Standing Your Ground

I've been thinking about my dad a lot lately. The news reminds me of him - and not just because he rarely missed the news.

My dad was many things - loved family member, career firefighter, award winning trap shooting coach. Many of his family and friends believe that he was also suffering from some kind of undiagnosed, unmedicated illness. Even people who knew Dad only casually were likely to use the word "paranoid" to describe him.

His worries were constant, overwhelming, and often irrational. He worried about everything. He worried that someone would charm his beautiful, younger wife away from him. He worried that people would judge him because his wife worked, or because he'd had to take early retirement for medical reasons. He worried that his kids were trying to make him look bad by acting up. He worried about the government (and whether they would take his guns). He worried that he'd become an invalid. And he worried, constantly, that younger, stronger men were going to victimize him.

Dad had been a star athlete in school, and had spent his adult life doing jobs that took physical strength. I only knew him as a senior citizen; I was 22 when he died at age 78. The older he got, the more he worried that he'd be the victim of a crime.

Once, my sister and her husband were staying with my parents. My brother in law said or did something that upset Dad, and he flew at my brother in law and began beating him. My brother in law responded in kind. My mom and my sister had to drag them off of each other, right there in the living room. When they both demanded to know what in the hell was going on, Dad said, with no trace of irony or embarrassment, that since there was a younger, stronger man in the house, he was afraid that he'd "take over" and become the new "man of the house."

He wasn't worried about romance with my mom - she didn't like this son in law, and I think that the feeling was mutual. He wasn't comparing incomes, since he was retired and Mom was the major breadwinner. He was worried about status, and was sure that his was in jeopardy, just because someone else was younger and stronger. And, he decided to defind that status by inflicting violence, on a family member, because that apparently made sense to him.

(No, charges were not filed.)

I thought about Dad as I listened to the news reports of a statement given by an elderly man about an incident at his home. He said that there had been a "big black man, over six feet" tall on his porch. He was sure that the man was "reaching for the door handle" and that he was in danger. So, he shot the "man," once through the door and once after he'd fallen.

As most people know by now, the "man" was a 16 year old kid trying to pick up his siblings. He'd accidentally gone to a house on 115th Terrace when he was looking for a house on 115th Avenue.

Also in the news in the same week are a young woman shot because her car used a driveway as a turnaround, two young women shot when they accidentally tried to get into the wrong car in a parking lot, and a 6 year old and her dad, shot after the ball she was playing with rolled into a neighbor's yard. 

My dad had a history of, shall we say, aggrassively defending his property. I cannot picture him hunting down a jogger because he thought they "didn't belong" in the neighborhood. But he did once sleep on the patio with a gun all summer long, and once chased my friends down the street with a loaded shotgun after they knocked on my window at night. If Dad thought that you'd set foot on his property uninvited, all bets were off.

So, as you might imagine, I can picture my family ending up on one of those news shows. I can picture my dad becoming frightened, picking up his gun, and something going very wrong. I feel, very deeply, the sentiment of "there but for the grace of God go I."

I can imagine him being horrified if someone actually died, but I'm very sure that he would also double down on his reasoning. He wouldn't use the word "frightened" - he'd say "threatened." "I felt threatened. They were on my property without permission." That, in his mind, would mean that he was justified.

 No one wants to think that their loved ones are, or could be, dangerous. That's because we equate "dangerous" with "evil" or "a bad person." The reality is, everyone can be dangerous under the right circumstances. It's an ordinary reality. Feeling unsafe or victimized is almost a guarantee that a person will lash out. But aside from the reality that ordinary people, who are not evil, can be a danger, we also need to also acknowledge that feeling that you are in danger does not mean that you are in danger.

Our laws, and most people's moral codes, say that you are justified in defending yourself or others. But, what if you feel endangered, but there is no actual danger?

It's a muddier reality than one in which it's easy to separate "bad" people from "good" people - but the idea that those divisions are easy, accurate and self evident has always been fiction.

And yes, reacism is absolutely a huge problem that must be addressed. I'm not including it here simply because fixing it will not eliminate all of these problems. In our case, my brother in law and my terrified teenage friends are white.

So, I find myself wondering what I'd say to my dad, if I could, and if he'd listen. Part of that is easy; I decided years ago that it's my job to do or say the right thing even if it is not recieved well (or at all). I have doubts about whether my dad would be interested in hearing my thoughts on the matter. But I find myself formulating them, anyway.

Maybe no one else will want to hear them, either. But I'm going to share them, anyway. Here's what I think people who might be a danger need to hear.

Look, I know that you are not a bad person. I know that your intent is actually to protect. But what you are doing is dangerous.

