My first encounter with a gun happened in 1985 near my house in rural upstate New York. I was hitting my neighbor—a girl across the street who was a bit of a bully. She was two years younger than me, but about my size, and had been calling me names. It was my first and only fight (so technically I am undefeated). I sat on her and slapped her, and her father , a hunter, came out of his house with his shotgun. He didn’t point it at me, but held it while yelling at me to get off his daughter. Later we would learn that his marriage was going sour, so perhaps that explained the trigger-happy reaction. I remember my parents calling the girl’s father, screaming how dare he approach a sixth-grader with a gun. We didn’t trick-or-treat at that house anymore.
My second encounter with a gun occurred just a few weeks ago. We were spending New Year’s with friends in Phoenix who are Northeast transplants living the dream under Arizona’s abundant sunshine. While there, we went out to peruse tchotchke shops. I’m a sucker for fancy schmancy boots, which are a-plenty in the Southwest. I was boot-browsing amidst rhinestone belts and cowboy hats when I bumped into a box of loose ammunition cartridges on the floor in the boot aisle. I looked up and saw the glass case of handguns under the light, kept the way my mother-in-law keeps her Lladró porcelain figurines. The sign read guns for sale—they were all handguns. A Christmas clearance? Hot handguns for 2014? I don’t recall other than I hadn’t seen a gun in 28 years.
Ok, first, some housekeeping before we go any further: I didn’t visit Phoenix to question the Second Amendment and I’m not writing this to challenge gun ownership in America. So let’s just get that out of the way here and now. I’m a writer whose travels exceed her income, and I discovered during my Phoenix vacation that signs about guns were as much a part of the local culture as the copious cactus and delicious enchiladas and pinky-purple sunsets that made me pause every single night I was there and go “Goddammit, this is gorgeous!” as if it were the first time I had seen the sun go down.
This is about signs about guns. These signs popped up everywhere around urbane, swanky spots in Phoenix the way no smoking signs decorate public buildings and parks.
Please don’t bring your gun to the wine bar at the Desert Botanical Garden.
Please don’t bring your gun near our rhinoceroses at the Phoenix Zoo.
Please keep your guns in your check-in bags, not your carry-on luggage.
In Phoenix, do you just meet up for margaritas (which are excellent there) and forget to leave your 9 mm at home? I started looking at the moms pushing baby strollers. Was Suzy Homemaker packing heat underneath the diaper bag? Was Grandpa over there, gently feeding pellets to the giraffes, ready to aim and fire if it—whatever “it” is supposed to be—went down? Where was I? Aren’t the folks who visit botanical gardens and zoos the demographic that should remember to leave their weapons at home or maybe that was my naive, Yankee perspective? Forget about feeling underdressed for the occasion. I was grossly under-armed.
All these signs in Phoenix came after a lovely week cruising through Southwest vistas in a Jeep Liberty rental where we didn’t see a single sign for guns. Maybe signs are there, but we didn’t spot any. We drove through New Mexico — Albuquerque, Santa Fe, stayed in Taos (which was so hard to say goodbye to). We went to Flagstaff, Arizona (where the local greeting is “WTF” or “Welcome to Flagstaff), and the Grand Canyon and stopped along parts of the iconic Route 66. I felt like we spent our days in a moving, breathing painting that was reconfigured with every sunrise and sunset; the American Southwest landscape is that astounding. We stopped at truck stops, gas stations, pie stations (Rock Springs Cafe, folks, right off Interstate 17), restrooms, a 50,000-year-old meteor crater, and, yes, boot shops. We must’ve covered almost a thousand miles circling New Mexico and Arizona. During this road trip, we saw more signs for pie—always a beacon in the desert and the mountains—than signs about guns (a book about Route 66 in Arizona has “Pie Alerts” with information on where to pull over for a slice). America is a frontier nation. I get that. Law-loving folks own guns. I get that, too. But apparently outside of Phoenix they own (and use) them a bit more quietly, more like I was accustomed to in rural upstate New York.
I’ve lived out west, traveled around rural and urban western America, have camped and hiked in the west, have visited about 30 states, and have driven across the continental United States three times on three different routes, and never saw more signs about guns than I did in Phoenix. I had uncles, neighbors and ex-boyfriends who hunted, and where I came from, you bragged about what you shot, not what you shot it with.
Travel is about experiencing the new, right? New foods, new museums, new traditions, new ways of thinking. So as I made my way around Phoenix, looking at all these signs, I started thinking, maybe handguns were your bling? Your Rolex watch? Your heirloom diamonds? Maybe in the more rural areas we drove through, guns were more about function, like making sure your car or truck started up every day, but here in Phoenix, it was more related to social status? Like a shiny Corvette, maybe it was about the having than the shooting?
Very interesting post Katrina, especially for us those who live in areas where guns are not that prevalent as in other regions of the world like the ones you describe. I feel for you – I can only imagine how terrible your experience was as a child.
Thanks, Calin, though to be honest, the experience wasn’t all that “terrible” (considering there are far worse things that could have happened). I look at that event with a bit of a chuckle because it was just so screwed up. I was just surprised that signs for guns were at all these swanky downtown areas. Guns are a way of life for some.