i grew up in the suburbs of san antonio, a military town in the south-central portion of the gun-loving-est state in the gun-loving-est country in the western world. this was the 1980s, when president reagan was building a nuclear arsenal capable of eliminating all life on the planet and the conservative backlash against all things brown, female, and homo was in full bloom; popular culture was saturated with Rambos and Commandos and Robocops and all-around jingoism that was audacious even by riefenstahlian standards.
which is to say, the equation of White Guys + Guns = USA seemed self-evident. equally self-evident was the danger of Nonwhite Guys + Guns; 1992 was the year that crime peaked in America, and in the bucolic suburban community where i was raised, crime meant "inner cities", which meant young black and hispanic men.
san antonio itself was (and still is) segregated to a shocking degree; there is actually a demarcation where several railroad lines run parallel to one another, side by side, which indicated a division of richer and poorer parts of town; we literally had a "right" and "wrong" side of the tracks. the wrong side meant mexicans, which meant gangs, which meant certain death for an undersized white kid like myself, or so i fervently believed.
my home life had always been treacherous; the specters of divorce, substance abuse and mental illness were constant companions. it was therefore no surprise that my best friend at the time came from a loving, two-parent family that seemed (and apparently was) functional and healthy in every way that mine wasn't. what was a surprise, though, was the passion and pastime of the friend in question.
andrew (as i'll call him here) was obsessed with weaponry. even in junior high, when we began to grow close, there was scarcely a square inch of his bedroom wall left uncovered by weapons and weapons-related propaganda: toy guns, real swords, throwing stars, arrows, shooting range targets, and pro-gun and anti-government bumper stickers and posters, including a large sign referencing the second amendment to the constitution that andrew himself had handwritten, which said simply "...shall not be infringed?" he was also a self-described martial arts expert, having taken years of training in several disciplines, and seemed to be itching for a confrontation.
i should emphasize that andrew was hardly a troubled kid; practically the opposite. he was gregarious, popular, disarming (no pun intended), loyal, and blessed with the kind of social skills that not only made him a natural leader among his friends but helped him attract just about any girl he took an interest in. he loved his parents and sister, was close to his extended family, had been placed in accelerated and gifted classes from elementary school onward; in short, he had, to my eyes at least, an absolutely perfect and care-free life.
and yet he was not only fanatical about weapons of all kinds; he had a streak of paranoia which had convinced him that threats lurked everywhere, a strange fearfulness borne not of experience but fantasy, fueled by movies and television and pulp stories and selectively-read history books. coupled with this paranoia was a religious devotion to weapons, and firearms in particular. andrew was a fundamentalist disciple of the Church of Gun.
i think of the paradox of andrew's worldview as almost a microcosm of american culture at that time: overflowing with abundance bequeathed by prior generations, yet armed to the teeth in order to ward off the barbarians that were always just beyond our gates, ready to destroy our very way of life if we let down our guard for even a moment.
in my seventh grade year, andrew and i were walking home from school, possibly dreaming of imaginary battles and vanquished enemies but more probably discussing the new roundness of our female classmates' upper bodies, when we were approached by two latino boys our own age, one of whom i knew from school. the one i recognized greeted me, shook my hand, then without provocation put the blade of a large knife up to my neck and backed me up against a telephone pole. i was terrified. andrew stood by and watched helplessly, his years of martial arts training apparently melting away at the possibility of actual danger. the knife-wielder whispered a threat i don't recall, then backed off, laughing with his companion. andrew and i walked to his house and he told me i was "ready". he said that he'd been assembling a group of like-minded friends to create a sort of neighborhood crime watch to prevent happenings like the one i'd just experienced. he had been giving his friends "combat training", focused on both hand-to-hand fighting and shooting skills (practiced with pellet guns in his backyard). i was thrilled.
as it turns out, the training was more theoretical than practical; we did a little bit of shooting and there were a few hours spent learning how to block punches and the like, but nothing substantial or regular enough to retain. what was not insubstantial, though, was andrew's fantasy life: he dreamed of one day taking his crew out in the dead of night, dressed like ninjas in all-black, and "taking back the neighborhood". in the future, he believed, society would collapse due to nuclear war or scarcity or some other mad max-style scenario (andrew's favorite film character), and when that happened, he promised, we would be kings (and he would be the king of kings, naturally).
