When I was four, I picked up a handgun. Playing dress-up in my parents’ bedroom, I tried on my mother’s well-worn heels, draped her sequined blouses over my tiny body, and pulled on her pleated pants. The fabric legs, too long for my small frame, dragged along the floor. While my mother ironed our clothes in the next room, I reached inside the jewelry box on her dresser and clipped on gold earrings, dangled bracelets from my wrists, and loaded my neck with strings of pearls. Humming lullabies—Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star was a favorite—I sprayed rose-scented perfume in the crook of my arms, so much I’d sneeze. Sometimes I’d even step into her newly purchased footwear, and that’s how I discovered her revolver, lying quietly in a shoe box under my parents’ bed.
I lifted the heavy metal from its cardboard resting spot. A residue of oil coated my fingers as I turned it over, using both hands to hold it up. I wanted to show it off to my mother, to ask her about it, to find out whether it was a toy for me or my older brother, so I carried the gun to the next room where my mother stood at the ironing board, a spray bottle of starch sitting at the edge.
I can’t remember whether I said, “Mommy, look,” or some such excited phrase upon entering, but when our eyes met, her cheeks grew crimson as she calmly, slowly stepped forward and took it from me, careful to point the barrel toward the floor.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the gun was a gift to her from her older brother. The weapon was old, with a trigger so tight it took a lot of strength to pull it, she’d later share. My tiny hands barely fit around the single action revolver and would have been hard-pressed to cock the hammer and fire, but the piece was fully loaded, with six bullets that could have struck us if I’d dropped it.
Without a word, she walked the firearm back to their bedroom. I was hot on her heels, peppering her with questions she did not answer. She never turned to look at me as she returned the gun to the box and placed it high on a shelf in the closet. She redirected me with a shush and a shoo, and that was that. Forgotten immediately until that night as I lay in bed.
Pulling the sheets up to my chin to guard against a chill that ran through both the house and my body, my mind replayed the moment my mother’s fair-skinned cheeks became splotchy and her eyes grew wide. I was confused.
Weren’t guns make-believe?
That’s what they’d told me about the movies, cartoons, and tv shows that featured pistols and rifles: the Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd who chased Bugs Bunny with a shotgun, “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” with laser guns and cannons, and “The A-Team,” with their high-intensity rifle shoot-outs.
And I’d already been shot in the chest by a bullet fired from my older brother’s BB gun that had ricocheted off a tree. I’d been knocked down, surprised, and stung by the pelting, but I’d survived.
It was all pretend, wasn’t it? Then why did she take the toy from me and place it far away? Why didn’t she want me to play with it?
*
By seven, I knew where many of the guns were in our thousand-square-foot, two-bedroom home on Detroit’s westside. This is probably where I should mention that we lived in the Motor City at the height of the crack epidemic, when forced entries, muggings, and carjackings were pervasive. Even when my hometown wasn’t the “murder capital” of the United States, it was still a big city, replete with all the issues one would imagine: shoot-outs, beat-downs, break-ins, and drive-bys. My mother grew up on Detroit’s eastside, where, beginning in middle school, fistfights and stabbings were the norm. She’d graduated from a Catholic high school and settled into work as a secretary in an office building downtown. My father, who was raised on a southern Alabama farm, had become a card-carrying member of the United Auto Workers, where he worked late-night shifts. They often stayed overtime to afford Catholic school for my brother and me.
For self-defense and sport, my parents housed one fully-loaded revolver in a bottom drawer of my mother’s dresser. A pistol they kept in the cabinet above the fridge wrapped in a brown paper bag like a bottle of liquor, also loaded. My father had zipped his hunting rifle inside a carrying case that hung on a hook near our basement steps. There was a handgun in the dining room curio. I suspected he also had one in his safe, and I figured several more of his shotguns had spots in our garage. My friends all knew where the firearms were in their homes as well. When I visited them for parties, playdates, and sleep-overs, they often pointed the weapons out to me. “There’s my dad’s heat,” they’d whisper, in seeming deference to the sidearm’s power.
