My Road Rage: Pro-Gun Bumper Sticker

I drove behind a van the other day with a bumper sticker that said:

If you don’t like guns, don’t buy them. (It’s really that simple.)

Staring at those two sentences, I couldn’t decide which one made me angrier. The first overly simplistic sentence, with its childish logic, or the second, with its passive aggressive use of parenthesis.

After a mile or so the van turned off the bumpy road, and I sighed with relief, but the words on that bumper sticker stayed with me, along with my fury.

The first sentence, if you don’t like guns, don’t buy them, has been around for a while. It seems to be a favorite of the pro-gun crowd, but it doesn’t take much effort to poke holes in their logic.

Not buying a gun doesn’t keep me safe from the people who do.

Early the next day I drank my coffee in the kitchen while my kids played in the other room. Sunshine streamed through the sliding glass doors, and I picked at my hair idly, like I used to as a teenager, checking for split ends. I thought about how strange it is that hair continues to grow after you die, and wondered how long it takes for it to stop.

Then I thought about the movie theater shooting in Louisiana. I wondered how Amy Schumer felt after hearing the news that two women died watching her film, and how others were still bleeding and fighting for their lives in the hospital. I thought about how vibrant and young those women looked in their pictures splashed all over the Internet, their stunned families now in the process of mourning their tragic and senseless losses.

I couldn’t help but think of that bumper sticker, and especially the second loathsome line, tucked away in parenthesis like an afterthought, but dripping with condescension. (It’s really that simple.)

And I wondered if the van driver would still agree with that sentiment if the gun had been pointed at his head while he sat in a theatre with a box of popcorn between his knees, or if it was his child or sibling, his parent or lover. Would it still be something parenthetical? Can such a huge issue really be so simple?

I’m aware that I used a male pronoun, but it could’ve easily been female. I would prefer a third person pronoun that encompasses all genders.

Maybe that pronoun needs to exist, not he or she, not it, but one that is human, because in this argument, like so many, including ones about race and gender, we forget that we share humanity, that we all have hearts that beat and brains that think, until someone points a gun in our face or our chest and pulls the trigger.