I write this now, 36 years after the murder of my friend, to try to convey a very personal experience of gun violence in the hope that it will encourage people to call their Senators and INSIST they support the upcoming vote on background checks and banning those on the terrorist no-fly list from legally purchasing weapons, closing the so-called ‘terror gap.'
I was sixteen when my friend was murdered. Shot dead on the streets of New York City. I was at home at the time, the other side of New York to where he was shot. Even now, over three decades later, I remember that night as if it were yesterday, every tiny, hateful detail.
My phone rang late at night and a friend asked me if I had heard the news. I had heard nothing. He then went on to tell me that our mutual friend had been shot outside of his apartment building. At that moment the clock of my life reset itself to zero and every moment since has started from that point.
I remember somehow getting a cab and getting over to the street where my friend lived. I got out of the car and walked slowly towards his building and, as it came into view, I saw a gaggle of NYPD officers, a cordon and a growing group of onlookers on the corner. I continued walking towards the building with increasing confusion. I remember distinctly thinking “Why have they painted the sidewalk red?” and this thought seemed to focus my mind. It just kept repeating itself inside of my head. Funny the things you think when your brain refuses to process the awful truth.
Finally, when I was right up at the cordon, it dawned on me that this was not paint. Red or otherwise. It was the blood of my friend. My friend was nowhere to be seen. I remember standing there, at the edges of the cordon and feeling a terrible pain in the pit of my stomach - the sort of pain you sometimes feel when you are over hungry and your stomach acid feels as though it is burning a hole somewhere deep inside of you.
A policeman came up to me and asked what I was doing and what I wanted. I stared at him uncomprehendingly. All those things that you think you will think, or imagine you would ask, utterly missing. I stared at him for what seemed like hours but was probably only a few seconds and found myself opening and closing my mouth with no sound coming out.
He asked if I knew “the victim”? I initially said no as it did not occur to me that my friend could possibly be described as a “victim”. The Policeman continued talking, explaining that there had been a shooting and that a man had been seriously injured and taken to hospital. I wanted to ask “which one?” but the words simply would not form in my head or come out of my mouth. Instead, the burning feeling in my stomach switched to feeling as though someone had drop-kicked me in the abdomen and, as a result, all of the breath in my body had been squeezed out. Momentarily I truly thought I would die.
He asked me again if I knew the “victim” and somehow I seemed to nod. A strange non-understanding nod, totally devoid of all meaning. I could not stop, I just kept nodding and trying to seem as though I was a normal, intelligent, functioning human being. Trying to stop myself from emitting a scream of despair. When I think back to that moment now, I always see the image of the Mvnch painting “The Scream” instead of myself sitting on the sidewalk. I have morphed into a hideous scream. Even now, that memory and that image gives me the chills and takes my breath away.
I sat there, on the edge of the normally busy NYC sidewalk for what seemed an age. When I eventually managed to gather my thoughts into some semblance of function, I looked round for the officer to ask him which hospital my friend had been taken to but the officer had gone and I was sitting alone.
For one very strange moment an idea genuinely occurred to me that I could somehow retrace my journey to the scene, do it all again, arrive and find a different outcome. It was all a misunderstanding, it was someone else, he wasn’t hurt, the cordon didn’t exist. And that feeling remained for days afterwards, in the background of my mind, alongside the torrent of thoughts which slowly began to take shape in my head when I began processing what had actually happened.
Somehow I got home. Don’t ask me how, I was in a sort of a dream. I probably got a cab. I remember unlocking my front door and walking into the apartment in a haze. The phone was ringing as I arrived home, I answered it. Another friend told me that our friend had died. My head began to spin in a fairground ride way and I remember simply clutching the phone and listening to the words, completely without understanding any of them subsequent to the words “he is dead”. It was as though he was just endlessly repeating the same sentence, in a dirge-like fashion, repeating it until I could somehow process and understand what the actual words meant. But none of them meant anything to me. He may as well have been speaking in Ancient Latin for all the sense they made to me. I remember saying goodbye distractedly and hanging the phone up. Immediately afterwards I took it off the hook, I didn’t want to hear from anyone else. Ever again.
I have no idea how long I sat on the sofa that night, staring at some far-distant thing that my eyes could see but my brain refused to understand. I remember feeling very cold. Not that cold shiver we sometimes feel when we are momentarily scared of something, but a deep, heavy, icy cold which clamped around my innards and seemed to freeze them in its grip. It was the sort of cold that you could never warm with a blanket or heat, this was a type of cold I had never experienced before but, even then, I knew that it could not be warmed. It might be more accurate to say that my entire being had frozen. Frozen in those few minutes of time when I learned of what had happened, and frozen within my body rendering me completely incapable of feeling, or processing, or knowing what was going on.
You get a similar type of feeling if you unexpectedly bang your head on a cupboard door - you are momentarily stunned, your spine shivers and you freeze in pain until you realize what you have done. The difference here being that this feeling went on and on and there was no way of realizing what had happened. The world and my existence in it had gone mad, I was not capable of taking part in anything, the freezing, clamping fist of horror had fully encompassed me - and I am not sure it has ever fully left me. Every time I vaguely looked at the great big clock on the wall, it seemed to have moved only a few seconds. A few endless seconds which seemed to stretch and last hours.