I know that you're thinking, "The world is a dangerous place! I am just reacting!" But look at the odds. You have decided that ordinary actions by other people equate to danger. "People are hurt every day!" you say. "They get killed going to school, or shopping, or to work." Yes; they are, by and large, hurt by people with guns. You are feeling unsafe, by and large, because other people have guns, but you think that you having one makes you safer. If more guns equalled more safety, society would be getting safer and safer every day, because there are record numbers of guns in our homes. But is society safer and safer?

And how often are people knocking at your door dangerous? The percentages are tiny. Thieves and rapists and murderers generally just do not walk up and knock on your door. They break in. So, your best defense is not a gun, it's locks. Have locks on your windows. Lock your doors. Even if you're home, lock your door. Even if someone has knocked already and your door is unlocked, lock it. If they reach for the handle, lock it.

And if they try to break it down, or if they break your windows? Then, you can know, absolutely, that they mean you harm. You can defend your home with the certainty that you are justified.

But if someone just knocks, or if they simply walk on to your property? Tell them to leave. Most times, they will. Seriously, they will. If they don't, call 911, announce that cops are on their way, and hunker down,

But until someone engages in a hostile act, assume that they are not a threat. Deciding that everyone is bad and out to get you will mean that most times, you are wrong. (Plus, it makes you miserable.) Identifying a threat means actually seeing a threat, not just observing that a person exists. You are not being vigilant by being wrong. You are not becoming a target by giving others around you safety. If you don't want others to shoot you just because you are there, you can't shoot them for it.

You know that people are the real threat, and that weapons only act when people operate them. So avoid being one of the people who uses them badly.

Then, you will be safer, and I will be safer, and our neighborhoods and cities will be safer - which will make you happier.

Daddy Get Your Gun

The two following stories about my dad have reached the status of family legend. Mortifying when they happened, in retrospect they're now wildly entertaining. If in heaven we can watch things that happened on Earth as if we were watching a movie, I can see me, my dad, Joe and David all sitting together, laughing as we eat popcorn. (In heaven, popcorn tastes just they way it does at the movies, but it's good for you. I'm sure of it.) "Remember that?" we'll say. "Boy, that was funny!"

When I first told my friend Greg the story about the invitation to the midnight movie, and the ensuing chaos, he was 17. "Wow," he said. "Your parents are crazier than mine."

Let the record show that my mother has always been the calm at the center of the storm.

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As a kid, I always disliked playground blowhards. Everybody seems to have known at least one or two – the kids who say, "That's nothing; let me tell you my story," after a classmate has shared something, or who claim to be filthy rich, famous, the reincarnation of George Washington, or Mick Jagger's pen pal. Self aggrandizing people still annoy me, as do liars. I was also completely unable to relate to these kids, as my fondest wish in elementary school was to be invisible. Not super hero invisible, not fly on the wall invisible, but unnoticed and never singled out in any way.

It was therefore something of a shock to me every time someone thought I was making something up to get attention. I wasn't chatty and didn't have a lot of friends, but I wasn't a total recluse. I did talk to other kids. Every now and then someone would take exception to something I'd said, refusing to believe, for instance, my dad's age. "Your dad can't be that old! That's older than my grandpa!" It was very uncomfortable for me.

Occasionally I'd make a reference to one of our horses, thinking nothing of it. I knew most people didn't own horses, but we did, our neighbors did, and to me it was ordinary. Sometimes a classmate would ask me about them, wanting to know something, like where we kept them. "In the back yard" did not seem to be the answer they expected. So, I'd be called a liar.

We lived in an unusual area, considered unincorporated county land even though it was surrounded by city land. The houses there predated the city, and many used to be small ranches. When my parents bought the house, it was one of three houses on a dirt road, outside of town. Slowly, of course, the town encroached on them, and by the time I was in elementary school everything was vastly different - and, more crowded. Still, we and the other homeowners had different rules than the people even across the street from us. Nobody in our subdivision, which started with us and stretched out behind us, was on city sewers or garbage pickup. We had septic tanks and hauled our own trash to the dump. We also had more land than the average city lot. My parents had an acre and a third, as did the family next door. Some of the lots were still three or four acres. In our subdivision, it was legal to keep horses or other animals banned from city lots, and many of the families did. Behind our manicured back lawn was a horse pasture. When my older sister was in high school, it was her job to feed the horses every day before school.

