I Believe We Shouldn’t Own Guns. I’m Learning How To Shoot One Anyway

I didn’t grow up with guns. I grew up in an Italian-American family in Florida — two cultures people often associate with gun ownership — but we were never a “gun family,” even though my dad always kept one in his glove box. When I was old enough to finally notice, I’d ask him questions about it, ever curious about the power it provided and the reason he had it. For his work as a private investigator then, he had it solely for protection, but he never loved it. He never showed the enthusiasm men often showed towards their guns in movies or the way my friends would talk about their dads taking them shooting. I would probe him, but in the end, he would repeat it was a work necessity and nothing more. I was never sure if my dad always disliked them or if he especially started disliking them after he was shot in the back a few months before I was born in the late 1980s. That story isn’t really mine to tell, so I’m not going to, but growing up, I knew it shaded every conversation we had about guns.

Often, in our conversations about the glove box gun, he’d say he didn’t think people should own guns at all. As a kid, I didn’t exactly have an opinion on this one way or another. I’d watch action movies with my little brother or listen to our friends whose older brothers loved to shoot guns and think about their power sometimes, trying to understand what drew people to them since the most trustworthy man I knew thought they were awful. When I thought about them more generally, they mostly seemed incredibly terrifying and not very fun. If there was any truth to how they were portrayed in the movies and on TV, then they were just loud, dangerous, and destructive. And how much more of that did we really need in the world?

As I grew older and became more politically educated, I took what I’ve learned is the typical path for many leftists, at least among the ones I know. At 15-years-old, I joined a local anti-war group that was doing organizing work against the American Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were soldiers-turned-pacifists who didn’t just hate the violence of war but also hated all of the violence of our everyday lives. This made sense for a group of older, mostly veteran men who’d been entirely shocked by their duties and treatment in the military. It’s not that they weren’t understanding of the violence done by leftist revolutionary forces throughout history; they just couldn’t approve of it in our present day. They would talk endlessly about the need for peaceful showcases of power and adhered strictly to a doctrine of nonviolence that was established in the American consciousness throughout the twentieth century. They quoted (and sometimes misquoted) Gene Sharp, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Henry David Thoreau, and Philip Berrigan endlessly and believed that sustained political disobedience could change the operations of our current system. There, with people who were mostly twice, three times, and even four times my age, I learned to hate all violence, even if that violence seemed like it was warranted in some way, and I learned to hate guns in equal measure.

After working with them, I committed myself to other forms of radical political organizing in my late teens. With two friends around my age who I met in the group, I helped found the Ft. Lauderdale chapter of Food Not Bombs — a loose-knit, hyper-local mutual aid organization that had chapters all over the world by the time we came to know it. In the cities where Food Not Bombs operates, each group provides a weekly meal for anyone who needs it made from mostly “found” or donated food in protest of the American government’s insistence on military spending over spending on the well-being of everyone in the country. Food Not Bombs has three principles every chapter is supposed to follow as closely as possible:

1. Meals are always vegan and vegetarian and free to everyone who comes to meal sharing.
2. Every chapter is autonomous and has the power to make decisions via consensus.
3. Food Not Bombs is not a charity (or a non-profit) and is dedicated to nonviolent social change.

For three punk kids who mostly subscribed to the anarchist notions passed onto us through the songs we loved, Food Not Bombs was a response to our desire to do something that actually made a material impact on the world around us. Our weekly planning meetings and weekly meal sharings attracted not only the poor and low-income people they were designed to serve, but also left-learning young people like us who were trying to figure out exactly what we believed and why we believed it. We viewed the government as our enemy, but most of us didn’t yet have the political education necessary to do a thorough analysis of our enemy or to raise consciousness in the way we needed to actually change the systems we despised so much. I wish I could say our immediate desire to become better, more knowledgeable organizers is what led to a different perspective. But it was police violence that forced us into a period of deep learning and knowledge-sharing that transformed us all.