I didn’t feel grief, I didn’t feel anything. The entire evening seemed a nightmare blur and the precise details kept fading out of reach in my mind.
At some point I must have fallen into some sort of sleep. It lasted only a few minutes but when I awoke, I was filled with that beautiful optimism and gladness that only the memory-loss of the newly-awake can have. It lasted only nanoseconds before a creeping, heavy, sick feeling took over my senses, my body, my limbs and my life.
I got through the next days somehow. I think I made a decision to simply ride with it all and think nothing. I suspended my ability to process information and merely nodded and shook my head at what seemed like appropriate moments. At one point I clearly remember nodding in assent to a question someone had asked me. I have no clue as to what the question was. But what I remember is trying to nod with something resembling understanding. Trying to seem as though I was following what was being said, what was going on, and in reality I was not. I nodded a lot during the next few days. All without any degree of understanding. It was a kind of a reflex action, something I felt I was required to do although I had no understanding of why anyone expected me to do it. There were times when I became aware that I had been nodding for a long while and that people were staring at me. I couldn’t seem to stop. I didn’t care if they were staring, in fact, their stares seemed to come at me from a hazy light at the top of some hideous abyss which I was living in.
I spent many days in this abyss. Staring out at people, seeing their mouths move about and hearing sounds come out. Nothing made sense. Literally nothing. At times I thought I would just cover my ears in protest but my arms just seemed to stick to my side in pointless flaccidity. Just keep nodding, I thought to myself. Over and over. Just act normal. In retrospect, I’m perfectly sure that my attempts to act ‘normally’ convinced no one. But no one really seemed to notice because, as I later realized, everyone else was going through their own personal terrors and doing exactly the same thing. It was as though other people didn’t really exist. Time certainly didn’t exist. The world had somehow stopped and we were all suspended in a horrific, agonizing hole from which none of us could get out.
The best way I can describe this is to say that it felt as though I was staring up at people who were looking down at me through a tiny hazy light, somewhere very far away at the top of an unendingly deep abyss. I could see their mouths move, I could hear sounds coming out, but the words all merged into each other in a sickening murmuring and made no sense to me. They were too far away anyway, they could not reach me and I could find no way of reaching them. I had fallen into a stinking, putrified abyss which I had no idea how to get out of. The people at the top seemed to be carrying on with their lives, they were talking, waving, probably even shouting down at me, but my life was suspended in a horrific tunnel of pain and complete mystification. Something which made no sense to me had happened, I was aware that my life would never feel the same way again and, for much of the time, I thought I had drifted into a kind of strange clinical insanity from which I would never be able to return.
I was constantly aware of a terrible pain somewhere inside of my body, I couldn’t place where it came from but it hurt more than any pain I had ever previously experienced, it literally took my breath away. I repeatedly thought I would simply die as I couldn’t seem to draw breath, my mind had totally abandoned me and my arms and legs felt like cotton wool; an unpleasant mixture of numb, flaccid and lethargic. It was genuinely as though I had had a stroke or some similar physical injury. I even remember saying to myself in my head “put one foot down and press” in order to stand up. I am not joking or exaggerating, it was as though everything ‘normal’ had vanished and even simple movements required this humungous effort of will and concentration.
As time went by, I often made myself believe that I had ‘dealt’ with the loss of my friend. That I had ‘processed’ and ‘understood’ it. It was only many years later that I realized I had done nothing of the sort.
When I said earlier that those first moments of waking up, on the night he was murdered, allowed me a brief moment of relief until I remembered what had happened, I had no idea at that time that this morning miasma would affect me for the rest of my life. Even now, there are rarely days when I don’t have those weird, dream-like moments on waking up, when the world is right again and everything fits in its place. In fact, I have become so used to that feeling that there are times when I fall asleep looking forward to trying to grab onto that waking moment, to try to expand it, to try to force it to last longer, and probably also, if I am 100% honest, to try to find a way to make it all not true. Even now.
I wasn’t a very mature 16 year old. I had been protected from any type of random violence and the murder of my friend was the first contact with gun violence that I had ever had. I was little more than a child at the time of his death and yet, even now, over 35 years later, I think about my friend every single day. I think of what else he may have done with his life had some random person not been able to shoot and kill him. I think how much his young son has missed out on. The night that he died changed my life. Things were never the same again. I never felt truly safe again. I have spent years trying to untangle my emotions about what happened but have finally concluded that there IS no real way of processing and ‘dealing with’ an act of random, senseless violence which rips away from you, a friend who has been a center-point in your life up until that point. He would never be there again. We would never laugh together again. I could never ask him for advice again. I would never be able to feel him hug me again. He was permanently gone. For ever.
The way I lived my entire life changed with that one act of violence. Even now, I find myself unconsciously scanning the horizon and looking furtively at passers-by to convince myself that no-one is planning on shooting me. If I see someone walking down the road with a visible gun, it makes me extremely nervous and I will cross the road or get out of their way ‘just in case.
