A dad, a daughter, and guns
In conservative Wyoming, firearms are part of the fabric of everyday life, said journalist Eli Saslow. So when one teen, upset about school shootings, began to call for gun control, the resistance began at home.
G ILLETTE, WYO.—Alan Engdahl was driving home after an overnight shift in the oil field when his truck picked up a scratchy radio signal out of Gillette. It was the first sign of civilization since he had disappeared the afternoon before down 50 miles of wind-whipped prairie and rutted gravel roads, so Alan and his co-worker listened to the disc jockey tick through community news. Cattle prices were flat. T&T Guns had antique rifles on special. The Cowboy Draw lotto was up to $1 million. “And here’s something you don’t hear every day,” the radio host said. “We apparently have a liberal gun protest headline read. Above that was a picture of happening right here in Gillette.” several students marching, and there in the Alan had rarely heard anything described midst of them, holding a protest sign, was as liberal in northeast Wyoming, and his 16-year-old daughter, Moriah.
N now he listened as the DJ explained how
OW A WEEK later, that sign was in 10 Campbell County High School students his house, tucked into the closet of had marched downtown the previous afternoon a bedroom where Moriah had been to demand tighter gun laws. They spending much of her time, with her door said they wanted mandatory background closed, since the protest. In the days since checks on all gun purchases. They said they the march, the “Campbell County Ten” had wanted to build a gun-control movement become the object of profane graffiti and the in solidarity with survivors of a shooting in favorite target of a new Instagram account, Parkland, Fla. But this was Wyoming, where “Campbell County Students for America,” the high school yearbook devoted four which shared memes comparing gun protesters pages to “Hunting: No Greater Sport” and to Hitler. For his part, Alan had considered a local club funded college scholarships by grounding Moriah for skipping school raffling off AR-15s. The protesters had been but decided against it. “I’m pretty sure the met downtown with middle fingers and the rest of Wyoming is going to punish her for warning of suspensions. me,” he said, so instead he had chosen to “They should be expelled,” Alan remembered needle Moriah at every opportunity. joking to his co-worker. “That
“Win any popularity contests at school bleeding-heart nonsense might fly in New
today?” he asked when she walked into York or D.C., but in Wyoming? That’s
the kitchen. She rolled her eyes and ignored treason.”
him, so he tried again. “Did you manage to Wyoming has more guns per capita than get everyone’s guns yet?” he said. any other state, and more than 80 percent
“How many times do I have to tell you it’s of adults in Campbell County have firearms
not about that?” she said. “We’re just pushing in their homes. Alan once owned more than for more safety, a little more control.” 250 until he committed a drug felony in 2006 and lost his legal right to own guns. “That’s a bad word,” Alan said. “First it’s He parked at a ramshackle house on the gun control, then it’s confiscation.” outskirts of town, where the newspaper She was the youngest of his four daughters, waited at the kitchen table. On the front each a bit more empowered than the last, page he noticed a story about the gun protest, and by the time Moriah turned 12 she had the first that anyone could remember begun questioning her parents’ Christianity, in Gillette. “A Walkout for Change,” the and then started favoring abortion rights, and then calling herself a feminist, and then refusing to eat the pigs her family sometimes slaughtered for meat. “The mouthy, hardheaded one,” Alan called her, with some pride, even if they often disagreed. She advocated for gay rights in her high school, and he thought acceptance was “part of the problem, because that stuff is better off staying hidden.” She was dating a MexicanAmerican boy named Jon, whom Alan liked but also occasionally referred to as “Mexican Juan.” But one thing they had rarely argued about was guns, at least until 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland in February. Moriah occasionally went target shooting at the range on “ladies day” with her mother, who was remarried and living across town. Her mother’s freezer was filled with fresh venison from her latest October kill. Her father and his friends had sometimes fired off 1,500 rounds in a day of target shooting before he went to prison for distribution of methamphetamine. Like her parents, Moriah had usually blamed Gillette’s high rates of gun violence not on firearms but on the character of the town itself. The coal and oil boomtown had nearly doubled in size since the 1990s to about 32,000 people, many of whom worked to extract the natural resources below ground. The town suffered from high rates of transiency and wild economic swings, which contributed to one of the country’s highest suicide rates. After Parkland, though, Moriah began reading online about guns and became interested in research suggesting that guns are part of the mental health crisis, too. She read that suicides account for almost twothirds of gun deaths, and that people are five times more likely to successfully commit suicide if they own or have access to a gun. Her cousin had killed himself with a hunting rifle in 2015. One of her classmates had brought a gun to school a year later, sparking an evacuation before he shot and killed himself by the railroad tracks. She lived with her father in a single-story