One Nation: Our relationships with guns
Watch the discussion: IndyStar and USA TODAY are hosting a nonpartisan discussion on guns, educating and motivating people to vote. Watch the live stream at 6 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 18. on indystar.com.
We, as Americans, are emotional about gun issues.
Guns are an inextricable part of the American culture, woven into our foundation with the Second Amendment and equated with freedom. And yet it’s an issue that deeply divides us — a right that some fear could be taken away, and a right that others fear gets abused.
And, perhaps more than any generation, millennials' lives have been defined by gun politics. After all, they were students when the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado upended the feeling of schools as safe spaces. And they were the first generation to have their coming of age marked by so many mass shootings: Virginia Tech; Fort Hood, Texas; Aurora, Colo.; Sandy Hook, Conn.; San Bernardino, Calif. — the long list goes on.
Yet while studies show that liberal-leaning millennials may be less likely to own guns, the generation remains in line with older ones on gun control. Millennials are split, according to a 2014 report from the Pew Research Center, on whether it's more important to protect gun rights or control gun ownership.
Earlier this year, a Gallup poll estimated that 41 percent of Americans overall have guns in their homes, while 28 percent personally own firearms.
Editorial: Let’s have courage to hold gun debate
As a country roiled by gun violence, we debated this year whether to expand background checks for gun buyers or re-institute a ban on assault weapons. Do guns make us safer, or do they threaten our safety?
The answers to such questions are often framed in political polarities, but Americans' opinions on firearms are not always as neat as the planks in the party platforms. They are steeped in personal experience, family tradition, training and biases, spread across millions of Americans, each with a different relationship to firearms.
For this, we look to five stories from Indiana, the Crossroads of America — a state that culturally cherishes guns and has some of the nation's looser gun laws.
‘I love the Second Amendment’
Brent Smith bought his first gun at the age of 18.
“Every American who is an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, a lot of them want to exercise the Second Amendment to protect themselves or their property,” Smith said.
But during an incident nearly 10 years ago, his handgun was in his briefcase at the door of his east-side apartment as he ran back to the car to look for his house keys.
As he leaned into the car to search the console, he felt the barrel of someone else’s gun against his neck.
“Get on the ground!”
Five kids who had been loitering outside the apartment building jumped him, cursing. Smith was pistol-whipped across the jaw. A gun pressed against his leg as they patted down his pockets.
Smith didn’t say a word. He didn’t want to show fear.
His then-wife and a neighbor came out to see what was going on. The group ran, firing warning shots behind them.
It worries him to see young people turn to violence — out of desperation, out of not having any parental guidance, out of wanting to fit in. That’s the way Smith once felt, growing up fatherless on the east side. That’s what ensnared too many of the kids he grew up with, and what he was lucky to escape by going into the Job Corps training program for economically disadvantaged youths.
It worries him, in his job as a bail bondsman, to see felons getting caught with firearms. It worries him to see suspects of gun crimes released on cash bonds. And it worries him that private citizens can sell guns to each other without a background check and without any accountability.
“What if,” he asked, “you’re selling a weapon to a criminal?”
It puts the community at risk, said Smith, 31, and it puts police at risk, too.
“I exercise the Second Amendment,” Smith said. “I love the Second Amendment. But the Second Amendment does not state that you can exercise that to deprive people of their property or take the means of a life.”
‘Guns are simply a tool’
In rural Indiana, everyone had guns when Joey Buttram was growing up.
“It’s just another thing in your house,” he said. “It’s not even considered.”
Guns were a family tradition. When he was about 8, Buttram and his cousins learned to shoot and handle guns from his great-uncle who was a county sheriff and Indiana State Police shooting director.
“We’ve always been around them, but it’s always been a safety-first kind of thing,” said Buttram, 31, who now lives in Avon. “We never had guns laying around where I could get to them.”
He has never felt afraid of guns, he said, but he wonders whether that’s only because he didn’t grow up in a place where guns were used violently.
In high school, Buttram started hunting. Now, he runs a hunting and fishing company and hosts his own podcast.
“Guns are simply a tool,” he said.
“The killing part of hunting is the worst part,” he added. “If that was my favorite part, I’d be a sociopath.”
After interning at a factory farm, he pledged to hunt to provide healthy meat for his family: It’s free-range, and he knows how it died.
It’s better than what you can buy at a grocery store, he said. It tastes more natural. Better than chicken. Better than steak.
“There’s so much that goes into hunting in general that people don’t see,” Buttram said. “People think hunting is just going out and killing a bunch of animals, and that we’re all doing it for blood lust. Well, that’s not the case at all. Most hunters love the animals more, and do more for the animals in their habitat, than any of the organizations that are against hunting.”
He does not consider hunting a hobby, but a way of life.
Because of that, he considers himself politically moderate on gun issues. It’s important to him that hunters can own shotguns and rifles. Despite some people's gloomy predictions, “nobody’s come to get my guns yet,” Buttram said lightheartedly.
“I don’t live in areas where there’s high gun violence, so I don’t know that part of the story,” he said. “I do live in an area where most gun owners are law-abiding citizens, and they use them for the right reasons.”
‘I’d rather call 911 than shoot a gun’
Rima Shahid begged her cousins not to go hunting.
She couldn’t understand, at age 5 or 6, why they would want to kill animals. In Arabic, her name means “white antelope.”
Finally, they relented to their littlest cousin and decided not to go.
When she was a little older, in grade school, a cousin who was her age went to a friend’s house to play Nintendo. The friend took out his dad’s gun to show it off — and accidentally shot Shahid’s cousin in the back.
“My cousin is paralyzed, and he’ll never walk again,” said Shahid, 32, a mother of three children. “It just totally changed his life. And it totally changed our family.”