The thing I have learned over the decades is that you never ‘get over’ the loss of a friend when it is so senseless, so violent and so pointless. The perpetrator didn’t know my friend personally, he had no personal grudge with him, they had never met before. The only time their paths ever crossed was when the shooter killed my friend.
The shooter had mental health problems. This is an indisputable fact. He had a very long history of mental health care and mental health issues. But he had been able to perfectly legally purchase a gun, to purchase ammunition and to set his plan into action. The gun shop where he purchased the gun did not prevent him from buying it. The manufacturers who made the gun and sold it to the shop, who sold it to the perpetrator, didn’t stop him. Neither the shop nor the manufacturers cared what the end result was. Their lives did not shatter that day. Their families weren’t ripped apart. Their consciences didn’t prick them for a second. It was nothing to do with them. In their eyes. In mine? They are wrong. Dreadfully wrong.
When a person is killed by gun violence, the knock-on results of that act are like a set of dominoes. The live of their family, their loved ones, their friends and even those not directly affected but who witnessed the event, are all changed forever. The grieving never really ends. there are days when I honestly feel strong and determined enough to take on the world, and then many other days when a song on the radio, or a programme on television, and, one time it was even a beautiful sunrise that make me think “I must call him and tell him about this” and then that thudding reality hits you, all over again, that you can’t.
No matter how many years go by, I can never get that image of the red sidewalk out of my head. It is always there, lurking on some days, pounding inside my head on others. Sometimes I think I am fine and then a great big truck of grief will hit me and leave me feeling as though I have been unexpectedly hit by a ten tonne vehicle. The pieces of my life will never fully fit back together again. Not as they were before. I have tried repeatedly to make them fit, to make it ‘right’ somehow, but it never really works. I am a person who does not trust easily, someone who can be suddenly affected by a stray, careless word at times, someone who is in a state of near-constant hyper-vigilance of those around me. I rarely let my guard down. I miss the person I once was, before all of this happened. I miss the person I could have been if this had NOT happened. But I am left with what there is - a different me but me nonetheless.
I have spent years now campaigning for tighter controls on gun sales and for more effective laws surrounding gun ownership and yet still, every single day, another child lies dead from some ‘accidental’ shooting (which never is accidental, any adult who leaves an unsecured weapon around should be charged with negligent homicide in my opinion). I have met far too many other people whose lives have also been destroyed by gun violence. We all now belong to a group which none of us wanted to belong to and which none of us want anyone ELSE to belong to. Gun Violence in this country is out of control and it must stop, it HAS to stop!
I have a dream that one day, hopefully in the near future, I will wake up one day to find no random shootings have occurred overnight. Even one single day would be a start. As it is, we are a nation that the rest of the world stares at in amazement and confusion. If only those who would preserve the Second Amendment with their lives would be so vigilant about preserving the lives of the innocent men, woman and children who get caught in the crossfire or random gun violence that someone else wishes to inflict. If only we could just wake up and listen, not just listen but really hear, the stories of those of us who have lost loved ones to gun violence. Perhaps then we might begin to feel differently about it all. And all the while we delay, there will be more shattered lives, more victims and more people like me, desperately trying to understand what has happened and trying to make sense of all the pieces of our lives.
You may think ‘it could not happen to me, to my family, to my friends’ but you’d be wrong to think that. It can and does happen to anyone, any time, any where. All the while there are people wandering around with loaded weapons who have no business owning them, people will die and families will mourn.
I never, ever, want anyone else to experience what I went through on that night, or what I have gone through during the ensuing 35 years. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
I have seen the argument that if someone purchases a car and then purposefully (or accidentally) kills someone with it, you wouldn’t go after the car manufacturer and so why should we blame the gun manufacturers when a similar thing happens? My answer to this is simple - a car is not designed to be a weapon, it is designed to get you from one place to another. If a death occurs as a result of dangerous driving or some sort of accident then, unless the car was faulty, the car is acting in some way that it was not designed to act. Maybe the driver was drunk. Maybe they were speeding. Maybe many things but NO CAR is designed to kill or hurt people. Guns are. In fact, many guns are marketed predominantly on the basis of just HOW much damage they can do.
With the upcoming vote in The Senate on Monday, I’m writing this now to beg people to call their Senators and insist they vote in favor of the legislation. I have put a link at the end of this piece to make it easy for you to do so.
Alongside this, I want us ALL to push for a vote which bans private ownership of assault weapons. We had a ban before. 1994 - 2004 saw the
Federal Assault Weapons Ban . There were faults with this legislation but it did save lives. If you are in any doubt about this, read this article:
We need another ban NOW on private individuals owning assault weapons, and we need it now. Do not let this chance pass us by. MAKE SURE IT DOESN’T.
Here are some links which might be helpful. Keep the pressure going, contact your Senator, tweet about it, link people to it on Facebook, take this opportunity to STOP some of our gun craziness.
The NRA cannot be allowed to hold our entire country to ransom and unless we ALL speak up, they will continue to bully, harrass and bribe their way to the next massacre. Let Orlando be the last mass shooting we ever have to see.
DO IT NOW‼