*
One winter night, as the wind howled and pressed against the windows, the front door of our home blew open unexpectedly. The wood crashing against the wall sounded as if someone were kicking their way in for a home-invasion robbery.
Hearing that commotion at the front door while we all slept, my mother startled awake, drew her revolver from the bottom drawer of her dresser, and crept to the top of our stairs. I scurried from my bed and took up the space right behind her.
There’s something instructive for a child upon seeing her mother tiptoe across the upstairs hall gripping a loaded gun, as she, in her thick, winter nightgown whispers, “Stay back.”
By this point, I had learned about survival instincts in school, and had been taught that our options were to hide, flee, or fight. We had windows, but the thought of escape never seemed to occur to her. We had a lock on the bathroom door and closets we could cower in, but hiding didn’t seem to come to her mind either. She had immediately chosen fight and seemed to draw power and strength from having that weapon in her hand.
She didn’t tremble, but I did for the both of us. Tears stung my eyes. I held my breath as my feet bore into the carpet, and I hugged myself for warmth. Every shooting I’d seen on screen and every gunshot I’d heard in my neighborhood echoed in my mind. Was there an intruder in our home? Would they shoot us? Would my mother shoot them? I didn’t want the person to get her, I didn’t want her to get hurt or worse, and if the intruder got her, what would happen to me? What would happen to my older brother, still asleep and unaware of the unfolding danger? Even if I made it to another of our stored guns, I wouldn’t know how to shoot it. I wanted to wake my snoring brother, but I was too frightened to move.
My mother’s voice boomed down the stairs and echoed off the walls as she shouted, “Who’s there?” in a roar that I’d never heard her utter. To this day, she is a sharp-tongued five-foot-three-inch firecracker, and even without knowing she was strapped, I imagined an intruder downstairs backing up, weighing whether this woman would be an easy win.
Turns out, it was my father, home early from his late-night shift at the auto plant because of an impending snowstorm that would render the roads impassable.
My mother breathed again as she walked the gun back to its drawer, and that let me know I could relax. I was relieved but still uneasy because as I crept back to my bed I kept imagining a scenario in which my father didn’t answer fast enough and my mother shot him to death.
My mother used the episode as a teachable moment to officially tell me where the guns were and why I should never touch them. “Don’t pick them up. They’re not toys.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d already clocked their locations well before her warning.
*
By 10, I was better versed in guns and how deadly they were. My father had a hunting license, and I often helped him process rabbits and cook the deer he killed. I’d flip through his Bass Pro Shops catalogs and peruse his Field & Stream magazines. I have a vivid memory of him stepping into his blaze orange hunting bib, explaining to me for the hundredth time that the color was to avoid being accidentally shot by another hunter.
“But can’t the deer see you and run away?” I’d ask.
He’d pull on his matching vest and cap and say, “Looks gray to them.”
I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway. My mother didn’t allow me and my brother to go hunting with my dad, so chatting him up as he headed out and awaiting his return was my way of being a part of this fascinating sport, one that made him smile, his face looking younger and sunburned each time he returned.
It was also about this time that I had a recurring dream in which I discovered the revolver under my parents’ bed, picked it up, and accidentally shot out the bedroom window, the glass exploding and raining down on the hedges below.
Another nightly mainstay had me walking the gun up to the ironing board and accidentally shooting my mother or opening the cardboard box and unwittingly killing myself. That dream featured bright lights, a loud pop, and blood. So much blood.
*
On some deeper level, my subconscious must have already known how deadly guns were from the beginning, even before my parents’ warnings, well before I handled a gun myself. When I was a toddler, before the recurring dreams, before the shoebox, before my mother stood on those steps raising her revolver, someone shot my uncle through the chin, killing him and shattering my family.
