Instead of mocking rural Americans for owning twice as many guns as their urban counterparts, ask why they’re really afraid

Last summer I was targeted with online harassment after an essay of mine was published. For weeks afterward, I was afraid to be home alone. My liberal friends reassured me that I’d be safe. That I was brave, tough. That I was loved.

My neighbors? They taught me how to shoot guns.

They made a day of it. Two men came over, along with three boys and one teenage girl, and set up swinging targets in the field behind my house. They brought probably 10 guns between them, ranging from a revolver to a semi-automatic. We fitted ourselves with earmuffs, and one of the men, who’d built a number of the guns himself and kept a home arsenal of at least 60 firearms, carefully showed me and the boys the safety features of each gun: touch here, never here. Treat every gun as if it’s loaded. Arms strong and straight. Wide stance. Fire.

We shot for probably four hours, until the sun fell behind the trees and the mosquitoes came out. Then the neighbors went home. I was alone again. I locked my doors and windows and tried to fall asleep. And that night, far more quickly than on previous nights, I did. Not because I felt safer. Not because I owned, or planned to use, a gun to defend myself. But because that night, for the first time in weeks, I felt seen.

I live in a town of 800 in the Wisconsin Northwoods, with a per capita income of $20k/year. I’m Jewish and my fiance is transgender, and the whole town knows it, which is at times a comfort and at other times a liability.

As a dogsledder, I regularly spend days in the wilderness, 20 or 30 miles out, and even though I know other female mushers who have been assaulted – one was stabbed in the neck – by strangers when they’re on the trail, the most weapon-like thing I carry is an air horn strapped to the side of my sled on the off-chance that it might scare a bear or cougar into leaving me alone.

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I am extremely liberal, and very much in favor of strict gun control. And yet, when I was scared and my neighbors helped me in the best way they knew how – by showing up, distracting me, encouraging me to explore a limit of my own power – I was moved beyond speech.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of words about gun owners, generally, which is to say the kind of people in the place where I live. Ignorant. Backwards. Selfish. So many arguments for gun control seem to take at their core classist assumptions about who is capable of being responsible, whose needs and fears are worth hearing out; whose home town or weight or education level or dialect (’Murica, anyone?) makes them worthy of ridicule.

Instead of mocking rural Americans for owning twice as many guns as their urban counterparts, ask why they’re afraid

Instead of mocking rural Americans for owning twice as many guns as their urban counterparts, for thinking guns make them safer, ask why they’re really afraid. Because people like my neighbors sense the derision from those who have learned how to debate with a different vocabulary. Because they don’t have a school, or even a grocery store, and the best things around are the things they’ve made for themselves, the things they’ve built and protected. Because without the opportunity to hunt for food – and yes, assault rifles are used for hunting – they would be hard-pressed to access affordable organic meat for their families. And yes, they care about feeding their families organic meat.

Because in three years of living here, I’ve never seen a police car within 20 miles of my home, and when I called the sheriff last fall over a threatening trespasser, it took him three hours to show up. Because wanting the ability to physically defend yourself feels pretty darn visceral when you live out of screaming range from your nearest neighbor.

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My town is lawless in the best of ways, by which I mean largely self-organizing to meet its own needs. Every summer local businesses give out 60 bicycles to schoolchildren, and every Christmas the Schoolhouse Bar acquires for each of those same children, through a muscular tackling of Black Friday sales, a backpack filled with warm clothes, school supplies, toys, and age-appropriate books. They keep careful records each year so that no child receives the same book twice.

Hunting parties are intergenerational, and have in many cases stayed the same for decades; at the end of deer season, neighbors divide their venison between themselves. When bored teens go hunting with their cousins and neighbors, they stay out of trouble. Speaking as a member of a queer household, I can say that although anti-LGBT sentiment is less coded here than it is in more affluent circles, the community is ultimately more accepting of difference: if you have to spend your lives together, you find a way to work it out. Local currency – respect – is earned through generosity, talent, and self-sufficiency.

No number of mass shootings will convince my neighbors that guns should be banned, because the greater the tragedy, the greater their desire for the means to protect themselves. Theirs is an argument of values, not statistics. But listening to them, taking their concerns seriously, understanding the needs that guns meet for them and prioritizing those needs in policy? Now we’re talking.

Deep empathy with gun owners isn’t a distraction from gun control. It’s a prerequisite for implementing it successfully.

Blair Braverman is a nonfiction writer currently living in northern Wisconsin, and the author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube