A survey
In America, the gun, perhaps more than any other object, is in the eye of the beholder. To place a finger on the trigger of a firearm is to feel — if not respect — its power to wound and kill; to look down a barrel is to feel profound fear.
To bring personal perspectives to America’s vast supply of guns — and its consequences — we asked individuals who’ve held and fired them, or who’ve been on the terrible receiving end of their power, to share their stories.
These are police officers, former gang members, people carrying for personal protection or to hunt, innocent victims and more. They don’t represent every experience with firearms in America — no compendium could — but they serve as a window into the kaleidoscopic relationship between Americans and the firearms so many of them carry.
════════════════════════════════════════
Respect for the Trigger
By Peter Moskos
I was 28 years old when I touched my first gun. Twenty days later, I fired it. I was in the Baltimore City Police Academy.
The Baltimore gun range, aptly named Gunpowder (for a river running through it), was a ramshackle place. I was taught to disassemble the Glock 17 into five parts, clean it with a dry brush and a solvent-soaked brush and then oil a few parts before reassembling. There was no safety in the traditional sense. If a bullet was in the chamber, pulling the trigger would fire it.
Not having grown up in gun culture, I was impressed with the engineering. The gun made me think of my Bianchi road bicycle. Both are beautifully engineered machines with no wasted parts. Both, properly maintained, are well-oiled machines that perform just as they are designed.
The gun, of course, is more powerful. Not just metaphorically but literally. When you pull the trigger, it causes an explosion. Shooting a pistol accurately involves breathing, trigger control and relaxing before the recoil. Anticipating the recoil makes one jerk the gun down before it goes bang. And if you do that, you miss.
Before I fired my first round, the training sergeant asked if I had ever shot a gun before. I told him no. He smiled and told me to relax. On the outdoor gun range, the cardboard target flipped from perpendicular to parallel to face us. I remember pulling the trigger, wondering what would happen. I was surprised how little kickback there was from the pistol, and also that I hit the target. My first 12 rounds hit the target before I missed. I shot off 50 rounds before reholstering my gun.
“For a guy who doesn’t like guns and had never picked one up before,” said the sergeant, “I have to say that’s not too bad.” That didn’t give me swagger, but confidence.
On the street, a field training officer told me: “We’re partners when we’re out there. You can pull out your gun. You can point your gun. You can even put your finger on the trigger. That won’t be a big deal. But it’s up to you when you think you have to pull that trigger.”
Three days later, perhaps just to make him less apprehensive, I took my gun out of the holster for the first time as we were going through a vacant house. I had no idea who or what I might find. That quickly became routine. I no longer saw my pistol as a foreign object that might unexpectedly go bang, but a powerful tool firmly in my control.
There is a responsibility that goes with the knowledge one may have to kill to stop a threat. “You must think about whether you are willing to take the life of another,” said an instructor. “There is nothing wrong with saying no, but then you are in the wrong wind of work.”
I’ve never fired a gun outside of training. But on duty, perhaps every other shift I took my gun from its holster (most often while searching vacant buildings). Only twice did I point my pistol at another person. For the infrequency of that I credit luck and my less-than-two-year tenure more than any “de-escalation” ability on my part. A threat is a threat.
One gets used to carrying a gun, but one never forgets one is carrying. Within Baltimore City limits, outside of my house, I was required to carry my gun both on and off duty. Going for a jog, I would switch to an elastic “belly band” holster to secure my gun. At a movie theater, I’d place dates on my “weak” (nonshooting) side, so the gun wouldn’t be a wedge between us. I would strap up to take out the trash. Because you never know when something might happen.
When I quit the police department and moved to New York City, many of my police friends asked if I would have a gun. No. I know that I can carry and use a gun responsibly. But I’m happy to live in a city where I don’t feel the need to.
Peter Moskos is a professor at John Jay College and author of “Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.”
════════════════════════════════════════
Keeping Firearms at Arm’s Length
By Josiah Bates
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in the early 2000s. I had an uncle, Willie Young, who was a police officer, a correction officer at Rikers Island and a private investigator. He was law enforcement through and through, a true believer in law and order. He loved telling me and my cousins stories about his experiences during family gatherings. He’d go on about confrontations with inmates at Rikers, an arrest he made that got violent or riveting PI jobs. It was like listening to a live audiobook of a thrilling cop novel.
I had family involved on both sides of the street — the police side and the criminal side. No one on the street side shared their stories with the kids, but Uncle Willie was happy to.
His stories were so compelling that my cousins and I would talk about them when he wasn’t around. One time, my cousin shared a startling fact. “You know, he got guns in the house,” he said.
