City guns and rural guns

I drive nights for a company that wants us to smile in the app and I take classes in the day until my eyes go dry, which is a stupid way to become a person with an associate's, but it is the way I have. In the car I think about guns more than I want to, because the news is a loop and because last summer a boy was shot two blocks off Cedar in an argument that was not an argument, it was a performance with a weapon. The rifle in that story and the rifle in my cousin Yusuf's truck in St. Cloud get the same word in English. They do not get the same life.

Yusuf — different Yusuf, we are not original with names — hunts, and he keeps a shotgun because the farm cats are not enough for the raccoons, and he talks about the Second Amendment like it is a relative who served. He came from the same Mogadishu dust as my father, and he loves this amendment the way some men love a team they were not born into. I used to mock him. Then I rode with him at dusk and I saw the space, the actual space, between houses, and I understood why a city brain is a bad legislator for that road.

My city brain still wants the alley gun gone. Not in a poetic way. In a police-report way. We do the funerals. We do the GoFundMes. We do the uncles who say, this country has too many guns, as if they had not also seen a government with a monopoly on force do worse. That last part is why I will not join the simplest march. I have a memory of what a state looks like when only it is armed. My father has a worse memory. He votes for more cops and also complains about cops. He contains a crowd.

The conservative story I will give a chair: a pistol in a rural glove box is not a school shooting, and a confiscation scheme written by people who get their farm knowledge from a podcast will fail and make enemies you did not need. Permitless carry in a county with more deer than traffic lights is a different animal than permitless carry on Lake Street at 1 a.m. If your bill cannot say that out loud, your bill is a poster.

The left story I live inside: the alley does not care about your hunting novel. A 19-year-old with a stolen Glock is not a sportsman. He is a hole in a family. When Minnesota argues this, people pick a photograph — a tractor or a memorial balloon — and refuse the other photograph. I want both on the table. I want them labeled. I am not asking for a miracle. I am asking for captions.

I do not carry. I have thought about it after a night when a guy tried the door while I was waiting on a fried-chicken order, which sounds like a joke until it is your door. A friend said, get your permit, be a man. I said, I am a man who falls asleep in history class. A gun in my glove box would be a prop I am not trained for. The NRA has a point about training, and then they slide from training into a sales floor. I can hear the slide. Hearing it does not make the fried-chicken door less real.

School shootings sit in my head in a different drawer. I have a sister at a high school in Bloomington. They drill. She texts me "we are fine" like it is a weather report. She should not have a weather report for men with rifles. If rural carry is the price of a political coalition, I need the coalition to pay a different price too: age limits that mean something, storage laws that get enforced when a kid opens a closet, a stop on the purchases that everyone in a mosque parking lot can predict and nobody in a Capitol can.

Will those laws reach the stolen Glock. Sometimes no. I hate a law that only works on the obedient. The obedient are not the alley. Still, the obedient include the uncle who leaves a pistol in a nightstand because he thinks his house is a movie. The nightstand feeds the alley. That pipeline is not a myth invented by CNN. It is a classifieds problem and a storage problem and a pride problem. Pride is a gun issue. Nobody wants to write that bill.

After George Floyd, this city became a symbol that did not ask us. I marched. I also watched a stretch of Lake Street go feral in a way my aunt called "the other looting," meaning not a corporation, meaning a pharmacy, meaning us. If you talk guns in Minneapolis and you skip that year, you are doing a clean version. The clean version is a lie. Crime went up. People bought pistols. Some of those pistols will become alley pistols in three owners. That is not an argument against every regulation. It is an argument against pretending our demand is only about rights in the woods.

Yusuf and I fought about this at Eid, which is a terrible time to fight, the lamb is expensive and the old men are listening. He said, you want to be American until the amendment. I said, I want to be American in a city that is not a shooting range. My mother hit my wrist. She is right. Eid is for eating. Also she is right that I use "American" like a scold. He is American. The truck is American. The alley is American. That is the whole mess.

A serious 2A person, the kind I will listen to, talks about prohibited persons as if they actually want them prohibited, not as a magic phrase after a funeral. A serious gun-control person, the kind I will listen to, can visit a farm without smirking. I have met maybe four of each. The rest are content. Content wants a villain with a flag.

I am on the side of fewer guns in the alley even if it bruises the truck. That is a trade. Trades should be spoken. If we raise the age, if we force storage, if we stop pretending a private sale is a handshake from 1791, Yusuf will be angry and my sister might text fewer weather reports. I will take that trade. I will not take a fantasy where Minneapolis becomes a county of coyotes. We are not coyotes. We are an apartment and a bus and a kid on a bike.

Class got out late last week and I walked past a memorial with rain in the teddy bears. I called Yusuf about nothing, about a transmission, so I could hear a kitchen that is not this. He said the beans were good. He said I should come shoot clay sometime, not to make a point, just to see. I might. I might not. I do not think the clays would change the alley. I think they would change whether I can hear him. Hearing him is not the same as handing the alley a win. I can do the hearing. I cannot do the lie that the objects are one object.

Write the law like they are two. If you cannot, you are not writing a law. You are writing a team. I already have a team, the night class and the app that dings, and it is enough.