About a year into doing weekly meal sharings near a tent city that had gone up in recent years outside of the main public library, city police began surveilling us, ticketing us, and threatening us with arrest. The people who lived and worked near downtown had long been complaining about the tent city near the library, and they viewed our presence there as an encouraging reason for people to stay. They wanted the tent city cleared and the homeless people who lived there completely out of sight, a years-long “project” still happening today. Their threats and constant harassment forced us to study more, engage seriously with political theory outside of our favorite punk songs, and consider tactics used by radicals and revolutionaries before us in an attempt to figure out exactly what we were going to do to fight back. During this time, I read works by Frantz Fanon, Ward Churchill, Kwame Ture, Leslie Feinberg, W.E.B. Du Bois, David Fernbach, Assata Shakur, and tons of others. I reread The Communist Manifesto in earnest for the first time, then read Wage Labor and Capitol, then asked my favorite university Literature professor at the time to point me to Marxist literary criticism beyond Louis Althusser’s work. Aside from truly learning how to accurately understand systems of oppression and what our duty is in destroying them, it was also the first time in my young life I’d seen people talk about violence as not just a means to combating these systems but a necessity in bringing an end to them.

Still, I couldn’t shake how much I hated guns. The mainstream American fascination with guns wasn’t and isn’t leftist or revolutionary in principle; it’s rooted in imperial genocide, chattel slavery, white supremacy, and patriarchy. And it repulsed and still repulses me in a way I find hard to fully express. In the U.S., the majority of people who owned guns then and own them now weren’t and aren’t believers in the teachings I was getting from the radical thinkers I was consulting. They were and are mostly gun worshippers who believe their rights as Americans begin and end with the second amendment. Back then, I found it hard to reconcile what I was learning with the realities of the world I was living in. The people who toted guns, for the most part, weren’t like me or my friends. In fact, they would probably feel inclined to aim those guns at us if and when we were doing something they felt threatened their right to have the gun (or their private property or whatever). Beyond that, I couldn’t imagine holding a gun in my hand and dispensing the magazine. I especially couldn’t imagine holding something so powerful and ruinous and aiming it at another person. Even in the wildest conceptions and thought exercises where I built a storyline in which I had to fight for my life, I hoped I had another option: a chance to flee, a place to hide, or, at worst, the opportunity to hit my attacker over the head without ending their life.

***I continued to study, read, write papers on radical political theory, and organize in material ways throughout the many communities I became part of after other people took over the operation of our Food Not Bombs chapter. I was no longer steadfastly dedicated to nonviolence as I was in the years before. In the “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, they write about the proletarian right to arm ourselves against our oppressors and say, “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.[…] Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

In theory, I agreed with this, but in the back of my head, guns remained a quandary I couldn’t solve for myself.

Even though it didn’t square with my distrust and disbelief in our current system of government, I believed strongly in the need for increased control of their sale and ownership. Becoming a teacher in August 2012 helped intensify this belief and shrouded my days with the constant fear of being taken out by the very thing I thought shouldn’t exist in the first place. At the public performing and visual arts high school in Miami where I began my career, we’d practice active shooter drills to the best of our ability within the walls of the school’s oddly proportioned building. My classroom on the second floor inexplicably had a large bathroom and closet combination that could easily fit 20-30 kids if I packed them tightly in there. During the drills, I’d follow the protocols, all the while planning in the back of my head that if an active shooter actually came to our campus, I’d send the kids into that room, tell them to lock it and stay quiet, and act as if that period was my planning time. That December, news of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting spread around school before the first lunch period of the day began. Twenty kids under 8 years old were dead, along with six members of the school’s personnel. It was devastating news to witness and take in. I was scared for my students, for my colleagues, and for myself. And then resentment began to build.

In the years that followed, shootings kept occurring all over the country. I moved on to another school, one further north situated directly in the suburbs of Broward County, and I began tutoring in the area, as well. At school, a close friend I made in the cohort of new faculty members  would talk with me about school shootings and gun violence whenever the topic came up. We’d sit through “Stop the Bleed” presentations at faculty work days with our mouths agape at the images the local police and EMTs showed us, throwing glances at each other when they said something insensitive and off-putting. We’d leave saying “I’m never going to be able to fucking to do that.” Our conversations revolved mostly around the availability of guns and how freely people could access them, how our culture was so steeped in the religion of the bullet that we couldn’t see a way out, and how much we hated the guns, the guns, the fucking guns. Very rarely did we think about the people who operated them and the threats they posed to us, people we viewed as indoctrinated into some cult-like fanaticism they could be broken out of if we kept asking hard enough.

Two years into our time there, the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School happened, only 20 miles away from where we were. Many of our school’s students had connections to kids at MSD, so when news broke toward the end of the school day, the school was buzzing with cold sweats and anxiety, kids in every corner of the hallway wondering about their friends or rushing to their cars in the parking garage to make phone calls. We had a scheduled faculty meeting that day that I was late for because I was trying to get a hold of the kid I had been tutoring for about a year at that point who went to MSD. But then, most people were late that day because they were tending to the needs of petrified students and students crying in their rooms as the bell signaled the end of the school day. Once again, we returned to the conversation: the fucking guns, man, how much longer can we possibly do this? 