I wasn’t immediately made aware of the circumstances of his death, but I have images in my mind of my grandmother, mother, and aunt weeping, of the working-class men in my family, who typically wore flannel shirts, jeans, and steel-toed boots to their factory jobs, suddenly donning three-piece suits with handkerchiefs in their pockets. And a lot of whispering. Everyone whispered around me when they spoke of my uncle’s demise. And I can recall his funeral.
Memory is a fickle thing, and I know I was too young to have actual recollection of the ceremony. Perhaps my mind has echoes of other funerals held for the men we knew who were gunned down. There were several. Either way, I do recall sitting on my mother’s lap, a black veil covering her face, my father beside her in that front row, my brother, seven years my senior, sobbing, the casket not far from us, and wails, so many cries and moans from everyone I loved, who were all in one place. A morbid family reunion.
On the procession from the church to the burial site, a long line of cars snaked down the road, a sea of people amassed at both sites, uniformed police officers, detectives, local politicians, armed bodyguards, Motown celebrities, and journalists were among the throng. My uncle, the one who’d given my mother the revolver that I would eventually find under the bed, had been killed at 32. He’d been neither a politician nor businessman, and yet there was a police escort and multiple limousines for my family. You do the math. I was too young to.
Time passed but the pall did not leave our home. My mother often sat on the couch, staring silently at her older brother’s framed photo. Rather, she would avoid looking at it, I realized one day. I was dusting and when I moved the image, facing it forward, placing it prominently in front of our family portraits, she rose and returned the picture to its spot behind the others. My uncle’s face was again obscured by the other frames, his smiling visage turned slightly away from her line of sight.
*
Have you ever heard your father wail? It’s not like hearing your mother wail.
My father, sharp-tongued and possessing a southern kindness coupled with a hardened gaze that could freeze another man in his shoes, was the embodiment of my safety. In those younger years, I never truly felt at ease until my father was home. He was a six-foot, two-inch broad-shouldered man with an obvious mixture of African American, white, and Creek Nation in his curly hair and chiseled features, who happened to have a booming voice and cursed like a sailor. I’d seen him cry before. At family funerals, a single tear would escape his eye and roll down his cheek.
But that day, he answered the phone, shouted, “What?” and paused for what felt like an eternity. Then he wailed. A high-pitched cry that seemed to start in his feet and push his entire soul up and out his body on the wave of the sound. Trembling, he dropped the phone and my mother screamed, “What’s wrong?” as she picked it up. After a few moments of my mother talking to the person on that line, saying, “Slow down.” “What happened?” “No,” and “Oh my God,” the truth finally came to light: my grandma had shot my grandpa.
As far back as I can remember, my grandparents had a tumultuous marriage. Accusations of cheating, physical abuse, shouting matches, and from my young vantage point, the violence seemed to emanate equally from both sides. I recall one family breakfast at my grandparents’ southern Alabama home when my grandma choked my grandpa, and my father and uncles had to pull them apart. So, as shocking as this news was for our family, it also came as no surprise to me. The part of me that became undone in that moment was due to my father’s wails, which had continued unabated.
I was no stranger to Catholic catechism and Sunday bible school at our Baptist church. There was a line in the Book of Lamentations that always stuck with me: “O Lord, behold my affliction: for the enemy hath magnified himself.”
My mind returned to this scripture whenever my family was met with tragedy, which was often, and I imagined my father’s wails were lamenting all of the times before, when he was young and he and my uncles had to stop their father from hitting their mother, for that altercation at breakfast that all of the grandchildren witnessed, for all of the hurt that violence in the home causes everyone. My mother tried to console him as she reported updates from the phone call. “He survived,” she whispered. “He’s in the hospital. They expect him to recover.”
My mother was doing triple duty in that moment. Keeping an eye on me, comforting my father, and trying to get information from my grandma, who was the person who’d phoned to say she’d shot my grandpa.
As I stood there watching this tribulation unfold, I also remembered how my grandparents showed love and kindness to each other, the times they’d visited us in Detroit and played with me together, the way they’d laugh with each other, and once when my grandpa seemed to have a heatstroke and my grandma tripped over herself and bumped into things trying to get him to a hospital.
