Essayist Anthony Reeves on a background of handwriting with a pen.
As winter approached, it was time once more for me to confront the Coat. The Coat is pea green. It fits me well. It is nylon, hooded, and has excellent insulation. It has deep pockets, useful for storing gloves, hand heaters, flashlight batteries, and the other odds and ends I might need to meet life’s unpredictable trials. I got possession of the Coat eight years ago, when my brother and I cleared out our parents’ house while easing them into assisted living.
I never felt that the Coat was fully my own. It merely passed to me from my father, and in time it would belong to someone else.
Still, the Coat posed a continual challenge, one that increased with the passage of time. For it had stitched on its left shoulder a red, white and blue patch with the gold silhouette of an eagle with its wings extended. Encircling the bird were these words in gold thread: “National Rifle Association” and “Life Member.”
I should point out now that I am not a member of the National Rifle Association, or NRA. I’ve never felt any great need to join that organization. I admit that when I turned 12 in 1968 and was finally old enough to hunt, I appreciated the firearms safety class that the NRA sponsored. Passing this class was a legal prerequisite to obtaining my first hunting license. And as was the case for many boys growing up in South Dakota in the late 1960s, hunting was an intimate part of my family life. My first firearm was a 12-gauge Ithaca pump-action shotgun. It was a gift from my father on my confirmation into the Methodist church, which also happened the year I turned 12. In effect, my father said, “Welcome to the church, son; here’s a gun.”
Nobody back home then would have seen any irony in that gesture. And that “nobody” included my father, who was both a life member of the NRA, and the original owner of the Coat. Most of our friends and neighbors felt the same way about hunting and firearms ownership. It was accepted as normal. And it meant that when pheasant season opened in October, Aberdeen, South Dakota, the railroad town I grew up in, turned into a ghost town. By 5:30 a.m. we would all have gotten up and fanned out into the cornfields and shelterbelts of rural Brown County, regardless of the weather. At noon we might meet in cafes for lunch and coffee in hamlets with names like Mellette Corner, Ipswich, Toronto and Groton. Nobody would think anything of taking a shotgun to a table or booth, then checking their dogs for ticks as they discussed the merits of the day’s blue plate special. Then we would all return to the fields, to flush the elusive ringneck pheasants from corn rows and fallow grazing fields until dusk. And when at day’s end we went home, we would chat about the day’s hunting as we stripped and gutted our birds.
Of course, 1968 was also an election year marked nationally by an extraordinary level of political violence, including the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Accompanying these tragedies, the call for stricter firearms regulation became more insistent, and in my family’s view, more strident. The magazine rack in our living room was stacked high with copies of the American Rifleman, the house organ of the NRA. As Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd and his allies sought to satisfy the call for stricter firearms control by banning gun sales through the mail, the American Rifleman struck back in its editorial columns with arguments that seemed sensible to us. After all, what business did those who knew nothing about game management and conservation have lecturing us about the evils of hunting as a “blood sport”? And why should the behavior of criminals and political fanatics dictate the rights of law-abiding gun owners?
Over time, my views on the sanctity of gun ownership changed. This is partly because the relentless carnage continued. Each month it seemed that a new spasm of gratuitous bloodshed erupted in America’s schoolyards and workplaces. With each outrage, the expressions of prayerful sympathy our elected officials offered to victims and their families came to sound more cowardly and mealy-mouthed.
But if I lacked enthusiasm for gun ownership rights, I was also agnostic about the value of firearms restrictions. If, as some estimates suggest, there are as many firearms as people in the U.S., we would seem to have reached the point where there was little hope of controlling that through mere regulation.
Still, the NRA increasingly became an organization that I didn’t care for. When states held referendums to enact gun control laws through the electoral process, NRA lobbyists strong-armed their legislatures into repealing them. And when the National Institutes of Health attempted to research the health impacts of gun control legislation, the NRA forced through laws that prohibited the agency from conducting or sponsoring any such study. Such prohibitions on the right of citizens to study public issues rationally and to use the tools of good government to effect change are fundamental transgressions against the give-and-take of democratic discourse. These actions convinced me that the NRA was an organization I no longer respected.
They also threw into sharp relief the question I had yet to confront: What would I do about that emblem on the Coat’s left shoulder? My changed views on gun control didn’t make the solution easy. As I’ve already explained, that Coat never felt like it was really mine. It was not a Christmas or birthday gift. I took it by default because my father no longer needed it.
What ultimately resolved matters was this question: How would I react if, while I was walking down State Street, someone who had just lost a child or lover to gun violence saw me wearing the Coat with that emblem on it? What would I say when that person accosted me? Why should he view me as anything other than the living embodiment of everything that turned his life upside down, made it a living hell?
My father could probably have provided an adequate answer of some sort. I no longer could.
Some weeks ago, I took the Coat to a tailor I know in Middleton. He is a quiet Vietnamese American man who does excellent alterations. We set a price and time for the repair. My one concession to my memories was this: I asked that he not throw out the patch when he removed it. Instead, I asked that he tuck it into one of the deep, pea green coat pockets. He nodded briskly, murmuring his approval.
Anthony Reeves recently retired after 26 years as a research analyst for the state of Wisconsin and still serves as a union steward. He lives on Madison’s north side.
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