86: Our Tragic National Number

and why Jerry Brown should sign the LIFE Act

It was 2002, and my husband and I were living in San Francisco’s Castro district, in a one-bedroom apartment in a twelve-unit building called The San Miguel. We had very few possessions. We only owned things we liked and needed. With one exception. There was something in the apartment that I hated with a passion—my husband’s Sig Sauer.

The Sig Sauer wasn’t a personal possession. It was a mandatory accoutrement of my husband’s job in law enforcement. When he got home from work, he immediately locked the gun in the safe, and when he left for work in the morning, he took it with him.

I’d grown up in Alabama, the land of Jesus, guns, and football. In college I lived with four guys; three of them owned guns. My extended family lived in rural Mississippi, where guns were more common than pickup trucks; everybody had a few. Still, for most of the years of my childhood, my immediate family was the anomaly, an unarmed household in a land of gun lovers. My mother, a nurse, couldn’t see any way that a gun would make our house safer. She’d worked too many hours in the ER to have a favorable opinion of guns.

One day, my husband suggested that it was time that I became familiar with the gun. It wasn’t going anywhere, he pointed out. Years before, when he first took the job, and we were living in an even smaller apartment in New York City, he had emptied the chamber and had me hold the gun. He’d shown me how to work the safety, and I’d felt the heft of the gun in my hands. Just once, and that was enough. Nothing about the gun felt right to me. So yes, I had held a gun, but I’d never fired one. I agreed that I would try it—since this thing was a fact of our lives, since we would be living with it for many more years.

When we arrived at the indoor firing range a few days later, a dismal place off the freeway, we signed a waiver and paid a small fee. We rented a gun for me, the same model of Sig Sauer that had been issued to my husband. We put on our safety glasses and headphones and entered the range. Half a dozen men stood in separate lanes, firing weapons at paper targets lined up along the far wall. There was a young boy, no older than ten, there with an older guy. The boy, too, was firing a gun. Despite the headphones, it was very noisy. The room vibrated as the guns went off—bang, bang, bang. I wanted to leave.

“You’ve come this far,” my husband said. He stood in front of the target and showed me how to stand, how to hold the gun, how to aim. When he pulled the trigger, I jumped back.

“Now you try,” he said. The gun in my hands felt even worse than it had that first time, as I sat on the bed in our apartment in New York City, feeling its serious heft. Now, it was loaded. I turned to face the target. I lifted the gun with both hands, braced myself, and aimed. I counted down from 10, and pulled the trigger.

The gun kicked back, pushing me off balance. The force of the bullet leaving the chamber vibrated through my arms, my chest, my legs. The noise of it exploded thunderously in my head. The bullet tore a black hole in the target. In that moment, I felt a sense of complete dread, and revulsion, mixed with sorrow. How was it possible that so many people, every day, across our county, could pick up one of these, aim it at another human being, and pull the trigger? To hold the gun was to feel a tremendous power, the power to take a life. There I was, five foot two—a person who had never so much as hit another human being, beyond the minor sibling scuffles of childhood. There I was, holding an instrument that could easily end a life.

My husband must have seen the look on my face, because he gently, carefully took the gun from my hands. “Enough?” he asked.

I nodded. Yes, once was enough.

That was the last time I held a gun. We have a rule in our home: the moment my husband walks in the door, the gun goes in the safe. I haven’t laid eyes on it in years. I don’t want to. I know that it is there, that, as long as he has this job, the gun is a fact of our lives. My husband, for his part, isn’t a fan of guns. But he undergoes rigorous firearms training several times a year, just in case he ever has to use it. I can forget the gun for long stretches at a time, and then something will happen to remind me: a wife shot by her husband, a senator shot by an angry citizen, a group of children shot, along with their teachers, on what began as an ordinary day at school.

Some shootings make the news. Most pass unremarked—which is to say they are remarkable only to the people left behind.86 people were killed by guns in America yesterday. 86 today. 86 more tomorrow. Of those, 32 are murdered, 51 take their own lives, and 2 are shot by accident. 8 of the fatalities, each day, are children and teens. In 2007, more pre-school-aged children (85) were killed by guns than police officers were killed in the line of duty. If you want more numbers, you can find them here.

86 is an average, of course. Some days it is fewer, some days it is more. Many more are shot, but survive—an average of 196 per day. There is paralysis, disfigurement. There are the walking wounded. When I went to my twenty-year high school reunion, I learned that a guy with whom I used to carpool to school, a guy who had been renowned, above all, for his good looks, had been shot in the face. He was alive, but he was no longer familiar to himself or others, no longer recognizable. The mirror was no longer his friend. Simply to step outside the door was to subject himself to the horrified pity of strangers.

Thirteen years ago, a well-liked professor of comparative literature at the university where I attended graduate school was shot and killed in his office by a disgruntled graduate student on what began as an ordinary day in August. My cousin, a petite accountant in her late twenties, was shot in the stomach some years ago because, on an ordinary day in rural Mississippi, she found herself in the wrong place in the wrong time. No matter your political leanings, your social status, your income, your geographic location, your age, your race, your gender, you probably know someone who has been killed, or someone whose life has been irrevocably altered, by gun violence. What does it say about our culture that most of us know someone who has been shot?

It always begins as an ordinary day. This is what we hear again and again: kindergarteners at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who began their day at the doughnut shop, or choosing their favorite pair of shoes. The parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Arizona, where citizens had come to talk with their elected representative: an ordinary day. Couples sitting in a movie theater, eating popcorn, watching the carnage unfold onscreen, until the carnage was no longer a fantasy, but their own unfathomable reality. A professor in his office, a high school student in the school library, a clerk at a convenience store. A child in her bed in Oakland, sleeping as children do, dreaming.

Each begins as an ordinary day. Then, a single element is introduced: this piece of metal or plastic, its inner workings designed to push a bullet through barrel, into the air, into whatever, or whoever, is standing in its way. This thing that so many defend not with their own lives, but with the lives of others. Day after day, month after month, year after deadly year. All the dead children, all the dead mothers, all the dead brothers and sisters and fathers and friends, because, as a nation, we love this thing too much. We love this thing beyond reason. We love it more than life itself.

Right now in California, there is legislation sitting on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk. It is the LIFE Act, passed by the California legislature, a series of bills that will, among other things, close background check loopholes and make it harder for people with violent records or mental illness to obtain guns. The NRA is fighting these bills, threatening our governor, hoping to bully him into submission, as they have bullied so many others. Call Governor Brown at 916-445-2841 to urge him to sign the bills into law. Or go here to learn about each of the bills.

If you are not in California, you can take action by contacting your representatives, signing a petition, or joining the fight against gun violence in your city. Find out how to get involved here.

Michelle Richmond is the author of the forthcoming novel GOLDEN STATE, the New York Times bestseller The Year of Fog, and four other books of fiction.