When the Guns Come Out
A meditation in six parts.
I.
GUNS HAVE ALWAYS INTERESTED ME. I owned dozens as a kid. Toy guns, of course. A black revolver with a metal cylinder for caps. A plastic M16 that rattled when you pulled the trigger. A submachine gun with a removable clip that held yellow rubber bullets. These guns were props used in imaginary battles. I pretended to be John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from Commando (1985), or John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in First Blood (1982). I hid behind trees to ambush enemies. I army crawled to avoid hostile forces. I camouflaged myself to vanish in the woods. But none of it was real—not even when I thought I wanted it to be.
As a kid, the finality of gun violence didn’t register with me. And why would it? What I saw on screen was well-choreographed fiction centered on a protagonist who could kill dozens of enemies without a single bullet wound. I never dwelled on what destruction a single bullet might cause because it was conveniently ignored. In Die Hard, for example, John McClane never paused to wax scientific about how all the bullets he fired were tearing through the skin, bones, muscles, arteries, brain stems, and frontal cortexes of the vaguely European terrorists who had seized control of Nakatomi Plaza. My fictional visions of good guys brandishing guns were cartoonish and uncomplicated. Tidy and simplistic—like the plot lines in a Michael Bay film. Primal imaginative play that pre-dated a nuanced understanding of the violent nature of man. It was also—as fleeting moments tend to be—extremely short-lived.
By the time I was 10, reality began to supplant fantasy. Guns were everywhere—not just in the action movies that I loved, but in government buildings and schools, amusement parks and places of worship. In 1987, I watched Budd Dwyer put a gun in his mouth and commit suicide on live television. A decade later, in 1999, I saw CCTV footage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murder 13 of their classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado. In 2007, I witnessed a chaotic scene play out on CNN after Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech, killed thirty-two students and teachers, and wounded seventeen others before shooting himself. In October of 2018, while driving my son to a Saturday morning art class at the museum, I watched dozens of police cruisers race past us in response to a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. That morning Robert Gregory Bowers, 46, killed eleven people and wounded six, in what remains the deadliest attack on a local Jewish community in American history.
II.
GROWING UP IN THE 1980S, guns were glamorized. Not only in action movies, but in cartoons, comic strips, and television commercials. Advertisements for toy guns played between episodes of Super Friends and Transformers. Issues of The Amazing Spider-Man had full-page ads for Daisy BB guns and Lazer Tag. Sunday newspapers included circulars for stores like Kmart that had toy sections dominated by play guns made to look real.
In April 1987, when I was 10 years old, I watched a TV news report that memorably rattled me. It recounted how Leonard Joseph Falcon, a 19-year-old college student from Rancho Cucamonga, Ca., was shot and killed by a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy summoned to investigate a late-night report of armed prowlers at a nearby school. At the time, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department told the Los Angeles Times that Falcon had “jumped out from the dark and posed in a shooting stance, pointing a gun at the deputy.” In response, the deputy pulled his shotgun and fired at Falcon, killing him. But when the deputy knelt to recover Falcon’s “gun,” he instead found a plastic toy laser. Falcon and his three friends—Kevin Bishop (16), Ronald Gross (20), and Michael Henderson (17)—were playing Lazer Tag, a home-based version of the arena-style laser tag normally played in video arcades.
In response to Falcon’s killing, and other similar incidents in San Francisco and Memphis, new regulations were imposed on toy gun manufacturers—particularly those producing realistic-looking weapons. In 1988, federal legislation was passed under Section 4 of the Federal Energy Management Improvement Act requiring that imitation firearms be clearly marked with a blaze-orange plug, or be cast in brightly colored or translucent plastic. These regulations were eventually implemented by the Department of Commerce on May 5, 1989.
In the nearly four decades since, police officers have killed countless minors (and adults) after mistaking fake guns for the real thing. One of the highest-profile incidents in recent memory happened in 2014, when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by Timothy Loehmann, a patrolman with the Cleveland Division of Police. After receiving a call that a male was seen pointing “a pistol” at random people at the Cudell Recreation Center, Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback arrived at the park and found Rice near a covered pavilion. Both men reported yelling “show me your hands” to the boy several times. The surveillance video appears to show Rice with nothing in his hands as Loehmann quickly exits the vehicle and shoots. “I knew it was a gun and I knew it was coming out," he reported. Loehmann fired two shots at Rice, hitting him once in the torso. The boy died the next day.1
Unfortunately, little has changed in the years since Rice’s death. According to the Washington Post Police Shootings Database, at least 245 people have been killed by police while in possession of a toy gun between 2015 and late 2021. A further breakdown shows that 22 children under age 16 were fatally shot by police while holding imitation firearms during a similar period (2015–2021).
III.
BY THE TIME I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, my childhood interest in guns had turned to fear. In the early 1990s, Pittsburgh was, like many other American cities, faced with growing gang violence. Inspired by West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, local sets emerged in neighborhoods throughout the city. Homewood, the North Side, and Beltzhoover were neighborhoods held by Crips, while Garfield and the East Hills were controlled by Bloods. Another gang known as LAW (Larimer-Avenue Wilkinsburg) had also risen to prominence.
I was safely insulated from gangs in the suburban neighborhood where I lived. When I was in the city, however, I sometimes crossed into gang territory by accident. Usually to paint graffiti. The first time was in East Liberty. It was after midnight in spring of 1992, and my friends and I were tagging walls in the alleys off Penn Avenue when a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, rode up to us on a BMX bike to deliver a message: “You white boys better get the fuck out of here before you get shot.” We took the advice, retreating to my friend’s beat-up gold Chevette parked several blocks away.
