When Guns Fire Outside Your Home
Living 13 hours ahead of the U.S. means waking up each morning to the U.S. news cycle -- the manic, fast news cycle. Yesterday morning, we had dreadful news from home.
A friend, trying to deliver chocolate Easter bunnies on our street, was held at gunpoint in an attempted carjacking. Miraculously, she is physically unharmed.
This was at 4:15pm on a weekday, in broad daylight, on a street lined with flowering trees and families playing outside - in witness to the violence. And just like that, our neighbors’ sense of security and freedom to be playing outside in their own front yards came to a grinding halt.
I am relieved everyone is ok. And I am angry.
For ridiculous and dated reasons, the freedom to own a gun trumps the most basic of American rights -- to go to school, to go grocery shopping, to really be at any mass gathering, or even to drive your own car -- delivering chocolate Easter bunnies to friends -- without the fear of being shot.
And yet.
And yet each year, about 39,000 people die of gun-related deaths in the United States.
Living abroad for the year and far removed from our regular environment has allowed me to look in on American culture with a curious eye. It has reminded me of a beautiful passage from 'Cutting for Stone' by Abraham Verghese where he talks about the 'sound' of America to the foreign ear. To me, it is the sound of striving.
With Japan as a comparative lens, it is also the sound of violence. Looking over my shoulder while walking through a parking lot, paying attention to exit signs in Penn Station just in case a mass shooter should strike during rush hour -- this mental calculus became so ingrained into my daily psyche that it was hard to see it was there at all.
And now as the world declares their own versions of national emergencies, I see schools and churches are closed, but gun shops and liquor stores are open. To be clear, I believe COVID-19 is bringing out the best of people and communities. But when the worst is also revealed, and it involves guns, the stakes are too high and life-changing. As we shelter at home and think with purpose about what we want our lives to look like after this, I wonder if Americans will consider how the stress of random gun violence has crept into their everyday psyche, like it did mine?
In posting this article, I do not wish to engage in an online political debate. But I won’t let that stop me from expressing what I believe is a fundamental flaw to how we think about ‘freedom’ in the United States. I have and will continue to direct our financial resources and time to organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety. Living with the absence of gun violence has redefined what living with liberty and freedom means to me. It is too bad I had to leave America to feel that liberty.