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Should I Buy a Gun?
After falling victim to a string of traumatic crimes, Amanda Fortini considers a controversial means of protection
By Amanda Fortini | January 12, 2012
One afternoon four years ago, my then boyfriend strides into the den where I’m reading a book and shows me a gun. A metallic silver handgun still wrapped in its original plastic, it lies there, impotent, in a small metal lock box, but it terrifies me anyway. My boyfriend, who I’ll call R., lifts the top of the box gingerly, like he’s displaying a rare and delicate treasure, a Fabergé egg that might shatter if jostled. He wants me to know there’s a gun in the house. I wonder when he decided he needed it, where he bought it, whether he applied for a permit to render the thing legitimate. Is owning a gun in Los Angeles even legal? Then, growing irritated, I ask myself: How did he manage to do this without my knowledge?
I’d never seen an actual gun, except in the holsters of police officers. To my mind, guns were verboten, menacing, violent. They were unpredictable contraptions beloved of white supremacists or paranoid meth heads in creepy desert hideouts. My formative years were spent in Illinois, where gun control laws have long been some of the strictest in the nation. I lived in a middle-class suburb, where mall-going was the chief recreational pastime and there wasn’t a culture of hunting or shooting for sport.
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