But on that day, long after they’d separated and he’d left their farm, a disagreement they were having escalated, and the rifle on hand became an option. This was true of heat-of-the-moment shootings in my city as well—someone would argue, and maybe they were drunk or fed up or for whatever reason unable to calm down. They’d say, “Wait here,” and return with a gun. Or they’d call someone and tell them to arrive with their weapon. The gun’s mere presence in their lives seemed to make it the first thought, like my mother in that hallway who would neither hide nor flee when she thought we were in danger.
The next day, my father returned home to Atmore, Alabama. It was a small town, and after my grandfather was sewn up, when authorities asked whether he wanted to press charges, he said no. My grandparents remained in each other’s lives until their passing, many of my grandfather’s final days spent in the family home on that farm, where my grandmother and aunts cared for him. Choosing that gun could have changed the fate of our family that day. I was relieved we’d survived another close encounter with a gun.
Then things got worse.
*
Most of the families on my block with kids I’d grown up around had long since moved away. The folks who could afford to leave, did. Many of the folks who stayed had problems or caused them—drug sales gone wrong, arguments that turned into fistfights that quickly became gunfights, carjackings, drive-bys. So many drive-bys. I can still hear the Pop. Pop. Pop. sound followed by screeching tires and screams.
Drive-bys scared me the most because anyone standing on their front porch or riding their bike down the street could be shot to death. Sometimes people were killed inside their homes when bullets penetrated windows. I saw a lot of dead kids in the news in my city who had been struck down while playing on their lawns, porches, in the street-facing rooms of their home, or while riding their bikes. My parents had a rule that my brother and I had to hang out and play in our backyard. Never out front. I was young enough to complain about it, but I also did what they said. In my neighborhood, not following rules could end in death.
Police raids were common in my neighborhood, with officers breaking down front doors with battering rams. I was warned off of speaking to police (snitching) or calling them in emergencies. If I was in danger, I had to call my parents or another armed adult who could get to me in a hurry. My parents made sure I understood that since we were Black, the police would be more likely to shoot one of us than help us. 911 was only for medical emergencies, which had to be plainly stated in the call, but even with that it was unlikely they would show up in time to save anyone. And it wasn’t just in my neighborhood. In 1990, rap artist Flavor Flav of Public Enemy fame wrote a song called “911 is a Joke.”
Helicopters flew overhead on a regular basis, and in the summertime, when I raised my window to let in a breeze, their searchlights would often wake me as it shown into my room, the brightness passing over my body as it went.
A close family friend was shot to death not far from his high school.
Several of the men in my extended family died by gun, while driving on the freeway, while standing in their driveway, while walking down the street, often by shots fired from passing vehicles.
At fifteen, I was in a car at night on a deserted Detroit street. I was arriving at the home of my friend’s family member and had no idea anyone was watching our car until a van pulled up beside us and two passengers pointed a gun at us through our driver’s window. We drove off. They gave chase and blocked us. We went in reverse. They went in reverse. We tore up grass and flowerbeds racing onto the sidewalk and driving away. We survived, but it was later that night when I was back at home and telling my parents about the incident that I first declared, “I hate this city. I want to leave.”
And who could blame me? I felt as if I were living in a war zone. Detroit was a wonderful city that had birthed Motown music, the auto industry, our singing angels Aretha, Anita, and Aaliyah, and a distinctive rectangular, thick-crusted pizza, but in some parts, in some neighborhoods, on some streets, danger was expected, guns were normalized, and children were desensitized to the violence. Many of us had greater access to guns than to books.
When I turned eighteen, as soon as college started, I got the hell out of Detroit with no plans to return. On the drive to the airport, my stomach churned as I looked out at my city in the rearview. I would attend college and put all of this gun and violence stuff behind me. Or so I thought.
