Six of one, half dozen of the other

Earlier this week, I was listening to a country music morning show during my morning run. (At this point in my telling of this story, Peggy said, "Why were you doing that?" She has a point, because morning shows are bad, and country dj's are the worst. But I got caught between songs, and I do love some country songs.) Like 97.9, there were two male and one female djs. The topic was how women's magazines depict men. DJ no. 1 claimed that by interviewing emotional, loving, caring men, the magazines were doing a disservice to women: men don't act like that. Dj no. 2 then joked that he was "half a man" because he was in touch with his feelings. The female dj announced she preferred men of the Kevin Kline mold. Then dj no. 1 posed the scenario: if your house is being invaded, which would you rather have, a touching feeling man or a man who would empty a clip.

First of all, if you marry someone based upon what he will do in the most unlikely of events, you are a fool. This path of logic detracts from the conversation, and we can just file that into the thick folder of what annoys me about morning djs.

I am unlike most Texans in that I don't want a gun in my house and I don't think that it will protect me. (While writing this, I can hear the voices of fellow Texans telling me that announcing I don't have a gun makes me vulnerable to attackers who prey on the undefended.) Statistically, gun owners are more likely to shoot a member of their family than anyone else, and their guns can be used against them in an attack. This is more common for women who are untrained to use said gun. Texans who keep guns aren't really swayed by logical arguments like this. If attacked, they want to be able to protect their families, an understandable impulse. Where we disagree is on the ability of gun ownership to accomplish this.

This year, my parents house was broken into while we were home and asleep. It was scary as hell. Someone picked off the molding on a window and took the window off the track. This caused the security system to beep, waking up my dad and Luigi. Luigi charged down the stairs, barking, and the burglar was gone by the time my dad turned on a light. This cemented my belief that having a good dog is way better than a handgun.

In the following weeks we learned that everyone has a burglary story. One friend of a friend was tied up in her home while it was burglarized, and spent the time chatting with her captor. He told her that if she really wanted to prevent this from happening in the future, a dog was her best bet. She now has three large dogs. Other friends had a burglar jump out of their plate glass window to escape and he bled on all of their things. So even though he didn't steal that much, they had to replace the carpet, the window, and several pieces of furniture.

The best story, however, is that one of my friends had his house invaded when he was a child. His dad did empty a clip. There were no direct hits, so really he emptied a clip into his wall, not the intruder. The burglar fired back and then ran away. The part of the story my friend loves is that his dad ran upstairs and into the bedroom, threw the gun at his wife, and yelled, "Reload!" To this my mom said, "And you wonder why they aren't married anymore."

My friend loves this story about his parents, and he thinks that it is an argument for gun ownership. Now, I am impressed that his dad had a loaded gun that he got to in time to use during an attack. I would think that, like a nail clippers, a gun would never be handy when you really need it. But it makes me wonder how well protected my friend was from finding the gun himself when he was a small child. But this is the Texan argument that everyone is armed, so you'd better be armed, too. This story makes me very uncomfortable because it could have so easily ended differently.

There are few things I can imagine that would be as terrible as watching someone empty a clip into a burglar and then having that burglar bleed to death in my home. Having to replace all my furniture and carpets because they were blood stained would probably (I can't say for certain) be more traumatic than having them stolen. The question that Peggy and I can't agree upon is which would be worse, if that shooter was your dad or your husband. In one case, you're a little kid seeing a dead body, and in the other, you are actually married to, you chose to live with, this guy who just murdered someone.