In the wake of last week’s mass killing in Wilkinsburg, there’s a lot I could write about.
I could talk about the need for an assault-weapons ban and the need for stronger background checks, but we all know that stuff and have pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that the gun lobby will always win. Do we do what the NRA wants and accept defeat and just stop fighting for gun control?
I think a lot of people are feeling that way. Our heads are bloodied, battered and bruised from banging them against the wall in frustration. Why should we keep fighting? The next mass shooting or even single-victim killing is right around the corner. Why should we keep fighting a battle that we believe we’ll probably never win?
I can’t answer for you. All I can do is explain why I keep fighting and speaking out.
On Sun., June 8, 1952, in Wellsboro, Pa., a drunken madman with a rifle was moments away from killing my then-5-year-old mother, her siblings and their mother.
The man lined the children and their mother, who was pregnant with her ninth child, in front of a wall. My mother’s memories of the night are both vivid and a bit confusing. She says she remembered feeling like a deer being trapped by a hunter, a dream she has had continually throughout her life. She also says, that there was no doubt in her mind she was going to die.
The man with the gun was no stranger; it was her father, Charles Robert Hill. She felt so certain of her death because she only knew him as an abusive monster her entire young life. Her siblings, the oldest in his teens, had dealt with it much longer. The fact that this was her daddy made her even surer of what was coming.
At some point during the standoff, my grandmother lunged for the gun and fought for the life of her children against a man who had no problem putting the boots to her in the past. There are varying versions of what happened next. The version I first heard as a teenager was that the gun discharged during the struggle, killing my grandfather.
An account I got later in life, the account I’m inclined to believe, is that she got the gun away and took her shot. My grandfather, a World War II veteran and inveterate drunk, was dead; my grandmother was arrested; and six months later a grand jury, who heard the first version of events, ruled the shooting self-defense, according to a news report from the time.
Now some will say, of course, and I’m just waiting for the emails, that a gun actually saved my mother’s life back in 1952. And who knows, maybe that’s how you might think of it if you’re not a 5-year-old with a rifle in your face or her 44-year-old son who sometimes thinks about how close he came to not existing so someone else could exercise his Second Amendment rights. But I don’t see it that way, and most rational people wouldn’t see it that way either.
This is a story my family doesn’t talk about. Being the offspring of someone who would do such a thing to his own family is a hard thing to face, so most choose not to. In fact, many of my uncles and cousins, and even one of my brothers, own and use firearms.
One man with one rifle nearly ended our entire bloodline in one night. Maybe it’s too much for them to comprehend. Sadly, the guns they own probably make them feel safer.
I also can’t imagine the tremendous toll this incident took on my grandmother. I talked to her about it only once. She was 87, and I was visiting her in a nursing home a few months before her death in 2004. She wasn’t melancholy. She was resolute and unashamed about what happened.
“I hope you never have to go through something like that,” Grandma Lizzie told me. “No one should have to go through that.”
That’s why the fight for gun control and prohibition is a windmill that I’ll never stop tilting at. Today’s gun violence doesn’t just affect those of us living now. It affects generations. My grandmother was right. No one should have to go through what she went through. But what if she hadn’t fought that night? I’m only alive today because she killed her husband 64 years ago. That’s one sacrifice that deserves to be paid forward.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2016.
Sounds like you should be evangelizing banning alcohol, not guns.
This is a terrible story and I’m sorry for the author’s family history, but this has very little to do the topics of gun control today. This story happened in 1958. That’s 44 years before our current background check system was created. That’s 4 years before the AR15 was even invented, the gun from this ghastly tale had to be an average old school hunting rifle or perhaps a WWII war trophy. Those are hardly anything that would be considered an “assault” weapon, instead they are the style of gun that everyone always insist nobody wants to ban.
This emotional story would explain why the author may have a fear of guns and a dislike of the NRA. It is a definite example of why the fight against ALL violence is important. What it is not, however, is a rational argument why gun control is necessary. This is nothing but emotional fuel added to the fire of a discussion that should be based on facts and logic. The moral of this story seems to be… Guns are bad so we should blindly support all gun control. That’s not helping anyone.
What a story! The emotional toll is just unbelievable. Thank god your grandmother took charge and did what she had to to protect your mom and everyone else!
I noticed the fact that Charlie left out the detail about what type of rifle it was, but we can be sure it wasn’t one of those “so-called” assault rifes as this supposedly occurrred in 1952 – the AR-15 hadn’t even been invented yet by Eugene Stoner, much less marketed to civilians. The AK-47? Not to be found outside of the Warsaw Pact.
Nope this might have been a run of the mill bolt-action or lever action hunting rifle, not an “assault rifle” that Charle demonizes.
Charlie also fails to mention that ALL long guns account for around 3% of firearms used in homicides, obviously the “assault rifle” is but a small pecentage of this 3%.
So why Charlie’s animosity towards the scary “assault rifle” when handguns are used in far more homicides ? Well yet another thing Chatlie doesn’t mention is he wants to ban all guns but the “assault rifle” is the “low-hanging fruit on the tree”, thus his first “target’.
P.S Also Charlie, since your grandmother was born in 1918 (Lizzie, wife of Robert Charles Hill who “passed away” June 1952 – ancestry.com) tell me again how she could have been 97 in 2004?
Some things are better left alone. Why bring up something that hurts the family of this tragedy. Everyone has SKELETONS IN THERE CLOSET. OUR LOVING GRANDMOTHER RIP.
HER GRAND DAUGHTER
First of all, Mom was 29 days from 88 when she passed,2nd it was a hunting rifle from what I was told by people who were there and older at the time. I’m the tenth child, and the one that she was carrying on that day. 3rd who in the Hell gave you the right to post our family history with names on a public forum without family permission to push your anti 2nd amendment agenda. And yes I carry it’s part of my job to keep me and others safe from harm. ONE PISSED OFF UNCLE D.
And back then there was no form of checks back then. You could buy a gun anywhere, sears, gas station, bicycle shops, or any Tom, Dick, or Harry on the street. And we had a lot less crime then, then we do now because of the way every generation after was brought up being coddled. The problem was when kids were no longer being punished . Heaven forbid don’t yell at my kid, Don’t paddle my kid
The feuding family members miss the point entirely by focusing on ‘grandma’s age’ or the rifle type. This is a moving and highly emotional story, one of many, of a family destroyed or nearly destroyed by guns in the hands of the wrong people. You may disagree with the author about which or how many guns should be banned, but you cannot argue with the fact that ‘grandma’ should never have needed to pull the trigger — intentionally or otherwise.