“Really?” I asked. He explained that Uncle Willie kept them in a trunk container by the stairwell to his attic. “I’ve never seen them,” I told my cousin.
“I’ll show you the next time we there,” he declared.
Sure enough, the next time we were at his house, we snuck upstairs real quick while the rest of the family enjoyed each other’s company downstairs. The narrow black trunk was against a closet door, right next to a stairwell to the attic. As my cousin opened the trunk, I kept watch, making sure none of the adults wandered in. He opened it to a long-barreled silver shotgun. I can’t recall what kind it was, but it was probably a 12-gauge pump-action. Before that, I’d never seen one up close, just what was depicted on TV shows and movies. “He got a couple handguns too,” my cousin said. He reached into the closet and grabbed a revolver in a black holster. He held it for maybe 15 seconds before he put it back.
At the moment, it didn’t seem like a big deal. We didn’t point the guns at each other. We didn’t play around with them. He just wanted to show me that they were really in the house. Because I had a zero on the street-smarts scale, I foolishly told another cousin about it, who told his mother, who told my mother. Needless to say, it wasn’t a small deal to her. Rather than beat my ass, she told Uncle Willie, and he wanted to talk to me and my cousin in person about it.
We met at my grandmother’s house. I felt like I was about to get a dose of that same no-nonsense energy he directed at criminals. Instead, he spoke like a concerned uncle. He explained that guns were nothing to mess around with, that he didn’t have guns in the house because he thought it was cool — but so that he could protect his family. He told us to never play around with guns because you have to be ready to use them when you have one.
Today, I don’t use guns at all. I’ve never fired one, and I’ve never carried one. Uncle Willie’s voice still rings in my head.
Josiah Bates is an enterprise reporter at The Grio. He is the author of “In These Streets: Reporting from the Front Lines of Inner-City Gun Violence.”
════════════════════════════════════════
It Made Me Feel Formidable
By Joseph Wilson
He died. He fell to the ground. His shoulder skidded on the concrete. His body folded like a soft blanket. That was after the second shot. I thought he had turned to retaliate, but it was just the force of the first bullet moving him from within. Before that, I jutted past him and spun as I pulled the gun from my pocket. Before that, he made a suspicious move. Before that, we talked tough, bending our brows into W’s. Before that, we were friends with guns.
Then I ran. The sun was like a spotlight; it made me sweat and exposed my shame. The gun somehow felt weightier, as if his body had attached itself to it. I was bonded to it as well, by guilt. I could not drop it now. I put it back into my pocket.
A few days later, from the Manhattan port, I boarded a New York City Staten Island Ferry. I lurked on the bottom of the boat where cars were parked. Once we were midway, close to the famed Statue of Liberty, I dropped the gun into the Hudson River as tourists photographed Ellis Island.
The gun plopped, with a soft splash. It was easily disposed of. The guilt was not. The weight of my friend’s life ascended out of the water, over the bow and into my chest. I sobbed quietly.
That same gun used to make me feel equal, equal to bad guys and bad good guys too. The handheld steel tool, matte black finishing and sound of chambering slippery, shiny bullets — all of it made me feel formidable. I knew that I was not invincible. I had seen too many people die with guns in their hands to believe that. But I felt capable of holding my own, with a chance to live.
There was danger lurking everywhere. There were the crazies, the stickup kids and the bad cops. However, in the dark corners of our minds, those of us who had set up drug stands knew to watch our family members and friends more than anyone else. If anyone could penetrate the force field, it was them.
Flash forward. I’m in prison. My friend has been in the ground, in the dark, for 20 years. The gun in the deep, eroded by the running river. Me, I’m still in the sun. It is still a spotlight, revealing to me the contents of my heart.
Joseph Wilson is a father, composer, librettist, singer, songwriter, pianist, art curator, writer and co-founder of the Sing Sing Family Collective. He is currently incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York.
════════════════════════════════════════
A Family Wounded
By Jessica Mofield
My father was shot in Philadelphia while I was in graduate school at NYU, where I was pursuing a degree in mental health counseling. I had enrolled hoping to make sense of my community’s trauma and my dad’s, and, if I’m honest, to become clever enough to outrun my own.
The early-morning call I received, jarring and far too familiar for so many families, snapped me out of any illusion that education alone could protect me from the experiences I still carried with me. No degree, no matter how “fancy,” can make your family bulletproof.
By the time my father was shot, I had already watched violence touch too many people I loved: my brother, friends, neighborhoods that raised me. These weren’t isolated tragedies. They were a pattern of policy decisions that prioritized punishment over prevention, siphoning the community’s ability to even attempt to heal.