needless to say, neither scenario took place, and yet as we grew into our high school and college years, andrew's paranoia did not subside; pellet guns were replaced with real ones, and the worldview of Threats Are Everywhere + Guns Are Fucking Badass intruded on our every interaction. he attended gun shows almost every weekend, and the few times i came along, a witnessed vendors selling not only formidable arsenals but a disturbing amount of nazi artifacts and various paraphernalia that could only be described as white supremacist; this was the point at which i first began to draw the connection between gun culture and racial paranoia. meanwhile, racist comments from andrew became more frequent, from his warnings that NAFTA would mean a mexican taco vendor on every corner of our neighborhood, to the near-certainty of a coming race war, to suspicion of the jewishness of his college roommate, to a deeply weird phone conversation after i'd moved to new york city in which he told me, in great detail, how he drove by a cotton field and stopped for a few minutes to, in his description, actually pick cotton with his own hands, so that no black person could ever lecture him about slavery. even our junior high neighborhood watch seemed in retrospect to be less a valiant defense of our community (the safest place i've ever lived, incidentially) than a racially obsessed wannabe lynch mob. andrew was clearly angry, but the focus of his anger kept changing; one minute it was directed at "the rich", then at any girl who rejected his advances, then at "minorities" who were getting "handouts" while "we" got nothing, then at a clinton-led government that he saw as tyrannical (this in spite of the fact that andrew himself had been extraordinarily well-served by government, attending elementary, junior high and high schools all recognized as "national exemplary schools" and a low-cost education at one of the finest public universities in america).
meanwhile, i had been growing more politically active and leftward leaning, and felt myself getting further and further from not only andrew's worldview but texas culture in general (and texas gun culture in particular). we drifted apart, and when a romantic betrayal finally sealed the fate of our friendship, it felt not like a bolt from the blue, but the straw that broke the camel's back. we still kept in occasionaly touch, "liking" family photos on Facebook and having coffee on those occasions when i came back to texas, but our infrequent interactions only left me feeling that we were living in entirely different universes -- mine a multicultural cosmopolitan reality, and his an isolated, rural one fueled by conspiracy theories and armed to the teeth for the coming apocalypse.
my alienation from the Church of Gun has been a gradual one, but the final schism came with the Newtown massacre; in the aftermath i finally had to "block" andrew on facebook, along with several other self-appointed high priests of the second amendment, lest my anger get the best of me and i lose a workday furiously arguing with those whose opinions are almost certainly unchangeable. admittedly, mine is just as hardened: i now believe american gun culture to be a cancer on our social and political life, impossible to unwind from racial animosity and white backlash to the civil rights movement, a proudly bloodthirsty dogma that not only defends the right to bear arms as a necessary evil, but celebrates and worships as gods the cold steel instruments designed for the sole purpose of shredding the bones and organs of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. my suspicion is that i'm not alone; rational conversation on this and other politically-charged topics has all but ceased in the aftermath of the 2012 election, and a cold war of attrition has commenced, with each side grinding out the victories it can until one is finally defeated through either societal collapse or inexorable demographic change in the body politic. andrew has become a symbol in my mind of the Church of Gun, and though he is many things besides (a father to three beautiful children, a loving husband, a loyal friend to those in his circle), i don't think he would shy away from identifying first and foremost as a soldier of the Church. i would not be surprised if he views me similarly as a symbol -- the city-dwelling bleeding heart liberal whose good intentions have the effect of robbing the rest of us of our constitutional freedoms and leaving us in perpetual danger from a government itching to fire up the gas chambers. there is no middle ground between these two views. once a cancer has been diagnosed, the only option is to cut it out.
lately i've found myself having imaginary arguments with an imaginary andrew, raging against phantoms just as i once privately criticized him for doing. i say this to my shame; no one deserves to be reduced to a strawman, and i usually stop myself once i realize what i'm doing, but the imaginary andrew keeps appearing in my mind, bristling with weapons, daring me to take them from his cold, dead hands. it was a surprise, then, when the real andrew called me several weeks ago, leaving a message as friendly as ever: "hey bud; you popped into my head yesterday and i was just wondering how you were." i didn't return the phone call. maybe someday, after the war is over and all our dead are buried, i will.
