My eyes only left his gun to get a read on his face, and then went directly back to the gun. My daughter cradled in my left arm, her bicycle clutched in my right hand, my brain spun to make sense of the scenario, all the while watching to see if his arm would swing that black semi-auto toward us.
Sunday afternoon walks around the neighborhood aren’t supposed to be dramatic. It had been a typical day; church in the morning, lunch at home, then an afternoon of chores and sneaking in a few running miles. Sofie loves being outside, which is something we encourage, so when she suggested we take a walk around the block, I obliged her.
Nearing the end of our trip, she wanted to detour through an alley that led to a swing set she loves to play on. Around the bend in the alley I noted a lady ahead of me and to my left in her backyard doing some weeding. Her yard was bisected by the alley and ahead of me to the right, her husband was sitting in a lawn chair half in and half out of his garage. His arm was holding up something that appeared to be a watering head for a garden hose.
I thought that maybe I wasn’t able to see the water coming from the sprayer head as he continued to hold his arm outward. As we got closer, it became clear that he had some sort of pistol and was training it on something in his yard.
Passing a parked car, I saw his target; our next door neighbor’s dog Milo. He’d escaped from his yard again. From my vantage point it seemed that the man was saying nothing, just sitting there aiming at the dog as it sniffed around in the grass. None of it made sense, which made my gut twinge with a precursor of adrenaline.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked in my friendliest voice.
The man snapped his head towards me and answered asymmetrically with a belligerent, “I’m gonna blow this dog’s head off! He keeps coming into my yard and attacking my dog.” His arm remained extended with the gun trained on the dog who was still lazily sniffing around.
I was stunned at how quickly the exchange escalated and how he never lowered his weapon. I countered with, “You don’t need to do that. I know who he belongs to and I’ll get him back home.”
Sofie (who hadn’t stopped talking about swing sets and slides and doggies) was simultaneously asking me about what’s going on.
“What do you got there?” My attempt at determining if he had a pellet gun and intended to scare the dog or if he had an actual firearm.
“I got a nine millimeter and I don’t care where he’s from, I’m gonna blow his head off!”
The rear sights of his gun became my focal point; two small off-white dots. His distressed voice made me think he’d pull the trigger any second. I prepared for the concussion. I also got angry. Angry that this grown man hadn’t lowered his weapon in the presence of a small child. That he didn’t seem interested in a peaceful resolution. That at any moment his anger may have swung his arm two feet to the left and put my daughter and I on the other side of that barrel.
Realizing he wasn’t in a mental state to talk, I cut out of the alley and put a house between us by slipping through an adjacent property. From the road I called for Milo hoping I could get him out of danger before it was too late. He came loping out from a side yard into the street, blissfully unaware of how close he came to dying.
In the end, as much as I hate to admit, that guy was within his rights on his own property to protect himself and his dog from a perceived threat. No laws were broken, save for those of good manners, decency and common sense. I thought a lot that evening about how close to the line he’d come, and what would have happened had I chosen to stay and reason with him, or if he’d crossed the line to threaten us. I never made mention or even intimated, but he wasn’t the only person armed in that exchange.
A firearm should be a last resort, life or death option, not a primary default solution. As a fellow firearm owner, I question this man’s decision making capacity and plan to keep as much distance between us as possible. Chaos broods around guys like that. I don’t want to be nearby when it boils over.
This situation also highlights a long lost truth in our emotion driven country: It is possible for an action to be unpleasant, even ill-advised, yet lawful. Imagine what we could get done if we stopped proposing laws against things that do nothing to our personal freedoms but rather commit to live our lives in ways that avoid, mitigate, or influence the things we dislike? Maybe that smacks too much of personal responsibility and real work but it’s the only way we’ll revitalize the relevance of the individual in our culture and stem the tide of subcontracting our conscience to lawmakers.
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