But, since my house looked the same as virtually any other house from the street, and because it was common knowledge that you couldn't keep a horse in a typical suburban back yard, kids wasted no time in labeling me a teller of fibs when I said anything about our horses. One horse didn't even have an expected name – her name was Querida. (We pronounced it in such an Americanized manner that it was as unrecognizable to Spanish speakers as it was to English speakers.) It didn't get much better when someone who had been to my house, or who lived close to it, vouched for my truthfulness. Then I'd be peppered with questions like, "Do you ride them every day?" Well, no. I rarely rode them. Back when we were out "in the sticks," we would ride the horses fairly far afield. Everything was quiet dirt roads, ranches and open space. Riding a horse down a city street made much less sense, and riding around the pasture wasn't too exciting. Besides, I was young enough to need help saddling and unsaddling, and my parents were busy. None of this entered into a standard seven year old's fantasy of owning a horse, though, so the other kids thought I was very weird for owning a horse and not riding it every day. To add insult to injury, my parents had a firm policy of not letting visitors ride, so any classmate who asked, "Can I come over and ride?" was instantly disappointed.

At least I understood that owning a horse was cool. All kids are awed by horses. As I got older, people would think I was fishing for attention by relating things with a far smaller "cool" factor.

We lived on the northeast corner of an intersection. On the southwest corner of the intersection lived a family with several boys, the youngest of whom was my age. Another was my older sister's age. They were several strata above us in the school's social hierarchy, so we weren't close. I didn't think much about them. My dad apparently did, though.

We were never given an allowance. My parents decided on a case by case basis whether or not we needed money for something we wanted. When I was 14, I knew I was too young for a regular job, but I still wanted some discretionary funds. I pestered my mom about jobs I could do, eventually wearing her down to an agreement that I could do most of the watering in the yard for $2.50 a week.

The spigot for the hose was right under my bedroom window. My room was in front of the house, with two windows facing the street (to the west) and one facing the south. The faucet was under the south window. There was a narrow flower bed along the house, then a stone path before the lawn. To decently reach the faucet control, I had to step into the flower bed. It didn't hurt the plants any – the area around the faucet was empty specifically so a person could operate it easily.

One day, my dad found a sneaker print in the flower bed under my window. It was, naturally, pointed toward the house, not the walk. He came unglued. He became convinced that the boys across the street were all Peeping Toms, spending their time trying to catch a glimpse of his daughters. It was an adolescent sized shoe, he was sure.

Well, of course it was. It was mine. I told him that. I told him that repeatedly. He would have none of it. Those boys were dirty minded perverts, and he was going to give them what they had coming. I was mortified by the mental image of him barging in and confronting the family. I would just never live it down. I offered Dad my shoe, asking him to compare it to the print in the mud. He wouldn't. I pleaded with Mom to explain it to him, but he was steadfast in his belief of the household of Peeping Toms.

The way Dad decided to deal with this threat to his family was less obvious than confronting the neighbors, but no less mortifying. He decided that he would sleep outside on the patio, with a loaded shotgun, every night until he caught them. Then, with definitive proof, he would confront the family and call the police.

There was always at least one loaded gun in our house, the pistol in my dad's nightstand. Usually, there was a rifle or shotgun loaded as well. We all knew this. This was Dad's idea of home security. It's amazing that none of us ever touched them. The wrath of Dad was probably scarier than any damage we thought they might cause. Anyway, we left the guns alone.

Now, of course, Dad was in the back yard every night with one slung across his chest, like some awful hillbilly cartoon. It was ludicrous. In the morning, he would come in, put the shotgun up, and go about his business as though this was all perfectly normal. He didn't give up after a week or two, either. He was relentless. He was out there for literally months.

One night, my friend Kim wanted to spend the night at my house. By then, the spectacle of Dad was part of the fabric of life so much that it was only after I agreed and got permission from my mother that I realized – "She'll see Dad and the gun. Oh, no. She'll think he's nuts. He is nuts! This is so embarrassing." Making friends in junior high was tough enough. I didn't need scenarios guaranteed to sink my chances.

On Friday, the night of the sleepover, I took her aside at school to prepare her. I was absolutely humiliated to have someone else witness this craziness. I explained about the watering, the footprint, Dad and the gun. "So, when we say goodnight to my dad tonight, we have to go out on the back patio to say it. He's sleeping in the hammock. Just don't look at the gun and pretend it's all normal. OK?" She said she would.

That night, everything was pretty normal until it was time for us to go to sleep. We trooped outside to where Dad literally lay in wait in the shadows. "We're headed to bed now, Dad. Good night." He said good night, just as if he wasn't an armed sentry. We walked back across the back lawn for the door with me still humiliated. This was probably the most embarrassing thing I'd ever had to reveal to somebody. My friend seemed pretty freaked out about the whole episode.

