Guns in rural America

I keep a Glock in the truck and a .22 by the back door that my dad used to shoot magpies off the barn roof, which is not a metaphor, we have magpies and they get into the calf feed. If you want that to be a culture-war prop, you can. I'd rather you come out here in February when the county plow is two days late and the coyotes are working the calving pasture like they pay rent.

I am tired of being told I "cling." I cling to a diesel bill and a note at the Farm Credit office. The pistol rides under a feed store receipt. That is the whole romance.

After Uvalde, and after the one in Nashville, and after the one that made my sister-in-law cry in the school parking lot in Ontario even though Ontario, Oregon is not a place anyone's cable show can find, I sat with the idea that maybe I was the problem. Not me personally. The me-shaped American. Rural, male, owns more than one firearm, votes in a way that makes Portland assume I'm one bad afternoon away from a manifesto. I looked at the safe. I looked at the kids' 4-H ribbons on the fridge. I did not have a conversion. I had a headache.

The honest part, the part I will give you if you will actually take it, is that school shootings are not a video-game scare story. They are a real slaughter of other people's children, and if your answer is "that's the price of liberty" you are a bad person and I don't want you at my table. Liberty is not a hall pass for dead fourth-graders. I have sat through the active-shooter night at the elementary, the one with the PowerPoint and the cop who used to play ball with me, and I hated every minute of it. Hated that my daughter now knows the word "barricade" before she knows how to parallel park.

What I will not do is pretend that an ARs-are-scary statute written for a city I will never live in is going to travel 400 miles of sagebrush and land on my coyote problem with precision. We already have laws. We already have prohibited persons. We already have a sheriff who knows who in this county should not have a gun, and some of those people still do, because the paperwork is a sieve and the meth is not.

Carry, out here, is not a costume. If I am moving cattle on the BLM allotment I am not waiting 40 minutes for a deputy. That's not tough-guy talk. That's a radio that doesn't always hit and a cell map that looks like a joke. When people in Portland say "just call the police," I want to ask which police, the two on duty covering a county bigger than some states' idea of a commute.

Could I live without the pistol in the truck. Probably. I lived without a lot of things in 2011 when hay was a disaster. The question is why the national conversation only has two settings: confiscation theater and "shall not be infringed" yelled like it is a complete sentence. The Second Amendment is a complete sentence, I'll grant the lawyers that. Life in Vale is not.

I know a kid — I'm not using his name — who should not have been able to buy what he bought. Everybody at the feedlot knew he was wrong in the head. His uncle said it out loud at the diner. Then he still passed a background check because being wrong in the head is not a checkbox unless a judge has already done the work, and judges here are backlogged with custody fights and the usual DUI carousel. If you want a gun law I would actually sign, start with making the mental-health piece real instead of a slogan you only remember after a funeral.

Red-flag laws. I can hear the emails already. I don't love the idea of a temporary order based on a neighbor's grudge. We have grudges. We have water grudges that go back to the 80s. A dishonest red-flag process would get used, in a town this small, the way gossip already gets used. That is a fair objection. It is also not the same as saying we should do nothing when a kid is posting pictures of his inventory and talking about "the day." Those are different risks. Adults can hold two risks.

My wife teaches at the high school. She wanted a lock on her classroom door that actually works, not a gun on her hip, and I backed her. The district spent money on a consultant and a laminated card. She still has a door that sticks. That, to me, is the tell. We will argue the Constitution until the cows are in, and we will not fix a door.

I hunt. I am not going to apologize for venison in the freezer like it's a personality disorder. I also don't need a 30-round magazine to shoot a deer, and you can print that. The people who collapse hunting and a rifle built for a stack of paper targets at a range are doing the same lazy trick as the people who collapse a rancher's glove-box pistol with a gang kid in Portland. Different tools, different messes, same cable-news blender.

If you come out here, I will let you handle the .22. I will not let you lecture me from the rental car. I will listen if you lost someone. I have friends who lost someone in a city I don't like, and their grief is not cancelled by my zip code. Grief is not a policy, though. Policy is doors, records, a DA who files, a hospital that isn't 90 minutes away when somebody does get shot by accident in a trailer.

I vote against most of what Salem wants to do with firearms because Salem does not know what a night calving looks like and does not care to learn. I would vote for a specific, boring bill about storage and about taking guns from people with a real restraining order, if I trusted the writers not to smuggle a confiscation into the definitions section. Trust is the actual shortage. Not steel.

Last week I put the Glock in the glove box because we were going to church and I didn't want it on my belt in a pew, which is a small thing, but I mention it so you know I am capable of taking it off. Capability is not the same as a national mood. I wish the national mood would visit. We have extra chairs. The coffee is bad.