The accident cemented her fear of guns.
“It’s something that’s used to hurt other people,” she said. “Whether you want to justify to yourself that it’s for defense, at the end of the day, the purpose of a gun is to hurt someone.”
She is determined not to let an accident like that happen to her children, checking with their friends’ parents about whether they have guns in their homes and whether they keep them safely stored.
“Maybe I’m being a helicopter mom,” Shahid said, “but it just makes me fearful, and I’d rather do my homework than sit and regret that the rest of my life.”
She has never held a gun, never shot a gun and never wants to.
“God forbid, if I ever am in that kind of situation — maybe it's easier said than done, but I’d rather call 911 than shoot a gun, ever,” Shahid said.
Tragedies such as mass shootings at a screening of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colo.; at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.; and at a health center in San Bernardino, Calif., make her want stricter gun control laws, to keep guns out of the wrong hands and to better track weapon ownership.
“There have been far too many vigils,” she said. “There have been far too many moments of silence.”
As executive director of the Muslim Alliance of Indiana, Shahid also has been pushing back against the bias in quickly labeling Muslim suspects in mass shootings “terrorists” while deeming white suspects “mentally ill.”
“Anyone who decides to kill someone is a terrorist,” she said.
‘More dangerous than the gun itself’
They held him at gunpoint while they took his mother.
A teenager during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Kizito Kalima remembers his mother being put in the back of a little Datsun and driven away.
She was taken to the mayor’s office, killed and buried in a mass grave.
Out of all the violence he survived in the mass slaughter of the Tutsi, this is the hardest to talk about. Kalima, 37, who now lives in Indianapolis, cradled his head in his hands as he thought about his mother.
“I was told the remains were found,” he said, “but I never got a chance to bury her.”
The genocide was started by guns, he said. Guns like the AK-47 pointed at him when killers jumped the fence to his house, where he was sitting on the back porch — 15 years old, a freshman in high school. That was the first time he saw a gun, and they shot at him as he ran away.
“I got shot at, myself, like three times during the genocide, and luckily I never got hit,” Kalima said. “But I’ve always been chased.
“No matter what we did in the genocide, we were running away. Any time we were running away, we got shot at.”
It comes back to him in nightmares. He wakes up screaming.
His head throbs from a dent left by a machete. He was dumped in a ditch with dead bodies and captured as soon as he got up, bloody. He was put in prison and later taken to a killing site along the highway, where he watched his young cousins die.
Kalima decided to run. His attackers had taken off his shoes and broken his ankles, but he still ran, limping, as they shot at him.
When gunfire came the closest, Kalima was running in a pack of kids. A bullet hit a kid on his left, and the impact of the gunshot was so loud and so powerful that it knocked Kalima off his feet, too.
“My dad was like a philosopher,” Kalima said. “He would use this metaphor: ‘If you put a gun down, it will never shoot itself. But the one who’s behind the gun is more dangerous than the gun itself.’”
Kalima hid in a swamp until the genocide ended, which left an infection that still makes his toenails fall off. Over the years, he has bought so many pairs of socks, probably thousands of them, terrified of seeing his feet.
He lived as a refugee throughout Africa, an orphan, homeless, until he was discovered by someone who brought him to the U.S. to play basketball. He went on to work in criminal justice and witnessed some of the worst parts of America’s gun culture.
“Anybody can get a gun. Easily. Even criminals,” Kalima said. “You wonder how they are able to acquire guns when this is the best country in the world. We have all the resources to protect the community.”
Kalima now runs a peace center in Indianapolis, publicly speaking about his trauma and devoting his life to helping other refugees. He adopted two orphaned Rwandan girls, genocide survivors like him, who were found as babies lying on their mother’s dead body.
“My household, we are products of gun violence,” he said.
“As much as we are called refugees, and we are called victims of violence,” Kalima said, “we try to bring the peace to Indianapolis, because we know exactly how it is to lack peace.”
‘Willing to harm someone to keep yourself safe’
Deployed to Iraq as an Army mechanic, Christylee Vickers leaned her gun against the tires of the trucks she fixed.
Vehicles rolled back to the bases, riddled with bullet holes or blasted by bombs.
“Knowing it did that to a truck, it could do that to a person,” she said.
The Army honed her marksmanship with regular range training. Abroad, she fired German and French weapons.
But off the range, she didn’t like the heavy burden — the responsibility and the pressure — of being armed.
“If you’re carrying a gun, you’re doing it to protect yourself, which means you’d be willing to harm someone to keep yourself safe,” Vickers said.
“In the military, we’re taught that there are levels — the escalation of force,” she added. “You should never just go for a gun because it’s there. You want to start at the lowest rung and work your way up.”
Vickers, 33, always knew she wanted to join the Army to continue her family’s long legacy of service, and she felt compelled to enlist after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
She hasn’t fired a gun since she left the military in 2007, after five years of service.
On the Fourth of July, fireworks still sound to her like the whizzing of bullets and the booming of mortars.
The nuance of today's gun debate plays out in Vickers' household. Her first experience with guns came from a National Rifle Association safety class that her mother insisted on after the Columbine shooting. She had always seen guns as being for police or military use, but then people were taking them on shooting rampages.
Vickers defends the right to own and use guns, but she thinks it's too easy to buy firearms — "like groceries," she said.
On the other hand, her husband is a 20-year Army veteran who grew up shooting guns and, she said, appreciates the ease of gun ownership. Because he is so much more comfortable with it, Vickers leaves it to him to be the show of force with a gun on his hip if they need it.
“I’ll gladly go without and let him be my responsible gun owner,” she said, “and I’ll be his conscientious objector.”
Call IndyStar reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.