A NEIGHBORHOOD OF GUNS

My next-door neighbor has an AR-15. I haven’t seen it. He told me that he owned one, and I believed him. He told me when we were outside, near his garage, near his grill, near his back deck. Our houses are small, under 1000 square feet, and with yards to match. Everything is near.

We had been talking about the latest mass murder. The grass had been green. Maybe it was early fall 2016, or spring 2017. In the months that followed I began to picture the gun within his house, a free-floating image, a long, dark shape, vague, because I didn’t know the details of its body.

In my mind, the gun floats in the air of a room. It moves like a remote control model airplane, or a ghost. It is easy to make the gun big in proportion to the size of my neighbor’s bed or his corridor; the gun is an idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen it or any of my neighbor’s other guns. I haven’t seen his gun case either, not when I’ve been over playing cards, or borrowing his high-speed internet for file transfers, or having Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, it’s possible that I have seen the case, without knowing, my eyes brushing over a piece of furniture. Out of politeness, I don’t examine people’s belongings that carefully as a guest. I avoid the out-of-the-way. Instead I look at what’s on the walls. I concentrate on what’s on the table in front of me.

I trust him with the AR-15—mostly. Concerning his ownership, there’s a small percentage of my thoughts, let’s say 5% out of 100, that doesn’t trust, that’s a question mark. That 5% knows what happens to some people as they get older; their fears can increase as their physical abilities diminish, their despair kicks in as life gets harder.

For many years, I saw him get angry when people drove over his lawn. The anger bordered on rage in the earlier days. He’d shout after cars, striding towards them as they left.

Our part of the street doesn’t have sidewalks, and so cars can park in our front yards, leaving tire grooves and flattened grass. My neighbor is what I would call obsessed with turf. He mows at least twice a week, sometimes three times. While I leave my yard to clover, he puts on fertilizer and weed killer. The differences between our yards are stark, like the time when we were talking at the fence, and there were bees and delicate flies and butterflies on my side, and no insects on his side. You’d think the insects would have crossed over, but that late afternoon, they didn’t. And when twilight came, the lightning bugs lit up my yard, and not his.

Eventually, my neighbor put a series of long 4 x 4s where grass met asphalt. No parking is possible there now. I haven’t heard him yell at cars for a while, only mutter under his breath if they speed by too fast. Because he owns an AR-15, I monitor his emotions more closely than I would otherwise. I also think of him as a possible defense, for when I’m threatened and the police are too far away. I don’t picture him using the AR-15 on my behalf except in an extreme circumstance, but where I live, in Charlottesville, Virginia, there has been more than one extreme circumstance.

On August 12, 2017, I stayed in my home, taking care of a sick pet and also avoiding the human storm, the Nazis and far-right militia gathering downtown for a day of protest. Earlier that year, in March, I had been in London when a driver had killed four people on Westminster Bridge. My friend and I, on the bridge that very day, had missed the attack by a mere hour or two. The reminder of what could happen was fresh in my mind; I woke on August 12 certain that it would attract the mentally unstable, the emotionally sick.

If the militia came to our neighborhood, if they shot into my house, I had someone to call. Our City Manager had already gone to the courts; he had asked for the location of the protest to be moved, despite their permit. He didn’t get what he wanted, but now we knew: The police didn’t believe that they could handle the event where it was.

My neighbor was my back-up plan. He could shoot to scare, to miss. He used to go to a shooting range north of town, hitting targets with the AR-15, improving his aim. At one point, he complained to me that an NRA membership was required at the range. He had come to think that the requirement impinged on his freedom of choice. He had problems with the NRA; he didn’t want to be forced to support them, just to shoot at targets. Hitting targets, however, was what he enjoyed about the AR-15. “It’s fun,” he said. “It’s a great gun for that.” I didn’t ask if they were bull’s eye or human-shaped. He had a bull’s eye for his axe throwing—a wooden stand—that has since disappeared.

Would I rather my neighbor kill someone who was attacking me, rather than for me to die? Yes. I can say this and still lobby for stricter gun laws.

My neighbor usually votes Democratic, maybe always, but he doesn’t identify with any political party. He is anti-racist; he tells me about confronting racism when slurs arise within his friends and his colleagues. He has criticized me for trying to preserve a statue of Lewis and Clark, whose families were both slave-holders.

He is one man, single, 50, with an AR-15.

Who else on my street has an AR-15? I assume that there is another one, maybe many more, and definitely other guns.

It is daunting, the question of where else the guns live. In particular, I want to know the mental state of each person on my street who owns a semi-automatic weapon. I can monitor my neighbor, but not the unknown. In general, the owners of war-grade guns are a disordered militia, the opposite of what the Constitution protects.

My neighbor just began mowing as I write. I am getting up to shut the window, to reduce the sound to a muted roar. The grass had already been perfect, so thick it was difficult to walk in, but not taller than the ankle.