A few months earlier, when the weather was still cold, I was out with friends when our car stopped at a red light in Wilkinsburg—the neighborhood where I used to live until moving to the suburbs in junior high. It was night. Tailpipe exhaust hovered like fog around the cars. When I looked to my right there was a Crown Victoria filled with boys our same age. I met eyes with one of them and he smiled. I gave him a head nod and he flashed a silver semi-automatic handgun, tapping the barrel against the glass before the light turned green and the car pulled away. I realized his smile was less a greeting than it was a silent message: We are not to be fucked with.
Several years later, during college, I was driving along South Avenue in Wilkinsburg. It was 5:45 a.m. and I was on the way to my job as a stock clerk at Sears. It was a route I had driven hundreds of times. It was still dark when a man darted in front of me. I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting him. The man slapped both of his hands on the hood in a hopeless attempt to either stop the car or catch himself from falling. We met eyes for a moment. He was naked except for underwear. As quick as we saw each other he was gone—turning sideways and disappearing in a thin gap between two nearby houses. Before he was out of sight, four men in FBI windbreakers drew their shotguns, ordering the man to freeze. But it was too late. He was nowhere to be found.2
IV.
IN MARCH 1999, RONALD TAYLOR KILLED THREE MEN and wounded two others. After shooting John Kroll, a maintenance worker performing routine repairs at Taylor’s apartment in Wilkinsburg, he walked to a nearby Burger King on Penn Avenue, where he fatally shot Joseph Healy, a 71-year-old former bank employee and priest. Moments later, Taylor approached a nearby McDonald's and fired multiple shots at a van belonging to 56-year-old Richard Clinger, who was waiting in the drive-thru lane. Several shots hit Clinger. His stepdaughter, who was in the passenger seat, ran to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to get help. After firing shots outside the restaurant, Taylor entered the McDonald's and shot Steven Bostard, a 25-year-old shift manager. He then returned to the parking lot and shot Emil Sanielevici, a 20-year-old waiting in the drive-thru lane. Sanielevici later died, while Clinger and Bostard survived after being treated at a nearby hospital. At 11:51 a.m., John Kroll, the maintenance worker Taylor shot during an altercation at his apartment, died from his gunshot wound while awaiting surgery.
Michelle and I were driving home that morning at the same time that Taylor was on his rampage. We were on South Avenue, a street that runs parallel to Penn where the McDonald’s is located, and we saw police cars speeding past with sirens flashing. It would be another hour or so until we fully understood what was happening. We just knew it was serious. Back at our apartment, when we turned on the TV, we saw our neighborhood on the news.
V.
AS A YOUNG PARENT, MY FEAR OF GUNS metastasized as my family grew. Not in irrational ways, but in the ways that your world feels more fragile when you have children. The common parental refrain—that you just want your kids to be happy, healthy, and safe—is common for a reason. It is core to how you navigate everyday life once you are responsible for another person’s well-being.
In September of 2003, when Michelle and I decided to leave our longtime apartment in Pittsburgh’s East End to buy a house in a nearby first-ring suburb, guns were on my mind. That’s because gunshots had become as common a sound as kids playing in the streets, or cars rumbling across cobblestone, or late night train whistles. Watching a movie in our living room, windows open to catch the breeze, we sometimes heard the pop of gunshots in the distance. Some nights they sounded only several blocks away. Other nights they were much closer. That last summer in our apartment, on several particularly violent nights, they were the closest I had ever heard. After talking to neighbors, we learned that multiple shootings had taken place on the street behind our house. Some of the victims lived, others did not.
I used to wonder what it would take to for me to leave a place that I loved. That summer, as we shopped for houses and talked about starting a family, I found out.3
VI.
I began writing this essay in early January, a few days after Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Like nearly everyone, I watched the shooting unfold on my phone. The video was horrifying in its banality. Several gunshots are heard before Good’s SUV drifts into a snowbank. Then it’s over. It’s hard to comprehend that you just watched a woman get killed. A 37-year-old woman, and mother of three. Someone’s partner, daughter, niece, friend, co-worker. Gone.
Seventeen days later, when Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA, was pepper-sprayed, shot, and killed by ICE officers in Minneapolis, it felt the same. Unreal. Untrue. Except it was real—it was true. As I watched his body fall to the ground, it reminded me of how a person’s weight shifts when they blackout. They change from lively to lifeless in a split second. That’s what it looked like when Alex Pretti fell to the ground. Please get up, I thought. Please get up.
* * *
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Endnotes
On March 15, 2017, 911 dispatcher Constance Hollinger was suspended for eight days for failing to inform the responding officers that the caller said Rice was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun he had was “probably fake.”
That morning the FBI served dozens of arrest warrants for high-profile members of LAW, the Larimer-Avenue Wilkinsburg gang who wore all-black and controlled drug trafficking in much of Pittsburgh’s East End. Law enforcement used the RICO act to prosecute the gang, the same federal law designed to combat organized crime. For more context, read “Understanding Gangs: Finding a Way Forward.”
There is more to write about my family’s unfortunate proximity to gun violence, but admittedly I don’t feel ready to write about them. First, there is the incident in 2015 when Ethan’s school was placed on lockdown for five hours after two guns were found on campus. We waited outside in the snow for hours while all the kids sheltered in place beneath their desks and SWAT teams descended on the school. The other incident took place in 2022 during Ethan’s first night as a scare actor at Kennywood’s Phantom Fall Fest, when gunfire erupted near the Musik Express, sparking a park-wide panic.