[Download] "In the Brotherhood of Guns (Essay)" by Harvard Review " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: In the Brotherhood of Guns (Essay)
- Author : Harvard Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Reference,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Language Arts & Disciplines,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 70 KB
Description
Everyone else in my family had done it, including my mother, an eager first-timer at sixty-six. "It felt like power," she said with chilling certainty. "I loved it: My father did it as an army draftee in the 1950s. My gentle, brilliant nephew--encouraged and instructed by my sister and her husband--began when he was ten and soon achieved proficiency. I was the outlier, ironically, given my reputation as the plucky adventurer. I had swallowed poisonous blowfish in Japan, imbibed fresh turtle blood in Vietnam, skied red zones in the Alps. One spooky evening I walked alone into the vast medina of Fez and remained there, lost until dawn. But I was the last virgin of the trigger in our little clan. As an ardent pacifist, I had upheld a longstanding vow: no contact whatsoever with any firearms. My grandfather was a deer and pheasant hunter, but I steered clear of his shotgun. My niece, who worked as a police cadet, once offered to slip a borrowed black pistol into my palm just so I could feel it; I refused. In law school, I directed an anti-violence project and wrote impassioned warnings about the proliferation of guns in America. In other words, I epitomized the kind of bleeding-heart pacifist who was burned in effigy at annual meetings of the National Rifle Association.