As a child I wanted my parents to buy a gun. I told them so. Repeatedly. I was consumed by the idea that we could be victimized, that bad guys could show up at our house—and that without a gun, we’d be powerless.
I did not exactly grow up in the ghetto. My childhood took place on a cul-de-sac in upper-middle-class Orange County of the 1970s and ’80s, and never once was my family subjected to so much as the suggestion that our safety was in jeopardy. Nonetheless, I wished for that gun, so appalling was the idea of being victimized.
That feeling stayed with me into my late 20s, when I finally fulfilled that wish by purchasing a 9mm Ruger, which had a clip that held over a dozen rounds. I loaded it with hollow-point bullets. Anyone who puts me in fear for my life, I reasoned, should suffer maximum damage.
For context, please understand that I have never been physically aggressive, not even slightly. But that’s part of the point. I so hated aggression and sharing the world with people (even if only a small percentage of the populous) who feel it’s acceptable to use force to get what they want that I was determined to be as equipped as possible to confront them, should they ever come my way.
I’ve mellowed over the years. Some of the anger I felt at the bad things/people in the world has given way to lamentation. Still, my feelings about victimization are more or less intact. Pacific as I am, I’m not entirely sure victimizers—those who willingly inflict suffering on others, for pleasure or profit—can be dealt with harshly enough. John Lennon was asked once why in “Revolution 1” after he sings, “When you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out,” he adds “in”: he said it’s because he thinks he’s against violence, but that he’s not sure. I feel like that. I’m basically nonviolent; but in response to aggression, I just don’t know.
My friend was mugged this week. You’d have trouble finding a more good-natured, peaceable person, a sensitive soul, someone who almost literally wouldn’t hurt a fly, who minds his own business, a warm and affectionate guy walking just a few blocks from home when he was grabbed by the collar from behind. Being the trusting sort, he presumed it was a friend. He thinks he might even have laughed. But one of the two young muggers put a hand over his mouth, while the other grabbed his legs. They demanded whatever of value he had on him.
On the surface, all he lost was a phone and five bucks. He was unharmed—physically, at least—so yeah, it could have been worse. But that phrase is generally a euphemism for something bad having taken place. And however relatively minor this event may have been, my friend was victimized. And that’s always bad.
I don’t know—no one can know—how this experience will affect him. Will he become a bit embittered toward the world? More fearful? Less trusting? Less in love with Long Beach, a community he’s fully embraced and that has embraced him? Will he feel less free to walk the streets? Will he pine for a firearm, maybe just a little?
There may be more or less pragmatic ways to react to such an experience (or even just its possibility), but there’s no right answer to the question of how one should feel. I don’t think I’ve been wrong to see the world as a dark and dangerous place, any more than he’s been wrong to see it as more full of light. And in any case, the two views aren’t mutually exclusive. There is darkness and danger, just as there is light and love.
My hope is that he comes out the other side of this unchanged. Bad things can happen to anyone pretty much anywhere at any time. Yes, you can do A, B, and C to help minimize the possibility of X, but beyond that you may as well let it go, because ultimately there’s a hell of a lot that is simply beyond our control—and all the worrying in the world won’t help.
As I finished composing this article, I can’t help imagining the comments it might generate below. “Five bucks and a phone? What’s the big deal?” “So somebody got mugged? Boo-hoo! Do you know how many people in the world got raped today? Got murdered?” “This is why everyone in America should carry a gun—because then the bad guys would think twice about pulling anything like this!”
Part of why I was motivated to write this, I now realize, is my wondering whether we’ve been made so callous by the world we live in, so hardened by experience and exposure, that we can’t pause to empathize with one small bit of victimization in our community, if we’re unable to grasp that such a relatively small occurrence shouldn’t be beneath notice. Isn’t there something terribly sad that a mugging is such a natural part of our collective here and now that you never read about it, not even in your local newspaper?
(Except today, I guess.)
Photo: The author and his friend. Photo by Vaughan Risher