can cause more damage than they can help. I have personally never been saved from danger by a gun, and that one story from a hundred years ago is the only one I know of.
But as a common sense weapon reform advocate–even though I’m a gun owner, even though I support a “well-regulated” Second Amendment in laws, even though I have personally been both entertained and harmed by guns–I see loved ones shut down at the mere mention of reform.
They all seem to fear some unnamed, unknown attacker at the door, rattling the handle to get in and forcibly take all weapons from all persons. They fear betrayal, and pain, and heartache that are all somehow held at bay by merely having a firearm. They fear what might happen, if they didn’t have complete control over having a weapon with them, when disturbed and distressed.
And it is exactly those fears–not love–that keeps them locked into a reliance on guns for perceived safety.