I can walk from the outer wall of my house to the outer wall of his house in five strides; from my bedroom I can sometimes hear his roommate’s TV. His roommate suffers from hearing loss, though he is not that old, also around fifty.

My street is demographically varied. There are modest, though over-priced, houses, like the ones on my end of the street. There is subsidized housing at the other end, with houses of millionaires scattered within the mix.

The month before the Nazi invasion, in July 2017, a gang murder happened at that other end, on the river, a ten to fifteen-minute walk from my house. A young man was killed by machete and knife. Like the AR-15, the gang was identified by two letters, a slash, and two numbers. I’m afraid of that gang. I don’t want to invoke them by forming those letters and numbers.

As a girl, I knew from an early age, like most girls knew, that one bad encounter could turn me into prey. In the decades that followed, I’ve had someone break into my house and wake me in my bed, pressing me down. I’ve had a handgun pulled on me at a tourist spot; I’ve had a stranger beat on my door drunk past midnight, yelling, shaking the walls.

On the subway in New York, I once saw the outline of a machine gun in a straw bag; the man holding the bag was seated directly across from me, his hand resting on the gun. Is it legal? I think it’s legal, I thought. When the train stopped, I got off, a few stops early.

In Charlottesville, a long, long time ago, outside a community center, the police motioned for me to hide behind their car. Their long guns came out. They pointed them at suspected drug dealers, across a long field. Then the police burst from behind the car, running towards the suspects, rifles in hand.

I navigate the world of guns without a gun, but I am capable of calling for one to arrive. The police are a delivery service of guns.

Still, they have never saved me, they’ve only taken down the details. I fought the intruder off me and then he ran, jumping out the window. I lunged at the guy trying to get my money, my hands going for the gun grip; he wrenched the pistol away and opened the bullet chamber. There were no bullets, only places for bullets. “Joke,” he said.

I received self-defense training from the police, twice, and they told me that, when threatened, most people freeze, some run, and a very few fight. I am in the minority--Immediate rage, immediate action, few, if any, words in my head.

In March 2018, I participated in the March for Our Lives protest, in support of gun control laws and ending school shootings.

I am an experimental filmmaker. In December 2018, I finished a short film called “The Etiquette of American Massacres,” which showed at the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 2019, and at 516 Arts in Albuquerque in 2020. The film used a painted bridge in Charlottesville as a metaphor. Decade after decade, the bridge keeps getting repainted with messages. It is thick with multi-colored layers of paint, layer after layer of tributes, some of them about gun violence and loss. The layers, like gun massacres, like our collective grief and trauma, keep coming.

The bridge is located a ten-minute drive from my neighborhood, near the University of Virginia’s Art Department on Culbreth Road.

I had hoped that my film would cause a positive change, that the metaphor would bring a few people a deeper understanding of the day-to-day impact of massacres. The bridge would influence those people to help eliminate gun violence. Through the film, the bridge would counter school shootings, erase them, stop the layers.

The opposite happened. A school shooting came to the bridge.

On November 13, 2022, a student shot and killed three of his fellow students: Devin Chandler, D'Sean Perry, and Lavel Davis Jr. Two others were wounded and hospitalized. The killings happened on Culbreth Road, on a bus at night, a bus parked a minute or so from the bridge, the end of a school trip to Washington to see a play about Emmett Till. Chandler, Perry, and Davis were members of the UVA football team, handsome Black men with genuine smiles and an obvious love of life and of people. Their faces remain beacons in photographs, shining light on the three voids of their absence.

I did not help to erase future massacres; massacres stalked my path, followed in my footsteps, as they stalk and follow every American now.

The bridge was painted with the men’s names and the numbers of their football jerseys. So far, no one has painted over their layer.

I ask the same questions as ever: Should I go to the school? Should I go to the movie theatre? Should I walk down the street or stay inside?

Is that person crazy? Does that person have a semi-automatic gun?

The machine gun had weight in the straw bag; but is it possible that it was a water gun?

I imagine the United States as a house on my street. The head of that house, the President, is on his way to lecture Great Britain about Northern Ireland. He has to step over the dead bodies of children to get to the front door. Their murderers, the ones who are still alive, are locked in the basement; AR-15s are everywhere else, and some can be found in the basement as well, with guards. “Follow our example of freedom and democracy,” the President tells the House of Great Britain, as he tells the world. Back in his house, more children are shot.

I’m lying to myself if I say I live across the street. I live in that house. I just haven’t accepted the truth. 

Alexandria Searls is an experimental filmmaker whose work on gun violence has shown at the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival and 516 Arts (an art gallery) in New Mexico. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, and she has recently been published in Progenitor, Cagibi, and Assignment Literary Magazine.