When we got inside she said, "I didn't think he'd actually be back there. I thought you were kidding." Now it was my turn to freak out.

"You thought I was KIDDING? Why would I be kidding?"

"Well, I don't know," she said. "Maybe to impress me or something."

"IMPRESS you? Why would you be impressed because my dad's crazy?"

Kim was looking even more uncomfortable. "Well, I don't know. You know how people say things to impress other people." I stared at her like she was crazy, too.

I could not get over it. Why anyone would think that I was making up something incredibly embarrassing, something that I'd revealed only reluctantly, was absolutely beyond me.

If I was given to lying to impress people, I would have said that my dad was royalty. I would have said that we were next in line to rule some obscure European country. I would have said that he'd been a member of a 60's rock group, and had five gold records hidden in our closet. I would have said something that played to fairly universal childhood fantasies of money or prestige. I did not want the fact that he was delusional, armed and patrolling our yard ready to kill or maim the kid who sat across from me in math class to be true.

Eventually, cold weather forced Dad to abandon the patrol. He'd been at it for months by that time. Instead of believing it was folly to begin with, he was convinced that word of his vigil had spread, forcing the boys to give up their prowling. As if any of us had talked about it to the extent that word of his behavior could have spread.

Three years later, I still had not fully processed the reluctance others would have to take such pronouncements about fathers and guns literally.

Several of my closest friends in high school were male. It didn't make any difference to me what gender they were, but I knew that there were times when it would matter to my father.

I knew it was one of those times when Joe described what he and our friend David planned to do when David spent the night at Joe's house that night. "We'll come knock on your window at midnight, OK?" They had it all planned out – I'd crawl out my window and accompany them wherever they planned to go, then crawl back through before anyone was the wiser. They didn't have anything immoral or illegal planned, just late night movies or a trip to the 24 hour convenience store.

"No!" I had to tell them. "That's an incredibly bad idea!" Joe's room was also at the front of his house, facing the street. People frequently came and went through Joe's window instead of the door, (not necessarily to avoid his parents, but just because they could) so they couldn't see why it wouldn't work elsewhere. Even if I could squeeze out of my high, narrow window – a far cry from Joe's, a large window at almost ground level – it was still an extraordinarily bad idea.

"My dad will shoot you," I told them. Despite their attempts to change my mind, I kept repeating it to them. "No. My dad would kill you both." They knew how overprotective my dad was, so I was sure they understood that this was a real danger. No. They assumed it was a figure of speech.

I can understand thinking "kill" was a figure of speech. Kids, and for that matter, adults, use it that way all the time. But I was sure that the word "shoot" carried a different connotation, the way it would if I'd said, "stab" or "electrocute." I was sure that took things out of the realm of the figurative into the concrete. My dad was a hunter, a trap shooting coach, a gun collector, and Joe knew that. Surely he would understand what I was trying to say, I thought.

At midnight, they knocked on my window. I didn't hear them. They knocked again. And again. I still didn't wake up, but across the hall, my dad did.

He leapt out of bed, grabbed the loaded shotgun, and barreled out the front door. A terrified couple of boys took off down the street, with my dad chasing them and swearing. I slept through it all. I'm still sure that they only escaped bodily harm because they were young and scared, and Dad was old, slow and vision impaired. He ran after them for a couple of blocks, but lost sight of them.

He stormed back in the house still swearing, and waited up for at least an hour to see if they were coming back. I slept through it all. My mother told me the story the next morning. She knew who it was, but she wasn't about to let on to my dad.

I phoned Joe. "What were you thinking? I told you no! I told you my dad would shoot you!" And much to my amazement, Joe echoed the words I'd heard before.

"We thought you were kidding," he said.

"Why would I be kidding about a loaded firearm pointed at you? Why would I be kidding about your life ending?" I was just beside myself. I couldn't believe he hadn't believed me. I couldn't believe I'd slept through the whole thing. I couldn't believe how glad I was that my dad hadn't grabbed his glasses on the way out of the house.

"He could actually kill somebody that way, you know," Joe said indignantly.

"I know that! I know! I told you!"

Even over the phone, I was sure I knew what Joe's face looked like, with the wide eyes of disbelief. "Will you believe me next time?" I was getting shrill, imagining poor Joe and David lying dead in the street. It would take a while before the whole thing was funny.

I think Joe was afraid of my dad after that. I wouldn't blame him. I know poor David was.

Since I tend to be an extraordinarily literal person, I still assume others will take what I have to say at face value. I do try to be explicit. But if the past has taught me anything, it's that no one takes anything literally. What's a girl to do?