*
At Columbia University, I studied political science and took several courses in African American studies, history, and politics, with celebrated scholars like Manning Marable, Winston A. James, and Anthony Marx. I quickly saw that what I’d experienced in my youth was by design—“American Apartheid,” one book called it, which was part and parcel of slavery, the dismantling of reconstruction, enactment of Jim Crow laws, segregation, and attacks on voting rights. I saw that law enforcement itself had grown out of the need to control enslaved people in the south. That the American empire was built from land seizure, enslavement, war and militarism, and that the gun was synonymous with American power. It became impossible to have discourse on American hegemony without also discussing the proliferation of gun manufacture and private ownership of firearms.
When my studies included images of war-torn nations overseas—ongoing civil war that impacted the children of Sudan, for instance, or Palestinian and Jewish youth affected by their continuous conflict—I identified with them. Especially in my comparative politics courses, those images began to feel familiar. Not only did I see myself in the children who were traumatized on a regular basis by gunfire, bombs, raids, and police over-enforcement, but I also discovered that American imperialism contributed to the conditions in which we all lived. U.S. guns weren’t only showing up on U.S. streets and in the hands of our military and police, but were also making it into the hands of U.S.-backed opposition forces abroad. The Iran-Contra Affair, for instance. Or in Haiti, where gangs used illegally trafficked U.S. guns at the same time that the United States was legally providing military power to Haitian police forces. I was seeing the violence from my Detroit street play out all over the world.
As a journalism student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, my beat was Inglewood, California, where I quickly took up the work of talking to Bloods and Crips, understanding gang culture and how the conditions of the urban ghettos directly contributed to the creation of the groups—poor education, dilapidated housing that often causes injury and illness, lack of investment in the neighborhood, no jobs, no healthcare, no resources. Quite often, the gangs were filling in the gaps of malicious social policy by providing an informal economy, de facto protection from predatory police officers and landlords, crime investigation, street justice, cash loans, and intelligence, particularly as it related to dirty cops. The ones I spoke to were also implementing inter-gang truces and reconciliation where they could.
This checked out with what I knew from my own experience, when crime-affiliated members of my family paid for my school tuition or gave me money to keep my phone on. Often, these were grants, not loans, and I had few other sources of capital at the time.
I ventured out to speak to former members of Mexican-American gangs, whose stories were very similar to the members of the black gangs that made up the Bloods and Crips. As young people, they were often living in awful conditions and also traumatized by their environments—a loved one had been shot and/or killed, they had witnessed beatings, they were beaten by a loved one or neighbor, they were assaulted by police or witnessed it happen to someone else. These were in their formative years, when they were younger than 10. The similarities across gangs, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures had been unexpected.
I went on to work at NBC News and later for a PBS television show, but I couldn’t turn off the part of me that had connected with these stories. And it wasn’t just those stories. It was also mass shootings and school shootings that were turning up in the news. And then one day, everything changed for me, a moment so gut-wrenching, I could no longer sit back and watch what had happened to me, what was happening to children the country over, the world over if we’re being honest, continue without taking action.
On December 14, 2012, just eleven days before Christmas, a twenty-year-old man shot and killed his mother and then arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, where he killed 26 teachers and students. Many of those who died were in first grade.
The nation was rightly shocked. Devastated. With many victims being only six years old, tiny, defenseless, some hiding in closets based on previously established school shooting lockdown protocols, the fallout from this event was palpable. President Obama repeatedly paused while delivering remarks on the tragedy, wiping tears from his eyes, and saying that he was reacting not as a president, but as a parent:
“As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago—these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
At the time, I was the young mother of a 20-month-old, and I thought: This is it. We’re finally going to have a national conversation about gun violence, with discourse on how we can once and for all protect our young.
But no one could agree on a solution, opposing sides seemed to grow even more polarized on television and in newspaper opinion pieces, and within weeks, the news cycle moved to other topics. I was outraged. First graders? Was nothing sacred? Did a line even exist that we as a nation were unwilling to cross? Certainly, we weren’t going to just sit around and watch our children die.
*
In earnest, I researched youth violence in America in what I’d thought would be a documentary on the subject. I spoke to survivors, parents who had lost children in shootings, law enforcement, think tank experts, staff at the CDC, municipal leaders that had put together task forces to address the issue in their towns. What I found was both heartbreaking and hopeful.
Gun violence in America is an epidemic and public health crisis, a declaration made in 2024 by former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. The stats from multiple public health and NGO sources paint a horrific picture:
- Gun injury is the leading cause of death for young people in this country;
- Each day, an average of 132 people die from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes—and this number includes suicides, homicides, and accidental shootings;
- In 2023, around 48,000 people died by gun; 27,300 people by firearm suicide, 17,927 by firearm homicide, an estimated 604 fatally shot by law enforcement, and 463 by unintentional gun injury.
The so-called inner city and gang shootings that the news media reported on episodically and that the national conversation mostly ignored was a first wave of gun violence in America, according to the experts I interviewed. As with most public health crises, the marginalized bear the brunt in the beginning, but it never stops there. Those shootings in poor communities were the canary in the coal mine for the uptick in firearm suicides and homicides, mass shootings, school shootings, and workplace shootings we see today.
And those drive-bys I feared as a kid? Often with multiple victims, drive-bys were mass shootings before the phrase had been popularized, but because they occurred in the “inner-city” and were deemed “gang-related” they could easily be overlooked.
In a pivotal line at the end of John Singleton’s 1991 crime drama, Boyz n the Hood, Doughboy (Ice Cube) discusses this very phenomenon in a wide-eyed assessment:
“Turned on the TV this morning. Had this s*it on about, about living in a violent, a violent world. Showed all these foreign places. Where foreigners live and all. I started thinkin,’ man. Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the hood.”
He was spot on. Our nation accepted mass shootings in “high-crime neighborhoods” and had even come to expect them. Back then, mass shootings were rare and unacceptable in suburban, rural, and exurban areas, which were deemed “safe” places to live. And just look at us now.
But the real eye-opener for me? Experts told me that before a young person ever picked up a gun, they most likely have first witnessed or have been victims of violence at home, in their community, or at school. That is true across all socioeconomic factors, environments, and ethnic backgrounds, which is why those gang members from completely different cultures all had similar stories—tales of trauma akin to that of the mass and school shooters as well.
*
For several reasons, the documentary never happened, not the least of which was that no one was excited about producing a story on guns, but the conversations I’d had on the subject haunted me. One woman in particular had lost a son, and when I interviewed her surviving boy, he was unable to imagine himself in the future. I asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” A simple question that many of us have asked ourselves from time to time. He was a teen. If I’d asked him when he was younger, he’d probably say something like, “In high school. Playing a sport. Thinking about college.” But he couldn’t answer that question. He said, “I don’t know.” And when I pressed, “Try. Imagine. Dream big. Anything you’ve ever wanted. Five years from now, where do you think that will be?” And he chuckled and said, “Honestly? Probably dead.”
And he wasn’t the only one. A young woman, who worked at Fr. Greg Boyle’s Homegirl Cafe within his Homeboy Industries for at-risk youth and gang members, smiled as she said she didn’t think she’d live to see 20. Another young man quipped, “In prison or dead.”
I recognized their smiles and chuckles. When I was young, I often grinned when I spoke plainly about the tragedies my family experienced. It wasn’t until I was older that I recognized it as a trauma response, a detachment and dissociation from the horrors I faced.
So many young people, both in gangs and who had survived school or mass shootings or were the siblings or best friends of young people who had been gunned down all seemed to have the same resignation about life when I spoke to them. A sense that being young in America is a precarious position.
My oldest child, now fourteen, definitely has this way about her. Years ago, there was a lockdown at her school, and she hid behind a couch, praying that she would survive to see my youngest, her baby brother. My kids live in relative upper-middle-class comfort compared to my upbringing, and yet she came home that day traumatized and crying because she knows the deal—at any time, someone can show up with a gun and take away her life.