A little over a month after the shooting, as a few of the students in my own classes were grieving the deaths of kids they were close to at MSD, I came across an essay by Walter Johnson in the Boston Review called “Guns in the Family.” In what is partly a defense of gun control and partly a treatise on the oppressive construction of American society in general, Johnson recounts his upbringing in a hyper-masculinized gun family and his experiences dealing with the fact that “guns are tools for making stunted men feel whole.” Toward the middle of the essay, he writes, “…when I hear people talking about raising the age at which someone might buy their first gun or banning bump stocks or assault weapons, I have got to admit it leaves me wondering why they are stopping there. True: there is no reason in the world for someone to have an AR-15 except to kill people […] We can start by banning the tools, but we are not going to be finished until we dismantle the house they have been used to build.”

At the end, he writes, “Until we deal with the admixture of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that produces such pornographic inequality; until we stop using armed police to guard the border between the haves and have-nots; until we recognize that imperial violence and police violence and school violence are related aspects of the same problem, we are going to keep producing killers. The cause of the United States’ problem with guns […] is not guns, it is the United States.”

Something in me began to churn, a recognition of what I already knew and suspected colliding with the reconciliation about guns I’d been unable to make within my own mind: Surely, stricter gun control should exist in some manner, but since it didn’t, aren’t we, as leftists, remiss in allowing fascists, neo-Nazis, and “patriots” hoard them when we don’t have a single clue how to use them to defend ourselves?

This question rattled inside of my mind and took up space in conversations I had with friends and other organizers for two years before I finally voiced a real interest in learning how to use a gun. The way life slowed down during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uprisings of the summer of 2020 had me thinking about everything I knew and understood about the prospect of building a world outside of the systems we currently live in, and it made me realize that if it came down to it — me and everyone I love vs. the government or the people who didn’t believe in our rights to exist or both — I wouldn’t be very useful in a fight. It felt like the most logical course of action was to ask my dad to take me to learn how to shoot, so I did, on and off for about a year. Each time, he said “No.” I’m still not exactly sure why. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to see me like that, as someone who could potentially maim another person with the firepower packed inside of a .22 or a 9 millimeter gun. Or maybe, in his sixties, he was done with the endeavor of dealing with guns entirely. Regardless, I was never going to get him to do it, and the rejection got to me in a way I didn’t expect. From there, I started jokingly floating the idea to friends, even suggesting we should go shooting for my upcoming birthday, but they were equally resistant, saying that’s just not something they ever imagined for themselves or that they were just too fearful of the experience to even attempt it. My partner didn’t want to go either, but she said she was supportive of me trying to find a way to make it happen because I wouldn’t stop talking about it.

***A few months ago, a real opportunity presented itself to me to learn how to shoot. The owner of the gym that transformed my life and turned me into a competitive powerlifter was beginning his own journey in figuring out how to use a gun properly should he be stuck in a situation that might call for its usage. Since we’d become good friends over the two years I’ve trained at the gym, we talked at length about guns, gun nuts in the U.S., and our fears as a queer and trans person (for me) and as a Black man (for him) living in a culture where the most ruthless people knew how to operate guns and we were wholly clueless about them. When he purchased a gun and began going to the gun range more regularly, I gathered the courage to ask him if he would mind me tagging along with him one day. He laughed at the way I asked and simply said, “Stef, of course, I’ll teach you how to shoot.”

We decided we’d go to the range at our local Bass Pro Shops on a Thursday early in the afternoon. Before that day, I’d never seen a gun like his — an all-black 9 millimeter pistol with a small sightfinder — close up. At the second-floor range, we checked in with the guy working it, signed waivers saying we couldn’t sue Bass Pro Shops if something happened to us, and bought $13 boxes of brass bullets and $1 paper targets before putting on our sound-blocking headphones and walking into the empty range. Once we were in and secured, my friend unloaded his gun from its locking case, took out the magazines, and started teaching me about gun safety and how to hold the gun and aim at it our targets to practice “dry firing,” the act of pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun to get a feel for how to fire it. When he put the gun in my hands for the first time, it felt surprisingly light unloaded, similar to the BB guns and metal airsoft guns my brothers had when we were growing up, but I was still extremely tense in its presence. Noticing how tight I got, he started reassuring me that everything was going to be fine, that it was a controlled environment and he would be there with me every single step of the way.

