My father was a writer, and everywhere he lived the gun was always hung up over his writing desk. He was one of those people who never talked about the war, at least not about things you wanted to know. But the rifle was there, silent and somehow deeply connected to the idea of my father, to something important that had happened to him before I was born. God knows he had his demons, and it seemed to me as time went by that some of them might have been connected to the war. The gun over his desk made writing seem like life or death. He went through a long period of writer’s block when I was growing up; that he had writer’s block was a known and anxiety-producing fact of my childhood, like knowing you had a parent with cancer. But he’d sit there, hour after hour, under the gun in front of the typewriter. He had made it back in one piece and he was going to be a writer.

David Frum: The American exception

I started to be afraid that someone could break into our house when I was 7 or 8 years old, the age when children stop being afraid of imaginary things and begin to be afraid of real ones. But my father and the gun always made me feel safe. Mixed bag though he was, I never for a second doubted that, should the occasion ever demand it, he would put himself between me and danger. My father had a lot of physical courage, as I observed several times, a strange trait for a man who had grown up an only child without a father, who moreover hated sports and never learned to drive a car. I think that courage had something to do with the war, but what do I know? One time I told him that I didn’t feel scared at night because we had the gun and he laughingly explained how useless it was, but it was too late—the gun was my father; my father would keep us safe; the gun would keep us safe.

The gun under my couch is a weapon of war. The Japanese empire manufactured millions of them in the years before Pearl Harbor and they were used to kill tens of thousands of American service members, young men who left their jobs and colleges, their wives and children, to go and save the world. It can hold five rounds in the magazine.

The gun Connor Betts allegedly used in the Dayton shooting was not a weapon of war. It was a consumer item, an AR-15-style firearm purchased legally and augmented—again, legally—with a “double drum” magazine that holds a staggering 100 rounds. Miraculously, the Dayton cops took him down within 30 seconds, during which time he murdered nine people and shot and injured as many as 20 others. The gun Patrick Crusius allegedly used in the El Paso massacre was also not a weapon of war. It was an AK-47-style rifle, also purchased legally, and he carried with him additional “banana” magazines, so called for their curved shapes. Some of these magazines are sold in bright yellow with blue banana stickers on them, a visual pun. They hold 30 rounds each.