And even our wealthy enclave in the East Bay of San Francisco has been touched by gun violence in recent years. A crowded Halloween night house party in 2019 ended with several people shot to death in our town. Two freeway shootings left people injured near the exits where I take my kids to sports practice. And in 2024, just down the street from my home, gunshots rang out in the middle of the day, the sound captured on our doorbell camera. A road rage incident left one man dead as an Orinda resident with a concealed carry permit opened fire on the other driver during their altercation. Helicopters flew overhead. The preschool around the corner was placed on lockdown, with my neighbor texting to say she had picked up her toddler because even though the shooter had been apprehended, this was just too close for comfort.
A chill passed through me as I listened to the gunshots on my home’s doorbell camera. Pop. Pop. Pop. The familiarity was undeniable; the fear had been living at my core my entire life. My mind reached back through the research, past the images of war-torn countries, beyond the gunshots I heard throughout my youth to a single, unanswered question:
How can we all come together to fix this?
*
Which leads me to The Curse of Hester Gardens. This book, my debut novel, gathers my lived experience, the research, the pain, the confusion, and encapsulates it in one text. I hope it will be a national conversation piece. It is a truly American book, bringing together all of the things that we face and don’t want to discuss: poor housing, racism, the prison-industrial complex, law enforcement, education, militarism…violence, in its myriad forms.
I must state plainly that the characters in my book are not villains. None of them. Not even the gang members. Especially not the gang members.
The book follows one mother’s attempt to break a horrific cycle of homicide in her neighborhood. Nona McKinley raised three boys in a Michigan public housing project called Hester Gardens, where crime is high and guns and drugs are pervasive. She is facing the worst possible odds with her husband behind bars and her oldest shot to death at eighteen, and she struggles to keep her remaining sons alive and thriving. There is a curse that seems to want her boys, and Nona fears she’s not strong enough to save them.
The setting of Hester Gardens highlights the facts of American life that are felt by us all. We have reached an impasse in this country, with one side saying “regulate the guns” and the other saying “this is about mental health and has nothing to do with guns.” And as with car accidents and cigarettes, gun violence is a preventable public health crisis that must be tackled through a non-political lens.
My late father, the hunter, would likely not want guns regulated in a heavy-handed way. My family members who own guns would likely balk at the idea of any more regulation on their weapons than already exists. They are not alone. Americans own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms, and our ownership rates far exceed those in other high-income countries. Forty-six percent of U.S. households report owning at least one firearm.
I believe this is why in some states, and certainly nationally, gun regulation is an uphill battle. The demand for guns remains high, so going after the supply is difficult until you decrease that demand.
My gun-owning family members, past and present, are part of this demand. And yet, they would probably all agree that AR-15 style rifles, the seeming weapon of choice in mass shootings, could use some more regulation. The thinking on that is supported by a look at states with more gun regulation in general. Regulation goes up, death-by-gun goes down.
And the pro-gun folks who discuss mental health and investing in social programs are right about that. The city leaders I spoke to all those years ago who were seeing some success in getting their gun deaths down had really done multiple things at once. They invested in mental health programs, safe gun-storage education, social programs that increased jobs and rehabilitation for at-risk youth, they trained law enforcement in community policing, with an eye toward creating connections with the people in the area that they were tasked with serving and protecting so that residents didn’t feel like they were under attack from police and that they could call on them for protection when they needed it. And since I’ve been able to watch these trends over time, I’ve seen that when the investment dollars go away, so does the progress.
I can’t state this emphatically enough: the communities I looked at that were investing in bringing their gun violence numbers down—Minneapolis, Louisville, Detroit, New Haven—weren’t only looking at gun regulation. They were throwing everything they had at the problem, and they were working towards reaching young people when they were still young enough to make a difference. Their efforts were working to reshape the thinking on guns, that over time would drive down demand.
