The Gun That Won the West

Winchester

Let's not pretend I was an unbiased researcher. I had intentions. I had best laid my plans. I set out to write an essay about guns and guilt and the female body. That's the story I'd first encountered all those years ago while watching a random episode of A&E's America's Castles. The legend lodged in me, building a little home in which to live, paying little board. It went like this:

A widow and heiress, consumed by grief at the loss of her husband and infant daughter, consults a Boston medium. He identifies the source of her bad luck: she's haunted by those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that won the West, the sale of which had made her fortune. She sought escape in motion, moving from Connecticut to California. She bought a house and hired laborers to construct elaborate traps and tricks to fool the phantoms who pursued her. The house, an icon of Victorian womanhood, became the receptacle and representation of all her torment. She constantly devised new wings, custom ordered glass, designed everything from stairwells to faucets. Building continued twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year until her death. In effect, she had scapegoated herself, shouldering her country's shame like a heavy woolen mantle. She fled directly into her own madness and transmuted guilt into architecture.

How could I not be fascinated? Ghostlike, she's haunted me all these years, until finally, I began in earnest to research and write. Her story was perfect as a plum, weighty and dripping with juice. The problem, I would learn, is that the story wasn't true.

1988: Gun #1

I was a fifteen-year-old white girl living in the booming Los Angeles suburbs, amid the palm trees and orange groves of the Inland Empire. My school, Riverside Poly High, was called the ''rich kids' school,'' though as one of our teachers snidely reminded us, if any of us were really rich, we would have been in private school. Her point was moot. We were generally doing well enough. Many of us had backyard pools. A lucky few got cars for their birthdays, including our future valedictorian, who had scored a white bmw complete with sun roof. I had moved from small-town Ohio a few years earlier and lacked the fashion sense to know Gucci from Jordache. Even so, I felt safe if not accepted.

If there's one thing rich kids' schools specialize in, it's cultivating outsiders. Looking back, it's easy to recognize the kid who sat behind me in US History as just another outcast. I didn't recognize him as one then only because he wasn't on my radar at all. He was quiet. I don't remember even being aware of him behind me each day until the day he nudged me before class, opening his school bag and inviting me to look inside. I remember the backpack as an oily blue, the gun itself as chrome and shining. I don't remember him saying anything. I don't remember speaking either. The situation, more than anything, confused me. Why the need to show the gun? Why to me? In those pre-Columbine years, I didn't exactly feel threatened. If there was a right way to respond, I still don't know what it was.

States

The gun debate in this country basically boils down into two factions holding a disparate set of beliefs. Pro-Gun: I love guns and everyone should have one. Anti-Gun: I don't like guns and so no one should have one. The Pro-Gun faction believes the world will be safer only when everyone is armed. The Anti-Gun faction suggests we melt the guns. Neither stance is productive. Neither wants to be persuaded.

Winchester

The widow may have moved west for any number of reasons. She and her late husband had traveled to the Bay Area years before, and she had loved her time there. More recently, her brother-in-law had taken a job...