It was a long time ago, that spring of 1979, and there is a lot that I can no longer remember. There is also a lot that I can never forget. I can't forget those two telephone calls.
"Jimmy? This is Helen Becker. Is your mother home?" The voice on the phone was familiar; I'd heard it many times before. Helen was a friend of my mother's, and she'd call occasionally. We knew the Becker family reasonably well; Helen's husband and my father had worked together, and I went to engineering school with their son David. There was nothing remarkable about Helen's phone call in the late spring of 1979, except that it was the last time I ever heard her voice. Not long after that call, Helen Becker was shot to death. So was her husband. And so was their granddaughter, who was nine years old.
A few months earlier in that awful spring, I'd gotten another call. A close friend, whose name I don't want to use here, was on the other end of the line, and she was clearly distressed. When she calmed herself enough to speak, what she said made me turn white.
"Heidi's dead," my friend said. "She shot herself."
Heidi was my friend's sister, and I knew them both well. Our families knew each other. Their aunt and my mother worked together and were friends long before any of us were born. Heidi was beautiful, and she was smart. So was her sister. I idolized them both, and I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. None of us could. There were no clues in Heidi's behavior that led us to believe she might commit such a horrific act. I was a pallbearer at her funeral. I was 22. Heidi was 17 years old when she died.
If the gun deaths of those family friends were the only times in my life that I'd been exposed to such horror, perhaps I wouldn't be writing these words, but there were others. There was Betty, another friend of my mother's. When I was too young to know about such things, Betty's husband shot her in a fit of rage, and then he shot himself. He died. Betty spent the rest of her life learning to speak again.
There was Eva, and her son Bram. They were my neighbors when I lived in St. Charles Missouri in the early 1980s. Eva was Dutch; she'd met John, an American, while traveling in Nepal. Their son Bram was born shortly before I moved next door. John became abusive, and he often threatened Eva. Sometimes she would come to my house in the middle of the night, with Bram, and ask me if they could hide there. On more than one occasion John threatened me as well. When she couldn't take it anymore, Eva fled with Bram, first to Chicago, where I drove them, and then to Texas, to a town with a name I can no longer remember. One day in the summer of 1983, in an act that I will never be able to comprehend, Eva shot her baby, and then she shot herself. Eva was in her late twenties. Bram was three years old.
The list goes on. In 2007 I became good friends with a woman whose husband was a prosecutor. Because he'd received death threats, he kept a loaded pistol in the glove box of his car. One horrible day, while riding in the car with his wife, he used the gun on himself.
The common thread that ran through all the unspeakable acts of violence I've witnessed in my 65 years is that each of them was committed with a gun. All those guns were within easy reach of the person who pulled the trigger, and they were all intended to offer someone "protection."
I've written openly about the Becker family murders, because their case became something of a local sensation in 1979. The Beckers lived on a secluded farm near Louisville, Kentucky. Helen's husband Howard was a brilliant physicist, inventor, and an engineer, and he rigged a clever system of sensors so that he would be alerted if anyone approached their farm. He kept guns in the house for "protection." None of it helped. All of us who knew the family were shocked when their bodies were discovered at home by their son, who was then charged with the murders. The police said that David's mother caught him raping his niece Erika, and that when his mother attempted to intervene, he shot her with his father's rifle and another gun. According to investigators, he then shot his father and his niece. None of us, including David's sisters, believed that David could have committed such heinous acts. At his highly publicized trial the following year, David was acquitted, due to conflicting evidence and a botched police investigation. No one else was ever charged in the case, and 43 years later, the murders remain something of a mystery. What is not a mystery is that the Beckers were killed with their own guns.
Heidi's mother worked as a security guard, and she routinely brought her service weapon home with her. Heidi found it one awful day in March of 1979, and in an irrational instant she used it to end her life. None of us will ever know why.
Eva hated guns. She was terrified of the one that John owned, as was I, given the threats that he made. When Eva fled to Texas with Bram, she stayed with American friends who also kept a handgun for "protection." Although I will never be able to understand why she did what she did, I know that in a brief few moments of extreme despair, she used that gun to make an irreversible decision. I'll never forget the words that her Dutch friend wrote to me afterward: "Last week Eva stepped out of life, taking Bram with her."
Whenever there is a mass shooting such as the recent Uvalde tragedy, I'm forced again to remember the people I've known - the friends, the families - whose lives were ended or irreversibly altered by guns that were meant to offer someone "protection." While there is understandable revulsion and shock at the tragedy of a mass shooting, I regret that it diverts attention from the slow-drip bloodbath that is plaguing families across our country every day. I think about all the lives that are ruined, one gunshot at a time, and about how I, my family, my friends, and their families have been cheated out of a lifetime of experiences with people we cared deeply about.
In all the discussions about gun control and gun rights, most people ignore the fact that their families are far more likely to be injured by their own guns than they are to successfully use those guns for defense. A Harvard study in 2008 noted that "In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one... Research shows that whether attempters live or die depends in large part on the ready availability of highly lethal means, especially firearms." The proliferation of gun ownership in the years that followed the study have only made matters worse.
I'm too old and cynical now to think that sensible gun laws will be enacted in my lifetime. The Uvalde tragedy finally moved the moribund US Congress to enact some reforms, and I sincerely hope that they help. The larger problem is that all the red flag laws, school security measures, and mental health spending in the world aren't going to change the fundamental nature of America's insane gun culture. We're a nation awash in guns and the blood of our citizens, and it appears as though nothing will change that anytime soon.
Sometimes just to vent my frustration, I'll seek out gun owners on social media, and I'll try to pick a fight with them. Doing so is a colossal waste of time, I know, but there are times when I just can't help myself. I'll search for hashtags that are popular among gun enthusiasts, like #2A, #ShallNotBeInfringed, and the one that disgusts me the most, #pewpew. In the cryptic 280-character world of Twitter, I try to tell them what happened to my friends. Most ignore me, but when they do respond, I get dog-whistle responses like these:
"that stuff doesnt happen where i live."
"i can only imagine that your friends were pieces of shit... you judge a man by the company he keeps"
"If you keep pushing for civilian disarmament, you’ll get (to hell) before I do"
None of us wants to believe that we or the people we love could ever commit suicide or do anything irrational and violent. Few gun owners dare to imagine the kind of catastrophic pain that the weapons they own can inflict on their own families in a single, horrible instant.
In my old age I've had to replace optimism with hope regarding all the big issues that we humans confront. When it comes to gun violence, I hope that tragedies like Uvalde will prompt gun owners to reevaluate the dangers that their own guns pose to their families. I hope that lawmakers will finally address the need for better gun safety. I hope that anyone who reads these words will think for a minute about Howard, Helen, Erika, Betty, Heidi, Eva, and Bram, and that everyone who's lost someone to gun violence talks to the people they know and tells them about how their lives have been permanently damaged as a result. As I talk to people about my own loss, and the loss of my friends, I ask them: "Don't think that it can happen to you? Neither did I. And neither did they."
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