American Weather: When the Gun Violence Epidemic Hits Home

On Halloween 2015, a man in our down-town Colorado Springs neighborhood woke up, set his apartment on fire, and walked outside carrying a pistol and a long gun as though he was taking out the trash. He took aim at a neighbor who fled, then turned his weapons on a passing bicyclist, a thirty-five-year old father of two from Ohio, recently discharged after three tours in Iraq. The father’s name was Andrew Myers, and he pleaded for his life. “Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me!” he said. And then he was shot, repeatedly. The murderer (thirty-three, white) wasn’t done. He went west down the busiest nearby street, an east-west thoroughfare lined with late nineteenth-century Victorians and early twentieth-century bungalows, and walked three blocks farther, crossing a bike path and, later, the creek that it’s named after. He turned to his left and shot two women, Jennifer Vasquez and Christina Galella-Baccus. Vasquez had been sitting on the front porch of their home, smoking a cigarette; Galella-Baccus opened the door. The shooter made it half a mile from where he’d started when the police finally caught up with him. He shot them, they shot back. He died in the parking lot of a Wendy’s at 9 a.m.

This news is not news. By the Gun Violence Archive’s definition (four or more people shot, fatally or otherwise, in a single event), there were 330 “mass shootings” in the United States in 2015. By Congress’s definition of “mass killing” (three or more in a single incident—a definition arrived at following the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012), there were forty-five. The go-to noun is “spree,” and then, upon reflection, “rampage.” Shooting spree, shopping spree, rolls of paint-colored candies, see also: a drunken revel.

A few hours before this “shooting spree,” I was asleep in the Phoenix airport. When I arrived, the gate to Denver was mostly empty, so I lie down on three chairs, put a scarf over my face, and fell asleep. I awoke when a man pushed me off of those chairs, then pretended like he hadn’t. I asked the man (fifties, white), if he couldn’t have spoken to me first, or touched my shoulder to wake me. He was angry, he said. I was taking up more than my fair share of room. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I would have been happy to share, but I don’t think men should push sleeping women onto the ground.” This has nothing to do with that, he said. He radiated free-floating, low-grade rage, and he refused to look at me, but he did not have a gun. In Arizona, you may carry one with or without a permit, in the open or under your clothes, but at the airport you still have to check them with your bags.

Lately, I worry about that: who has a gun. When I told a student that he was flunking and he turned sour, I thought, Is he armed? He’s allowed to be. On the day after Thanksgiving, I thought about this again. We’d taken our two daughters ice skating at a city rink. I was watching them charge after their upturned buckets when the scene came to me, unbidden: This is the sort of place—so public, so packed, its people happy and various—where a man (for it would be a man) might walk in and begin the lazy work of obliterating us. Then I thought, No. No, no. That’s ridiculous. Don’t be so dark. But we came home to hot cocoa and news of an “active shooter” five miles north, less than a month after the last such spree. The people in the Planned Parenthood and the King Scoopers, the nail salon and the sushi joint were asked to “shelter in place,” which is one name we might give to our age.

Amy Bennett, Sleeping Separately, 2006. (Courtesy...