If I had a gun

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If I had a gun, I would walk down to the Union Street bridge and toss it into the Gowanus Canal. Because that is the tradition.

If I had a gun, I would contact NYC’s Cash for Guns program and turn it in for $200.

If I had a gun, it would be the cap gun I found buried in the mud on the side of the creek that ran through the section of Amherst, Massachusetts, where I grew up. That cap gun was silver and took the old, rolled style of caps, and once we’d cleaned it up, it worked beautifully. I don’t know where it is now.

If I had a gun, it would be the BB gun that my friends had in high school and that we would wave around while driving through Tidewater Virginia. As far as I remember, we never fired it. We had no BBs.

If I had a gun, it would be the shotgun with which we shot skeet at my friend Andrew’s bachelor-party weekend. I remember, on the last round, acting on instinct, I finally nailed the skeet in both directions. Very satisfying. It was the first and last time I’ve ever touched a real firearm.

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I don’t like guns. Guns are dangerous. Duh. That’s the point. They exist to kill—animals or people. At vanishingly rare moments, they may act as a deterrent, but that’s secondary to their nature. They are weapons. And their very existence creates risk. Keeping guns at home increases the risk of people in that home getting shot. Lax state gun laws mean you’re more likely to get shot in those states. Almost every country in the world except that United States has realized, and accepted, that the way to prevent gun deaths is by restricting access to and ownership of firearms. But because the United States is somehow “exceptional,” we reject what works for the rest of humanity².

I’ve never liked guns. I have few childhood memories of pew-pew fantasies. That cap gun didn’t last long. I never owned G.I. Joe action figures and found the cartoon boring, although I did own Megatron, the leader of the Decepticon Transformers, who could change from a robot into a Walther P38. I was into Laser Tag for a hot second in the 1980s, but that fad came and went, and with it went my electronic pistol.

It could have been otherwise. I was little, nerdy, weak¹. Bullies and jerks abounded. I could have looked to guns, or gun culture, even the silliness of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, as substitutes for my lack of physical stature.

But I didn’t. It seemed ridiculous even then. Weak, little Matt with a gun would still be weak, little Matt, only more dangerous, to himself as well as to others. And what I wanted was to be weak and little no more—or, even better, to shift myself into a context where my physicality wouldn’t matter anymore. As a writer, I am now incorporeal. My sentences should not betray my height, my weight, my strength, my looks—only my ability to shape words and scenes, drama and argument. I still want you to feel my presence, a constant looming, but inside your head. That’s the space I want to occupy. Who needs a gun for that?

If I had a gun, it would be a rifle, and I would use it for hunting. I would go on camping trips into the mountains—maybe the Adirondacks, but ideally Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho—where I’d track deer or elk, not for a trophy but for meat. Aim and patience would matter, sure, but the rifle would play second fiddle to the knife I’d use to butcher the animal. There’s my artistry right there: separating skin from meat, carving meat from bone, smoking and preserving what my family and I will eventually consume.

If I had a gun, it would be a lightsaber—“an elegant weapon for a more civilized age,” as Obi-Wan Kenobi called it. I want a weapon for a more civilized age because I want to exist in a more civilized age, and the proliferation of guns, combined with our inelegant craving for violence, only makes this timeline more barbaric by the bullet. My dream is of discipline, discourse, diplomacy; only if those finally fail will I slice off your arm in a barroom brawl. Don’t worry—it will cauterize instantly.

If I had a gun and it were pointed at a bad person—you know, some significant someone whose actions or persona I or we find to be bad for the world—I would not pull the trigger. What kind of an idiotic hypothetical is that, anyway? It’s not going to happen, and I would not put myself in that situation.

But if I had a gun and I were being directly threatened by someone who had a real chance of doing harm to me or my family, I’d shoot them in a second. But again, this is dumb: I don’t have a gun, the situation is highly unlikely, and I’m not Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, nor even Bob Odenkirk in Nobody. Why play this game?

If I had a gun, it would shoot flowers. It would shoot ice cream (mint chocolate chip). It would shoot universal basic income.

If I had a gun, I would give it to someone else. Someone who could put it to better use than me. Someone with the skill, the experience, and the clarity of purpose to know what to do with a tool for killing. I’m not a hero—I’m not that guy. But that guy exists—those guys exist. I’m glad I don’t have to be one of them, and that I don’t yet need to be one of them.

If I had a gun, I’d take it to a shooting range? And practice? And get pretty good, or at least halfway decent, at hitting the target? And I’d learn about the different models and types of bullets, and get caught up in the nerdy technicality of it all? And maybe I’d start doing that instead of rock-climbing or running or cooking? And I’d forget about learning Italian and keeping up with the absolute unredeemable dreck that is the Foundation series on Apple TV+? Or maybe I’d just slot it into all my other hobbies and activities and responsibilities and it would become one more thing that I acquire some skill with but never really master and I’d always say I should focus—focus!—but I never do, or can’t keep it up, and then I get distracted by some other new thing, and slowly my marksmanship skills fade and I barely make it to the range more than once a month, and I can no longer distinguish between, idk, a Sig Sauer and a Glock? Do I even own a gun anymore? Do I even shoot, bro?

If I had a gun, it would be a tool not a weapon, and I would live in the past—possibly probably an imaginary past—when you carried a firearm out of necessity, just like you carried a canteen and some rope and a knife, because you might, out of nowhere, at any given moment, truly need to use your tools, and the tools were tools, not symbols. You take care of the tools, and the tools take care of you. I would take care of my tools, hoping never to need them.

If I had a gun, I would be Meursault. I would be Chekhov. I would be the kid who shot Omar Little.

Half the time I wrote the word gun in this essay, I actually typed fun and had to go back and correct it. Guns are fun—that’s what my fingers tell me.

If I had a gun, it would be a guitar. And what would I do with a guitar? I would point it at the fascists and shout: “Ready … aim … sing!” 🪨🪨🪨

Today’s essay was a prompt from M.D., who’s just one of a few friends I have with the initials M.D. Want to pitch me a rough idea to expand on? Email me!

This is my favorite poem.