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Late-night scare helps change gun control opinion

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Contributed by: Travis Duncan on 7/18/2008

I've always been a proponent of gun control.

I've even, from time to time, leaned toward the (perhaps naive) notion that they should be jettisoned from society altogether. I can picture it so clearly: A man with a Cro-Magnon forehead heaves his AK-47 skyward; it spins in slow motion against a black sky for a few seconds before the film cuts to a spinning spaceship, Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra" providing appropriate emotional gravity to the moment.

Guns have often struck me as, well, a bit outdated. Are we really still using these things to solve conflicts?

Before I go much further in this vein (and doing so would most certainly earn me a few e-mails with references to the 2nd Amendment in the subject line), let me say I'm aware of where I sit in the spectrum of our city's general opinion on gun control. Heck, UCCS has a group of students that wants the school to allow them to pack heat into class, all in the interest of protecting themselves against incidents like those that occurred at Virginia Tech or Columbine. That struck me as crazy, although I wasn't there and I didn't lose my friends in a senseless strafe on the student body. As it turns out, it took a lot less than that to get my mind marching toward the middle on the issue of guns.

I'm guessing the story I'm about to tell is a common one for many American families. It was late Sunday night, I was asleep and my wife was studying for her graduate program in the front room of our house, enjoying the breeze blowing in through the windows. Then she heard the measured steps and crunching of leaves outside. It could have been one of two things: a person or an animal, perhaps a particularly meditative male African lion (see Tuesday's Gazette if you missed that rather bizarre local story).

And so I was awakened by my wife, fear trembling in her voice, asking if I'd investigate. This, of course, had happened before. I've seen cats, foxes and even had a skunk hiss at me. About what you'd expect. We live on a quiet street where I have never seen anyone out past midnight. That fact alone was probably responsible for us delaying in getting decent window treatment (aka non-transparent) for the front room. So I turned out all the lights and sat quietly by the window, looking outside and listening. Nothing.

My wife went into my daughter's adjacent bedroom to check on her, and after seeing that she was sleeping soundly, peered through the blinds of her bedroom window. She saw a man peering back at her. The scream she let out was awful, filled with infectious fear that woke my daughter up and had me fumbling at the knife block in the kitchen for something to protect us with.

So now we have a shotgun. Just like that.

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