I hope that the story of Hester Gardens, a community of families surviving in a high-crime public housing project, highlights the fact that safe communities should exist for everyone. Not just for the wealthy. I hope the text pushes back on deeming certain neighborhoods okay for violent crime to occur, with law enforcement and government policy primarily being used to contain residents in these areas and keep them out of “safe” communities. Language like “up and coming neighborhood,” “rough area,” “troubled neighborhood,” “ghetto,” “slum,” “hood,” should be challenged because they remove the sense of responsibility we all have in ensuring dangerous neighborhoods don’t exist in the first place.
As for shootings in particular, one of the quickest ways we can wrap our brains around this national tragedy is to stop talking about gun violence as separate categories. We let down our guards when a shooting is targeted versus a random act of violence. We let down our guards when a domestic killing or a murder-suicide occurs, even though we know that with these mass shootings, domestic violence is often a precursor. We don’t call drive-by shootings mass shootings. We don’t lump inner-city shootings that happen at school bus stops or at school-sponsored sporting events in with school shootings. We don’t see so-called gang shootings as akin to school shootings and mass shootings. And this need we have to codify and categorize, and this desire to put ourselves at ease is costing lives and livelihoods. Not only are we looking at 48,000 Americans killed each year by guns, but there is an additional 32,000 non-fatal gun injuries. An average of more than 200 Americans visit the emergency department for nonfatal firearm injuries each day.
Those are entire families and communities shattered across the country daily, and I’ve experienced that shock and grief. I’ve survived that pain.
Having lived this, having researched this, having written this into a novel, I’ve concluded that gun ownership in America isn’t actually a political issue. Both sides can be right. We can reach consensus on what to do because I think the majority of people on all sides of the issue no longer want to live this way.
*
I dedicated my novel to my uncle, Richard “Larry” Revels, and “all of the people who have lost their lives to gun violence in America.” My uncle had pale brown eyes the women loved, a short-cropped afro, and he dated Motown singers and dined with Hollywood starlets. Family lore told of his armed bodyguard, whose street name was Bucket of Blood, of an international drug trafficking ring, homes in the Hollywood Hills, a penthouse overlooking New York’s Central Park, and stacks of cash lying beside a small cache of handguns.
Before his killing, he’d been ambushed once in a phone booth and another time while walking down the street. He’d survived those shootings and once had even gone into hiding in Canada, when the threats against his life had intensified. His homicide was never completely resolved, though the rumored shooter was a woman he knew, who, quiet as it’s kept, was eventually killed herself.
I never took kindly to the “criminal” label. It was too convenient a category in a country of unequal justice, where oligarchs and owners of predatory corporations live freely and are celebrated, where too many marginalized people are locked away for the crime of being poor, and where a convicted felon can hold the highest public office in our land. But my work is not to cast aspersions on any of them. My words are not to make enemies of anyone, rather to find the humanity in everyone.
My uncle was loved, full stop. The oligarch is loved. The convicted felon is loved. The marginalized are dearly loved. And our nation’s children are especially loved. Private gun owners and people who want the shootings to stop are one and the same. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
My mother has traded my uncle’s framed photograph for the smiling pictures of my children, her beloved grandkids. She knows my husband and I considered gun ownership but maintain a gun-free home, and that we’ve instead enrolled our kids in self-defense classes, where they learn to de-escalate conflict, but also know how to throw a sharp elbow or knee to defend themselves.
On a recent day, my mother watched my six-year-old son complete his Taekwondo belt test, and she mentioned that my late uncle had been in martial arts as well.
“Uncle Larry?” I asked, fascinated by this new tidbit.
“Uncle Larry,” she responded, nodding, but never taking her eyes off my son.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, staring at her, trying to gauge her willingness to elaborate. “It’s a great alternative to guns,” I added.
She nodded, glanced at me, and then quickly looked away, her cheeks growing crimson just like on that day so many years ago. It had been well over forty years since she lost her big brother, and I realized in that moment that it still hurt for her to remember him. It still haunted her to say his name.
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