Today, at work, my coworker told me that she owns a Glock. She keeps it in the drawer by her bed, "just in case." In case of what, I asked her, and she shrugged. "You know," she said, "burglars, rapists." I was about to ask her if perhaps an alarm system would work better, but than I thought better of it.
I've lost count of how many school shootings there have been this month. Eight? Nine? This can't be normal. Can it? Perhaps it's not the violence I'm afraid of, but the fact that violence is now the norm. All you ever wanted to know about blood and death, news at six.
That was morbid, but I'm in a morbid mood. I came home and walked to my bedroom closet and reached up to the very top shelf where all my unwanted junk is kept and I brought down the wooden box and I opened it. And there it was. The gun.
Somehow, it is reassuring to me. I picked it up and it felt heavy, heavier than I expected. I spun the cylinder and it made a nice clicking sound as it went around.
I couldn't throw it away. Someone might have found it, digging through the trash. So I keep in my closet. I can't use it -- I'm not about to buy bullets or anything. As I said, somehow just looking at makes me feel safe.
Now I just have to figure out: safe against what?
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