Saved by a Gun
When the first of the three men stepped up into the arctic entryway of our home, I reached across and flipped the deadbolt. I didn’t know these men and even a junior high kid knew they didn’t look right.
At the height of the TransAlaska Pipeline construction, Fairbanks tripled its population over a two-year period, absorbing thousands of mostly male construction workers, strippers and prostitutes, and drug dealers. We didn’t have enough police to deal with the problems associated with this influx. Maybe it’s not surprising that a bar fight spilled out into the -45’ cold on 2nd Avenue (our version of Main Street), requiring every cop in town to bring order.
What a perfect time to cause some mischief!
My dad worked a remote job, so Mom and I were alone at the house about three blocks from the riot. When it’s that cold, you can’t even see the house next door because of the ice fog. I was talking to a friend on the phone, which is why I was there to flip the deadbolt. Mom watched a favorite sitcom in the living room, but when the first man of the three began banging on the door, she came into the kitchen. The old thin door bulged with their weight against it and his fist could go through the single-layer glass at any moment. Mom disappeared into the living room and I grabbed a butcher knife from the drain rack.
I was 12 and small. Mom weighed 95 pounds if she was soaking wet and had bricks in her pockets. It was ridiculous that we were going to defend ourselves against even the first guy — the biggest of the three — but there you have it. Three men in orange Alyeska parkas were battering down our door and I was on my own.
What else was I going to do but go down fighting and maybe make them bleed a little?
And then Mom reappeared in the living room doorway and raised her 357 to point right at the first guy’s face.
Argument Over
The third guy in the group disappeared almost immediately. The second guy stayed to point out to the first guy that he was about to die, but when Mom cocked the gun, he disappeared too. It was a double action. She didn’t need to cock it, but the action made a point. She meant to use that gun.
The first guy said a few swear words and called Mom a “bitch”, but then he backed down the steps too and disappeared into the fog.
We called the cops, but they were busy and while Mom was on the phone with the dispatcher, we heard the fire truck alarms.
The rapists found a victim and it got worse from there.
How do I know they were rapists?
Well, maybe they weren’t — yet — when they tried to force their way into our house. Mom and her willingness to shoot them stopped them from trying to rape me, but they went down the street to Mr. P’s house, forced their way in, beat the crap out of him, raped his daughter (a classmate of mine), set fire to the P-family cabin, and disappeared into the fog. They were never brought to justice. The description matched. Seems unlikely there was another group of three Alyeska workers slipping through the fog looking for young girls to rape.
Mr. P wasn’t armed — the adults said it was because he had a felony from a long-ago period of stupid. A laborer, he fought back until beaten down and then forced to watch while they raped his daughter. He couldn’t protect her. The cops were busy. There was no one to protect Mr. P and his daughter.
Two pounds of steel and wood made my pocket-sized Mom a superhero.
Mom and her gun saved me from a lifetime of psychic trauma. She didn’t have to fire a shot, which puts her in the same category as the 1 to 2.5 million Americans who use guns to defend themselves from violent crimes every year. Mom broke the law that night. They weren’t inside the door when she pointed the gun at them. Alaska’s castle doctrine didn’t (at the time) give her a right to shoot would-be intruders. When the cops took her statement the next day, they ignored that because they knew she did what she needed to do. Mom felt guilty she didn’t pull that trigger for the rest of her life because by letting those men live, she made it possible for them to hurt someone else.
It’s Not About Guns
Guns have existed for centuries; in the US, they’ve been in private hands since our founding. When my brother was in school, he stored his 22 rifle in his unlocked locker so he could go rabbit-hunting on the way home from school. That was ordinary behavior in suburban and rural schools throughout the country until the 1970s. There were vanishingly few mass shootings back in those days.
Alaska is arguably the most-armed state in the union and my community of the Fairbanks North Star Borough is the most-armed community in the country. In any crowd, local police estimate that 1 in 10 are concealed carry. There’s never been a public mass shooting in Fairbanks or North Pole. Why? I’d argue it’s because everybody is armed, so mass shooters know they won’t get more than a round or two off before someone ends their spree. Extensive psychological studies of surviving mass shooters indicate they crave the publicity, so they aren’t going to go where there might not be a big body count.
Nobody remembers the guy that only killed one of two people.
The vast majority of gun owners never shoot any humans. They hope to never have to. My mom didn’t want to kill anyone when she and my dad bought a retired Alaska State trooper's service weapon. She bought it as bear protection because she liked to go berry-picking and Alaska has a lot of large carnivores who think humans are tasty. She’d had a few incidents where she thought she might need it at the house, which is why she kept it loaded and accessible. She was right. She needed a gun…once in her 58 years of life (approximately 21,000 days).
I’ve needed that same 357 two times in my adult life. A moose ran into fish camp once and I fired over her head to keep her from trampling small children. I guess I could have run in front of her and waved my arms but I didn’t want to get trampled either. I was fully prepared to put a round between her eyes if she didn’t swerve back into the woods. That’s the only time I’ve ever drawn my weapon other than as a training exercise. I once intervened in a domestic violence occurrence. I didn’t need to draw my weapon. Its presence in my shoulder holster (fully open carry) convinced the man who was beating his wife on the front lawn that he didn’t want to mess with the 110-pound woman who was trying to save his wife’s life.
My gun, always in my holster, arguably saved my neighbor’s life.
A lot of Americans (somewhere between 1 million and 2.5 million annually) report using guns to protect themselves or another person from violent crime every year. The reason for the wide disparity is that police generally only count defensive gun instances where a shot was fired. Brandishing goes unreported, but researchers believe a lot more common than statistics indicate, based on interviews with crime victims. If you’re doing a cost-benefit analysis, the gun control advocates are essentially saying that we should sacrifice the lives of millions to save about 16,000 people a year.
That makes no sense to anyone who applies logic to the gun debate.
It also makes little sense to take away our first line of defense when we call men with guns to protect us from crime. That’s what cops are — men (and women) with guns. Take away their guns and they are useless against criminals who will refuse to give up their guns. What would be the purpose of calling them if they didn’t carry guns?
The local police station is 12 minutes from my house. That’s a long time for an intruder to kill me…assuming he doesn’t prevent me from calling the police, which then gives him an unlimited amount of time to do whatever he wants with me. Last summer my husband was awakened from a sound sleep when someone pushed the back door into the restraining bar we use to secure it. Brad ran to the garage with a hammer in hand to stop the intruder, only to find hitting the restraining bar had scared the intruder away. If the guy had been in the garage, a 59-year-old naked construction worker wielding his favorite hammer might have scared him off, but do you think a 110-pound woman would? I’m under no illusion that I could scare off an intruder without a gun.
I’m armed with a gun because cops are always a quarter-of-an-hour away when seconds count in saving my life.
Evidence indicates that I would have been raped that long-ago cold night had my mother not been effectively armed. She was not an intimidating presence. Her gun was.
This is why there’s no stable appetite for gun control in the US. We all know that we need to protect ourselves because we can’t carry a cop in a shoulder holster in case someone decides to harm us.