From there, he taught me how to load the bullets we just bought into the gun’s magazines, then how to load the gun, and release the safety, which I struggled with at first. He helped me set up my body to shoot, reminded me not to lock my arms all the way straight, to keep my shoulders steady and my lats and glutes tight — cues that were oddly familiar to the experience of weight training. Finally, he told me to align the sight with the target and focus my eye’s attention on the target itself.

“Ok, don’t think too much about the sound because you’ll scare yourself away from doing it,” he said. “Shoot when you’re ready.”

I shot three poorly aimed rounds before I finally stopped to breathe.

“Keep going.”

Another three rounds, then another, then another, then four more. I shot 16 rounds on that first try before we swapped places and continued going back and forth shooting 12-16 rounds during our turns until we ran out of bullets. As he was instructing me, I made a few egregious mistakes: I held the gun with my hand on the trigger before I was ready to use it, and I turned to look at him with the unloaded gun in my hand, two bad habits that had the potential to kill or hurt someone else under different conditions. It made me feel embarrassed and a little crazy to commit these obvious errors when I knew these obvious errors are the things that get people killed. Shooting a gun scrambled my brain a little bit for sure, but also having so much force in such a little package makes you feel like you’re more in control of all the variables than you actually ever are. I felt like I was learning much more than how to shoot — I was beginning to understand that the process of using them was a never-ending practice in restraint, care, and mindfulness. You couldn’t afford to let your guard down for even a tenth of a second.

After each of my turns, he asked me how I felt, and I really didn’t have an answer for him. Mostly, I felt insane that I was actually doing this, but I also realized immediately that I could never have figured this out in a high conflict situation of any kind. Aside from the actual setup, everything about using a gun is so counterintuitive to being a human animal who shouldn’t be holding something so deadly in the palm of their hand. A feeling that doesn’t disappear no matter how many times I actually shoot. In some world where I’m a different person, I can imagine feeling more positively about shooting or, at the very least, I can imagine myself viewing it as a new hobby to master, another activity to add in the repertoire of things I’m practicing constantly. But I can’t magically will myself to unknow the truth about guns and the havoc they wreak. When we go shooting, even if we’re bantering in between turns and making jokes about what we’re doing or naming the targets after our political enemies, all I can think about is how profoundly fucked up it is that we’re allowed to do this, that guns are readily available for me to buy on the first-floor of Bass Pro Shops or at the Miami Gun Show. We schedule more times to go practice at the range, and I think about how guns are one of the most unnatural and unholy human inventions, a cogent reminder of the lengths we take to destroy each other without having to contend with the emotional reality of using other weapons or our fists in close combat.

***In the days following this month’s presidential election, a slew of tweets and social media posts hit a lot of our timelines talking about the need for cis women, queer people, and trans people to start arming themselves with guns for protection. These kinds of posts weren’t exactly new. I’d seen them in other moments of particular despair and disappointment over the way things are going in our world. But after having learned how to shoot, they hit me a lot differently than they ever did before. I certainly didn’t disagree with them, but I was bothered by the flippancy with which people were approaching this conversation and the hubris they had to think they’d be able to intuitively know how to use a gun in a high-conflict situation without any training or practice. Both the insouciance and the arrogance of these posts felt like the byproducts of our gun-obsessed culture in the way that gun-worship did: Some people think they understand the ways these things work because our consciousness has been steeped in images, videos, and examples of their usage.

But using a gun is nothing like what you see in the movies or on TV or in the Olympics or in your experienced acquaintance’s Instagram post. Using a gun at a gun range fucking sucks, to say the least, so I can’t imagine how intensely terrifying it would feel to discharge one on another human being, even if that person left me no other option but to shoot. We shouldn’t feel comforted by the mere fact that they’re present, because their presence ultimately amounts to nothing if we don’t respect their power and the power we hold (literally and figuratively) as we’re using them.

Even as I continue to practice and learn how to shoot more accurately, my complicated feelings remain. We shouldn’t have guns, I don’t particularly enjoy the experience of shooting them, and yet, I can’t stop myself from wanting to improve all the skills involved with handling them properly. I want to practice that respect, and I want to know how to protect myself and the people I love. And also, I want to know that I can be useful even if the revolution that’s necessary to deconstruct the systems that aim their guns at us doesn’t happen in my lifetime. I can never fully enjoy the experience of learning to shoot outside of the new way it’s bonding me to others who want to live as badly as I do. But every time I do it, I remember that’s not exactly the point.