I'm foreign-born and, unlike my American friends, ambivalent about firearms. I respect a pistol's power as a peacemaker, but I find no love in pointed metallic objects. The only weapons in my world are imaginary, like the gun with which my grandfather threatened to shoot his tormentors in the foot. Despite the certainty of my grandfather's hostile intentions, he was ill-equipped to follow through. I never saw a gun in my house except for the toy water guns I bought each Christmas Eve.
In the Caribbean, where I grew up, machetes served as the all-purpose household tool and weapon. Their chrome-edged blade cut grass, chopped beef and sliced stomachs with equal precision. I rarely saw firearms. Whenever I did, they were usually presented as symbols of British colonial power: for ceremonial parades or during times of civil disorder. Then police and volunteer members of the local defense force appeared on the streets with 10-cartridge .303 rifles. At their backs, a British man-of-war, arrogant in its demeanor, rode anchor in the harbor.
During each queen's birthday parade, held at the national park the second Saturday in June, I eagerly anticipated the nearly 100-gun salute. Flashes of red flame lit each muzzle like mini fireworks displays on metal rods, as the soldiers and police fired in sequence. I corked my ears to drown out the fearsome report. But no sooner than the parade ground cleared, I raced onto the grassy field with dozens of other young boys to scramble for the hot, spent shells left behind.
Years later, when my high school principal organized a cadet corps squad, I became one of those parading soldiers dressed in lime green fatigues, matching berets and black hand-me-down leather boots. I soon learned that guns emitted a seductive political power. Bearing the rifle on my shoulder wrapped me with an aura of authority. Even if the rifle contained blanks or the carbine sat empty, it clothed me with the illusion of power. Raw ambition swelled up in my chest. Visions of a coup d'etat danced in my head whenever I marched in double time with my regiment.
At one Sunday morning Armistice Day remembrance, as I stood at ease beneath the merciless tropical sun, I mulled over my postpubescent revolution. It seems ludicrous 20 years later, but back then I envisioned myself as a baby-faced rebel boy soldier leading my squad up to the parliament building to dismiss corrupt, sycophantic island politicians. I'd give power back to the people, kick out the British, lower the Union Jack and declare independence. But each parade ended with my half-baked plot unhatched. When I returned to the barracks and relinquished my rifle, my power surge subsided. Until the next time.
I was a college student before I understood the power that rests at the end of a gun barrel. A minister of the U.S.-installed Grenadian government visited Howard University to talk about the socialist revolution he never supported. After the overthrow of the democratically elected government in 1979, the leftist government armed many youngsters with AK-47s. Those adolescent socialist cadres learned to respect only force of arms. Parents no longer exerted authority over their children. The natural order fractured. That was until 1983, when President Ronald Reagan dispatched American Marines and paratroopers to teach those young revolutionaries a harsh lesson in Cold War gunplay. But that was somebody else's war.
I remember the first time I shot a rifle. I remember the heat and humidity, the gravel under my knees as I jammed the rifle butt into my shoulder blade, closed one eye and focused on the distant target.
Those World War I era rifles were more suitable for target practice than for combat. The rifle shot accurately, but I, like a blind man with a bow and arrow, didn't. I never quite learned to measure the target. I closed one eye shut in vain; the smell of linseed oil filled my nostrils, my greasy fingers smudged the oak stock. I inhaled deeply, squeezed the trigger slowly, exhaled gradually and flinched. The rifle leapt from my hands; the wood and metal butt jerked backward and bore into the meaty part of my shoulder. The bull's-eye remained untouched. My next shot was even farther off the mark, bouncing off boulders in the foreground.
If I derived no thrill from shooting, I fared no better being shot at. During my final year in high school, while attending military camp, British military advisers recruited me for night war games. I played the role of a guerrilla infiltrator who walked into an ambush. On a dark, moonless night as I tiptoed up a steep dirt and gravel road, my boot toe struck loose rock. With each footstep, I expected to spring the trap. Walking into an ambush is like going to meet an alcoholic father-in-law. The explosion is certain, but the timing is guesswork.
After about half a mile, I must have stepped on the trip wire, because flares lit the night sky; red dawn replaced blackness; gunshots exploded around me; red muzzle flashes burst from both sides of the road as waiting soldiers emptied their carbines of blanks. I don't recall falling, but I do remember being acutely aware of the stinging bruises on my arms and elbows as I lay stomach first in the dust and gravel, my rifle in the dirt, my two blank rounds unfired. I shook from head to toe. My grand illusions of rebellions and wars dissipated in the darkness of that gravel road in the middle of nowhere.
But even if I never developed any romantic notions about pistols and rifles, some of my high school contemporaries did. The summer camp after my guerrilla ambush, a rifle disappeared from our cadet corps. The same firearm resurfaced five years later in the hands of a masked, naked bandit astride a stripped-down motorcycle with its muffler removed. Handcuffed and unmasked, the bandit turned out to be a former classmate. After he served time, he exchanged his rifle for a paintbrush.
I own paintbrushes but no guns. My house is a lead-free zone. My wife won't allow our teenage son to own even a water pistol. Once a friend gave him one of those machine gun-size Super Soaker water guns. My wife hid it in the laundry basket. When she stumbled on it years later, she threw the toy into the trash. Now my teenage son does all his shooting on his video game - anything except the video game Grand Theft Auto. My tolerance for electronic gunplay has its limits. Still, my rejection of guns doesn't grant my children immunity from their lure. Recently, my 3-year-old daughter returned home from day care, picked up an L-shaped picture stand and pointed it at me. Pow! Pow! Pow! she shouted. I looked at my wife and shrugged.
- Andrew Skerritt is an assistant editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Hernando County.
