I was shot for no reason except that U.S. is awash in firearms
As NRA meets in Dallas over right to bear arms, grim story highlights epidemic of gun violence
It was April 30, 2015. I’d been living in Third Ward for about three months during my first semester at the University of Houston.
Despite hearing occasional gunshots at night, I felt reasonably safe. The trick, I thought, was to make sure that I was never on the street too late.
At 9:45 on a sunny Thursday morning, I was running late to my job at Roadster Grill in Bellaire, meaning I’d have to take a quicker route. I dialed the radio in my truck to Carlos Santana’s “Oye Como Va” as I stopped at a red light on Scott Street, lit a cigarette and zoned out to the song’s chirping organs, lost in thought about whether Santana was playing a Hammond or some brand I’d never heard of.
A man pulled up in a truck next to me with a .22-caliber long rifle in the passenger seat of his late-model GMC Sierra. As I hung my cigarette hand out the window and deliberated the staying power of Hammond organs in rock music, he looked down the barrel, steadied his aim and shot me just above the elbow. See, kids, smoking does kill. The light turned green. He drove away nonchalantly. I sat in panic, the agonizing pain beginning to register in my brain. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard distant, grating screaming — which turned out to be my own.
I vainly tried to compose myself and pulled my truck into a corner store about 20 feet away, still screaming like hell. The bullet — hollow-point and designed to expand and splinter upon penetration to disrupt more tissue — certainly did its job, shattering my humerus, severing an artery and striking my radial nerve. A warm arterial spray radiated from my left arm, soaking my entire front seat and T-shirt with God knows how much blood.
Several kind strangers helped me out of my truck, called 911, tied a tourniquet and urged me
to lie down. In shock and increasingly dizzy, I obeyed.
It’s hard to say what happened in the following 10 minutes, but as I lay there, darkness slowly descended from my peripheries, and my breath grew shorter and shorter. I’ve always been told that one’s life flashes before his eyes in that moment, but I didn’t see much of anything, and I didn’t feel much of anything beyond a faint, forlorn warmth of what I assume death is like, before blacking out.
Hauled off to the Texas Medical Center where I underwent 13 hours of surgery and spent three days in the ICU, I lived. A Sisyphean year of physical rehabilitation followed, as did a broken plate months later, invasive surgeries, more rehabilitation and an occluded artery.
Three years later, my left hand has a quarter of its former dexterity, and I can barely feel my thumb and index finger.
As we are often told, the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The roughly 81,000 shooting survivors per year and I appreciate the implicit victim-blaming.
What’s more, the United States already has more guns than other developed countries, and, according to United Nations data, a much higher rate of gun deaths. If more guns is the answer, it isn’t working.
The police never caught my shooter, who shot at someone else hours later, and it’s doubtful that he’ll ever be caught. Closure, I’ve come to believe, is a wholly useless concept. Conjecture, on the other hand, is all I have.
Why did he shoot me? I assume race was a factor. I’m white; he’s black. Baltimore was rioting over Freddie Gray’s death in the back of a police van. I was mad about that, and he probably was, too.
I wonder what degree of racism, poverty, abuse, mental illness, trauma or substance abuse may have been a factor that day. Regardless, I believe he deserves empathy.
But, as they say, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. True, but people kill people more efficiently with guns, which are designed specifically for the purpose. Whereas a knife is a tool used to cut boxes, fruit or whatever, guns serve no purpose other than to cause death.
If the man who shot me didn’t have a gun, I wouldn’t have been shot.
In fact, it’s easy to imagine him strolling into a local Walmart or pawn shop, picking a .22 long rifle, passing a rudimentary background check and walking out — and without needing a permit, registration, owner license or carry license.
And if he bought it on the black market? Well, all illegal guns were legal at some point. Texas’ lax gun laws, requiring no background checks for gun show purchases, make it simple for a troubled person to buy a gun.
An 8-year-old boy was killed in March a quartermile from where I was shot. And though the nation’s epidemic of gun violence has claimed 11 Houston children since December 2016, it’s only mass shootings, which make up only 2 percent of yearly gun deaths, that get sustained public attention.
If you combined the 10 deadliest mass shootings in recent history, you’re not even close to the nearly 13,000 lives ended by gun violence. Mass shootings are only indicative of a greater, long-ignored problem. Fewer guns is the only way to stop people from killing each other with guns.
Perhaps the Secret Service would agree: President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, as they extolled the seemingly sacrosanct virtues of the right to bear arms at the National Rifle Association’s convention this weekend in Dallas, did so in a gun-free zone. Apparently it’s safe for them to speak so highly of guns only when the crowd — the self-proclaimed “good guys with guns” — is unarmed, per Secret Service requirement.
I have no illusions that anything will change after Parkland or after the next mass shooting or after all the unnoticed stories like mine. But thousands are dying each year, and thousands like me have to live with post-traumatic stress disorder.
And yet, until something changes, all 320 million Americans are complicit in thousands of premature deaths and immeasurable trauma.