So no, I didn’t plan to work in government, let alone eventually come to lead the New York City Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. But when your family has bled on American soil, your understanding of safety hits differently. Violence stops being so abstract, and you stop waiting for someone else to fix it.
By the time I started working for the City in 2015, the real work was already underway. Years of advocacy from survivors, grassroots organizers, local elected officials, unofficial neighborhood mayors and nonprofits had pushed the City to pilot community-led violence-reduction strategies. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and evaluation partnerships with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City began building a different type of system, one rooted in healing, prevention and community wisdom. That system became the Crisis Management System (CMS), a network of community-based organizations embedded in more than 30 precincts with the highest rates of gun violence. The work was radical in its simplicity: Trust the community to save the community. Our role was to fortify it, grow its reach, refine its operations and ensure community voice remained at the center of how we defined and funded public safety.
What did this look like?
- Responding to shootings by mobilizing credible messengers to prevent retaliation and support survivors
- Hosting peace events and community vigils to publicly denounce violence and promote collective healing
- Providing trauma-informed care at hospitals and through mobile trauma units
- Creating safe-passage corridors around schools and holding space for in-school and after-school programming
- Connecting young people to employment through the Anti-Gun Violence Employment Program
- Making healing visible through community healing circles and sharing resources
- Offering community safety grants to help everyday residents coproduce public safety on their own terms
And it worked.
Then Donald Trump got elected — again — and now we’re watching federal support for Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs dry up across the country. The White House Office to Prevent Gun Violence is no longer and community care has been undermined, all while systems for locking people up continue to get a blank check.
Easy access to guns, chronic disinvestment in Black and brown communities and harmful policy choices shaped this part of my life. It shapes the lives of too many other Americans — and will continue to until we find ways to have their experiences truly guide the political and policy choices we make.
Jessica Mofield is a community strategist and the former executive director of the New York City Office to Prevent Gun Violence. She is currently vice president of community engagement and policy at the Center for Policing Equity.
════════════════════════════════════════
What a Gun Took From Me
By Mia Livas Porter
Growing up in the 1980s in our Catholic, Filipino family, we were expected to be well-behaved and look like (Asian) Stepford children. You didn’t air your dirty laundry. What happened in the family was to stay in the family. So when my brother Junior, a few years my elder, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early 20s, the message I received was clear: Don’t talk about his mental illness.
For five years, I watched as Junior battled his demons: being paranoid that someone was “out to get him”; giggling to himself throughout the day; screaming in the middle of the night at the voices in his head. He was living a tortured life. So when he told my dad that he wanted to go back to school and finish college, my parents complied because they wanted him to be happy.
Within a few months, my sweet, kind, loving brother had died by his own hand because of easy access to a firearm. I believe Junior had a plan: He wanted the pain to go away and thought this was the best solution to spare our family from the “burden” of his disease. When we came back from his funeral, he had written a letter to each remaining family member. I still have mine. But as before, our family was taught to believe that Junior’s schizophrenia, and now his suicide, were shameful.
In one sense, it wasn’t a gun that killed him — it was his own hand and the schizophrenia that haunted him. But if a gun hadn’t been in his hand, there’s a high likelihood he would’ve seen a way forward.
Decades later, thinking of Junior’s last moments still breaks me. Tears flow thinking of how alone, scared and helpless he must have felt if he believed this was the only way to relieve his pain. And like a ripple in a pond, his death changed my entire family’s life and everyone I interacted with in the years to follow. This is true of all survivors of violence or trauma.
We are a nation of survivors of gun violence. 125 Americans die by firearms — and twice that many are wounded — every single day. And though most frequently we talk about gun homicide, gun suicides make up nearly 6 in 10 of those deaths. For those who believe Junior would just have “found another way” to end his life, suicide attempts by firearm are around 90% fatal, compared to around 5% by other means. Suicidal ideation can last as little as 15 minutes. Think of the countless lives we could save with lifesaving firearm legislation like secure storage, longer waiting periods after buying a gun and background checks on all gun sales.
Firearms are the leading cause of death for children under 19. We are failing an entire generation of children who have never known the feeling of security and safety. Economically, gun violence costs taxpayers $557 billion every single year. And with almost 400 million guns in circulation, the epidemic of gun violence is uniquely American. It’s. The. Guns. And specifically, it is the easy access to guns. This is why we all need to use our platforms and networks to demand a country free from gun violence. We do not have to live — or die — like this.
