Tag: gun culture
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My First Look Down the Barrel
Dear Reader: I’ve been writing about my life in Nicaragua during the Sandinista-Contra war. This is from the archives. It’s one essay of a four-part series on guns, which can be found on The Writing Bull. The man was drunk. He had reason to be. The enemy had come through his small town in northern […]
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Our Guns, Our Madness
Dear Reader: This is from the archives, I wrote it after the massacre in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, it’s a timeless piece, and will remain so until this country gets rid of its guns. I know madness. I have manic depression and have been hospitalized when paranoia seizes me from the shadows without warning—the belief that […]
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My Guns, Part 2: My Blackbirds
I was both a city and country mouse, living between my father’s deep-Appalachian world of sharecroppers, hunters, and, yes, moonshine, and the bustling metropolis of Rogersville, Tennessee, population around 5,100. I grew up in a small, middle-class suburb on the edge of town, a place where people kept their grass cut and their children played […]
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My Guns, Part 1
I don’t remember Dad handing me my first rifle. I do remember killing my first rabbit. It was winter, I’d just turned nine, so, in Appalachian thought, I was two years late. It was time to kill something. But Dad hadn’t put pressure on me. We were walking through four inches of snow in a […]