“I know this sounds horrible, but do you know how hard it is not to have ill feelings toward a kid? How hard it is not to be upset at Jaxon? Do you know how hard it is?” she had asked the night before. “I have no one to blame. I can’t blame my kid. I can’t blame God because it’s inappropriate. I have nobody to blame. I have no outlet as far as taking out my anger, so I use my family and my fiance as a punching bag.”
In the car now, she turns the volume up so loud that conversation with her boyfriend becomes impossible. She grips the wheel tightly, looks straight ahead and mouths the words of a song as she steers a car that has, among other things, a loaded gun in the glove box. It’s a 9mm — the same caliber that killed Kimi — but while her anger bothers her, guns don’t. She doesn’t feel nervous around that gun or any other gun. She’s more scared of not having one. She still has a child to raise, and what if there’s an intruder, and that intruder has a gun, and she doesn’t? How would she recover from that? How could she live knowing she could have protected Jaxon but had decided she was too afraid to have a gun?
Jesus, how do you go through an experience like that and still maintain the same attitude and behaviour? They haven’t changed a thing, they’ve still got guns lying around the house.
That’s the most horrific thing: fucked up but profoundly unremarkable as far as local standards seem to go. It’s not a crime… it’s an accident…oh well. Just another standard family with a standard relationship to guns… By local standards.
Fucked. Up.
They’re experiencing a fundamental cognitive dissonance. Their life-long proximity to their weapons has inculcated them with the belief that the weapons are safe and keep them safe. The horror that a family member could be irreversibly un-alived by the weapon is anathema to that “safe” belief they have. Frankly, it’s preventing them from properly grieving and living their lives.
It certainly helps to explain why there’s significant push-back to common-sense gun control - some Americans experience profound reliance on the presence of a weapon to feel a “normal” sense of security and well-being. It’s tragic, and there’s no easy way to interrupt the establishment of that totemic objectification of weapons.
Edit to add relevant quote from the piece:
Thank you for teaching me the word inculcate!
I think you’re absolutely right about how entrenched the gun=safety belief is. It’s essentially a religious thought. How do you convince someone their religion is wrong?