Mia Livas Porter is a mother, gun violence survivor and activist.
════════════════════════════════════════
Me and My Girlfriend
By LaShawn Fonza
Growing up on the West Side of Chicago in the 1980s, I got to observe a lot of violence and criminal activity, and I was attracted to it. I shot a gun for the first time when I was 12 years old, in 1983. My mom had just passed away. It was her birthday. My uncles and grandpa were in the backyard lighting fireworks and shooting their guns in the air. I asked my granny, and she showed me how to brace myself for the kickback so I didn’t hurt myself. I fired a .357 Magnum. It had a forceful kickback, and I was not prepared for it — I threw my whole shoulder out from the recoil of the gun.
My first personal gun was a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver. I acquired this gun the same year, when I was 12. When the police were chasing my uncle, he threw it and I went to pick it up. My uncle was arrested. Two or three weeks later, he was released. He never asked about the gun, and I never told him. This gun became my best friend, my protector, my leverage. My .38 was my girlfriend and I never left home without it. I was a snub, so I could hide it in my bra, or, if I had a skirt on, I would wrap it around my inner thigh.
The first time I shot at someone, I was 14. A girl was getting beat and raped by three guys under the bleachers in Franklin Park. I could not believe what I was seeing. I aimed at their legs and lower extremities. I hit one in the butt, one in the leg. The young girl was pretty bruised up, but the street knew exactly who had violated her. Although I was engaging in criminal activity, I helped someone that day.
In August of 1986, I was caught in a drive while I was seven months pregnant. My baby daddy was driving a ’79 Ford Maverick two-door, and there were three of us in the front seat. My nephew was on the passenger side and I was in the middle. A car pulled up behind us and started shooting. My nephew hit the floor. I reached down and grabbed his 9 mm and emptied the clip. The car that was chasing us crashed and we made it home.
That incident solidified my newfound obsession with firearms; I vowed to never leave home without one.
Our gang culture changed as drugs invaded our community in the 1980s. At first, we were protecting our neighborhoods — and then, in the blink of an eye, we were destroying them. The structure and rules were gone.
We have all heard the script that guns do not hurt people, but people with guns hurt people. It’s an NRA line, but there’s some truth to it.
Lashawn Fonza is a dedicated youth advocate with a background in human services and sociology.
════════════════════════════════════════
Armed, Against My Will
By Kerri Raissian
I have a lot of roles. I am a wife, mother, daughter, public health researcher and family violence survivor. I have spent most of my life advocating for policies that keep people and communities safe from violence — including gun violence. At times, I am also a permitless handgun carrier. While many might think these things cannot coexist, they often do. Let me explain.
My abuser lives in Texas, and I live in Connecticut. Generally, I can keep a safe distance, but every now and again, when I am in Texas, I know I am not safe. I know that if he found me, he would kill me. He’s told me how he’d kill me. He’s described it. He’s got a violent criminal record, has violated protective orders and has a history of drug abuse, complex and untreated mental health issues and a lifetime of poor choices. All this is to say: When he says he’d kill me, I believe him.
And yet, like many victims of violence, I’ve had trouble getting Texas law enforcement to believe me and follow through with meaningful action. I’ve reported harassment (terroristic messages, to be specific), violations of orders of protection and reasonable suspicion of firearm possession. I am lucky if I can even get my phone calls returned from the police.
This does not inspire feelings of safety. So like many firearm owners, on select trips to Texas, I have carried a handgun. I grew up around guns; I was born and raised in Texas, oscillating between Houston and our family’s farm two hours north. I know how to use them and am not afraid of them, but I am not a firearm enthusiast. In fact, I only carry a gun for self-defense. I would much prefer the police investigate his crimes and hold him accountable for his credible threats and other crimes.
People often cite “self-defense” as a reason for carrying firearms. It’s my reason, so that resonates with me. However, I think what’s lost is the resentment I feel for having to do so. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want anyone to live like this.
I often hear, “We don’t need new gun laws, we just need to enforce the ones we have.” And this is where my public health research brain and lived experience brain come together. While strong evidence supports the adoption of some new laws and programs to curb gun violence, we most certainly should place strong emphasis on enforcing the laws we already have. In my case, as with so many other women, we know this would save lives.
I’d much prefer to both leave my gun at home and be safe from violence. In the meantime, I will carry when I think it’s necessary and when I can’t avoid the risk. I will carry to keep myself safe in Texas, but I will also, in my role as a research scientist, continue to advance research that might inform policies that can prevent violence — for myself and others.
Kerri Raissian is a senior research scientist at the Yale School of Public Health and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center.