No Woman Is an Island: The Gun in Your Hand

You have picked up a loaded gun. Yes, you have. You have held it in your hand, felt the weight of it, felt its power. The first time you picked it up you were very careful. You treated it with the respect it deserved. You focused your attention entirely on it, were constantly aware of where it was pointing. But after a while you got more comfortable. You started taking it for granted. You even became a little careless. You started doing other things while holding the loaded gun in your hand. You would eat, talk on the phone, all while holding a loaded gun in your hand. You even got into heated discussions and waved the gun around, not threateningly but carelessly, not noticing where it was pointed.

You’ve had a few close calls. One time you turned around to see that a child was standing right in front of the gun you were pointing behind you, and you hadn’t even seen them. Another time the gun actually went off, but fortunately no one was in the line of fire. Each time you had one of these incidents, you vowed to be more careful. And you were more careful. For a while. Then you slipped back into your casual ways.

You’ve seen other people be even more careless than you with their guns. “Some people are idiots,” you think to yourself, “and really shouldn’t be allowed to use guns. I wouldn’t be surprised to see those maniacs kill somebody.” These other careless people make you feel like a responsible gun user. You forget about all your own careless actions and close calls. You don’t allow yourself to think about how lucky you are that you haven’t accidentally killed someone with your gun.

You pickup a loaded gun almost every day. You do. Have you figured out what I’m talking about yet? You pick up a weapon as deadly as a loaded gun every time you get behind the wheel of a car, truck, minivan or SUV. 

Do you remember how careful you were the first time you drove a car? The parked cars seemed so close! Every trip seemed like a Drivers Ed. film, with pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars coming at you out of nowhere. And you definitely did not want to get a ticket, so you followed the rules of the road religiously.

Probably the first rule you bent was the speed limit. Then there were the rolling stops at stop signs, the illegal turns that seemed fine to do when no one was looking. As soon as you gained a little driving experience, you started multi-tasking. I’m not just talking about using the phone or texting. If you’ve never done those things while driving, you are certainly in a minority and you might feel pretty smug about that. But how about eating? Or looking at a map? Or digging through your purse to find something? Or taking off your sweater? Or any of the many, many things that you would never do while holding a loaded gun in your hand? When I was in college, a girl I knew hit a bicyclist while adjusting her radio.

Have you ever driven someone else’s car? Maybe a really nice, new, expensive car? You take care not to get a scratch on it, right? But it is hard to keep up that level of attention and care every single day, every single time you get in your car. How can we remind ourselves to treat our vehicles like the loaded guns that they are?

Berkeley hippie child that I am, I have never actually held a loaded gun. But I spoke with a friend of mine, a police officer who handles loaded guns every day, and he says that the same thing happens with actual guns:  

Trained professionals who carry a gun on their hip every day initially start out with that immense respect. They attend the academy and endless training sessions on the range. They too commit the firearms safety rules to memory. Yet like you, your neighbors or myself, they too start cutting corners through complacency. Every year dozens of firearms accidents also known as negligent discharges occur in homes, offices and police locker rooms.

So what are we to do? If people can get complacent about loaded guns, how can we expect to remember the awesomeness of the responsibility we take on every time we get behind the wheel? How do we combat complacency, carelessness, inattentiveness, and multi-tasking beyond common sense? Maybe to start, every time we get behind the wheel we can remind ourselves that we are, in a sense, picking up a loaded gun. And turning the ignition is taking off the safety.