CW: violence, violence against women
I was a sophomore in high school, a new student in a new town.
A girl who sat in the row next to me alphabetically, and I had said hello a couple of times without too much communication, but I did feel a connection wth her.
Halfway through the school year, her father killed her mother and both of her siblings. She somehow got out unharmed physically.
She wasn’t at school for a couple of weeks. She returned without life in her eyes, color in her skin, or life-force energy. I said hello a couple of times; she barely could muster a hello back, and her eyes never quite made it off the floor.
This is a story about men, guns & violence.
My first experience seeing a gun in real life was at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, which was a sixth-grade field trip for all of three classes in our school. In the row in front of us, some Yankee fans and Baltimore Orioles fans had gotten into a little bit of an argument and shouting match during the game. The Yankees won the game, and the Orioles fans were pretty pissed off. As everybody was filing out of their seats into the corridor, these men started yelling at each other, pushing and shoving each other. One of them brought out a gun and shot one of the guys less than 20 feet away from us in his thigh, and he hit the ground with blood squirting out. Our entire sixth-grade class ran the three floors down the ramps of Yankee Stadium and the whole parking lot to the school buses waiting on the perimeter. The teachers got there about 5 minutes after us.
This is a story about men, guns, and violence.
I was 24 years old and a full-time criminal and mobster in the Newark, New Jersey area. In many ways, I didn’t fit in with the other mobsters and criminals, but I was a good enough con man that they kept me around anyway.
I was an active cocaine addict at the time, and had run out of drugs to use, and needed to earn some money fast, and more importantly, I needed cocaine. I had set up a meet to buy one kilo of Peruvian pink cocaine in a block. Another guy and I set it up in advance that we were going to rob the guy with the kilo, so we would have both our money and the drugs to use and sell. I was in the guy’s car working through the deal, when the guy I was working with snuck out of my car, put a gun to his head, and threatened his life. We left with the cocaine and the money.
What we didn’t expect was that he had a loaded .22 pistol with him. We pulled out of the parking lot behind a Friendly’s Restaurant, and he came after us. We were driving down a local busy road with him firing shots while driving on this one-lane road. He hit my car several times and shattered one of the windows, but never hit me or him. We eventually got away.
This is a story of men, guns, and violence.
Later that same year, I, that guy, and another guy robbed another rival gang of about $25,000 of cocaine and marijuana. To offer some context, this was $25,000 in 1985. We didn’t know they were part of a larger operation that was a rival gang/family. Several of the bosses had a “sit down” and came to an agreement that we had to get them the money back by midnight. Most of the money we had spent, and we had very little of the cocaine, was still in our possession. I met up with my older brother that night, which he had requested. David was a sociopath and a strong arm for the mob. Most of the time, he had a Buck knife and a .357 revolver in his possession; this night was no exception. While we were talking about how I was going to pull this off, he pulled out his gun and put it in my mouth, and released the safety. David looked me in the eye, “Mikey, you have till midnight or you’re dead meat.”.. I robbed some drug dealers and gave the money to the bosses, who honored their agreement.
This is a story about men, guns, and violence.
I was 29 years old in 1989, when I was admitted to a locked mental health facility for trying to kill my girlfriend and myself the night before. I was 6 weeks “clean” from alcohol and drugs, but obviously, still a complete mess. I was given the option of either being taken away by the police or willingly going to the mental hospital. I sort of willingly went with my girlfriend, driving me, the one I tried to kill the night before. I was going to run her over in my sports car and just keep my foot on the pedal, driving into the Big Oak Tree about 50 feet away. Through divine intervention, none of that happened, but I landed in a mental hospital. It was my fourth day on the unit, and we were in one of our evening therapy groups led by the psychologist, who was my new therapist on the unit. Somewhere during that session, the head nurse had come in and interrupted the group for a minute, whispering something in the psychologist’s ear.
While she was talking, both of them started looking in my direction. I had done enough things wrong in life to know that shit was about to hit the fan, and I was caught doing something, and I was indexing in my mind what I could be in trouble for, so I’d have to come up with some bullshit story to cover my ass. Like I said, “clean and sober.” The psychologist looked up and asked me if the two of us could have a word in the other room, and the head nurse took over the group. All sixteen patients, the two assistant Mental Health workers, the head nurse, and my psychologist were all watching me as I walked around the room slowly following her outside the metal doors. We went to her office, and she explained to me that my brother and one of his friends were in the reception area with guns, threatening to kill people if I did not come down there immediately. I want to repeat that, my brother, in his infinite wisdom, went to a mental hospital with guns to break me out of the mental hospital.
They were trying to come up with a plan of what to do, and I asked if I could talk to him. They said under no circumstances would they let me go down there because they didn’t know what would happen. I asked if I could speak to him on the phone, which they set up for me to do. I talked him down and told him I was there of my own free will, and that they were treating me okay. If there were any problems, I would let him know. He made me promise three times that I would let him know, and he left. After we got off the phone, I said to the psychologist, “ I know you and the rest of the staff and all of the other patients think I keep lying in groups about who I am and what I come from, but do you believe me now?” Her face was white and her eyes were wide open.
“Yes, Michael, I believe you now.” This was the first time that anybody believed me about what my world was like.
This is a story about men, guns, and violence.
In 1995, I was the Program Coordinator for a federally-funded local program working with adolescent teens in crisis on juvenile probation.
In the second year of our program, we hired a young woman who was a local university student.
She began dating a man significantly older than her. After a couple of weeks, she expressed that she was uncomfortable about him.
Two years later, she was found dead with her newborn baby tied up in a closet. The man held her at gunpoint and forced her to tie herself up in the closet.
This is a story about men, guns & violence.
I was the Program Director for a nonprofit that received referrals from child protective services of families that they had worked with unsuccessfully for years.
He was a 12-year-old boy. His grandfather had shot and killed his grandmother, then his father shot and killed his mother. They were both in prison, and he was living with his Aunt, whom he barely knew, and her daughter, two years younger than him.
A couple of weeks after working with him, he attacked several of the girls at the new alternative school to which he had been transferred. As a surprise to nobody, he was incredibly violent towards many of the girls at his school.
This is a story about men, guns & violence.
The list is extensive of experiences of knowing or having clients whose lives have been torn apart or ended due to men, guns & violence.
The mass shootings and murders of famous people make the news.
But in our communities, men who have not learned how to manage or regulate their emotions are a threat to everybody when they have access to guns, especially assault weapons.
I guarantee anybody older than twenty-five doesn’t know it, but they’ve met somebody who has trauma as a result of men, guns & violence.
At some point, we as a culture need to take drastic measures to create a safer world for everyone, especially women and children, from men, guns, and violence.
This is a story about men, guns, and violence.
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Previously Published on Medium
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