I never wanted a gun. There are days when I forget I have it, locked up in a smart safe under a pile of clothes in a dresser. I still take it out to the range about once a month, but I spend more time looking at its disassembled parts on the cleaning table — the harmless viscera of the killing machine — than aiming it at the target. At home, if I pick it up, I just hold its slick black body in my hand, fingers wrapped around the grip. It doesn’t feel as heavy as I thought a gun would be — 20 ounces. The weight of a Bible. Or, perhaps, of two human hearts. I put it back in the safe, cover the safe with jeans. But I can’t hide the unease I feel — or is it shame? — about living with a gun in America.

Gun violence has also divided the country. While the majority of Americans support stricter gun laws, a loud minority opposes any reforms. The disagreement appears to be about the meaning of the Second Amendment — the right of people to keep and bear arms — but it is about much more than the letter of the law. It is about power: who has it, and who doesn’t, and who is afraid of losing what little they think they still have.

I did not grow up around firearms. I came to the United States nearly two decades ago, this country where guns outnumber people. This fact made me less, not more, interested in them. The first time I saw someone carrying a gun was at a dinner party in Florida, when a young woman I was chatting with as we sipped wine around a marble counter in our hosts’ kitchen lifted her skirt to reveal a holstered handgun strapped to her thigh. I was training to be a paramedic then, assigned to a rescue unit in Jacksonville, and I saw gunshot wounds regularly. I had witnessed people bleed to death in the back of our ambulance, despite our frantic efforts to plug the holes in their bodies. We calculated the volume of blood loss in pints, punctured their veins with large-bore catheters to administer fluids, treated them for shock. Sometimes they survived long enough for us to get them to the ER. Seeing the savagery of guns up close, I was afraid of firearms and viscerally appalled by them.

As a medical anthropologist studying violence in Latin America, I have for well over a decade seen the damage that American firearms inflict abroad. When I began volunteering at a medical clinic treating migrants in Nogales, Mexico, steps away from the border wall, I realized that the people fleeing Mexico and Central America were moving in the opposite direction of the guns that had threatened to destroy their lives over there. They were not yet thinking that our guns could destroy their lives here, too.

I decided six years ago to write a book about guns. I wanted to follow the weapons south, from Arizona and Texas to cities and towns in Mexico, in order to better understand the role that American firearms play in violence on both sides of the border. I knew I would be hanging out with people who bought, sold, smuggled, and carried those guns. But how could I do that if I was afraid of the object of my research?

Fear was not new to me. I had lived with it for years, since a day almost 20 years ago when a man tried to break into my apartment. For weeks, I couldn’t sleep until the first rays of light made my terror retreat into the dark corners of the room, where it waited until the next sundown, like a monster. I placed a kitchen knife and my cellphone set to the local emergency number on the nightstand. If I could have bought a gun then, I probably would have. But I lived in Italy, a country where guns were hard to come by, especially for a foreign student like me. I battled my fear alone, counted days until I could move back home to Lithuania and then to the United States.

But in the past few years, I have felt a different kind of fear. Although I didn’t want to admit it, a seed of dread began to germinate somewhere deep inside me. Its source: all that was happening in the United States — racial violence, domestic terrorism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, a backlash against women’s rights. I knew a gun would not protect me from all the hate in our society. But the thing about fear is that it is often irrational.

Twice I got very close to buying a gun. First I bid on an old Spanish pistol in an online auction but fell asleep before the bidding ended. I don’t remember what made me change my mind the second time. But then about a year ago, I realized that the only way I would understand my relationship to guns would be to own one. I wanted to know firsthand what it meant to live with a gun in America, to feel the discomfort of such a possession, to see what it did to me.

Woman walks into a gun shop

The gun store everyone recommended was located north of Boston in the basement of a nondescript office building housing a nail salon and a real estate company. No large, flashy signs announced it from blocks away, like the ones I saw during my research trips to firearms dealers in Southern states. The only hint that I had come to the right place was the parking lot full of Chevy and Ford pickup trucks with military veteran and firefighter union decals. Inside, past a heavy metal door, the room was packed with weapons, boxes of ammunition, and white men. I didn’t know how to move my body between the shelves in the tight, labyrinthine space. The scent of my perfume suddenly seemed too strong, giving me away in this oil-and-leather-smelling basement.

I took my place at the end of the line. The men in front of me were chatting about where and how to buy semiautomatic rifles now prohibited by state law. When they noticed me, they fell silent. “Are you buying your first gun?” one of them asked. I nodded, and he smiled approvingly. “My wife is getting her second,” he said and motioned with his head in the direction from the counter. Looking past him, I could see a blonde middle-aged woman signing paperwork.

When it was my turn, the clerk reached into the display case and set two handguns on the glass counter in front of me. I picked each up, opened the slides, put them back down. “This one,” I said, pointing to the 9mm pistol that a Mexican military officer I once interviewed called “the Ferrari” of firearms. “It is very popular,” the clerk said and then directed me to the computer to fill out ATF Form 4473. This asked me to answer “yes” or “no” to a series of questions: Was I a fugitive from justice? Did I use marijuana, even if it was for medicinal purposes? Was I buying a gun on behalf of someone else? A poster on the wall in front of me bore the message “Don’t lie for the other guy.” A new gun trafficking law passed after the 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, increased penalties for straw purchasing to up to 15 years in prison. Only later did I notice another message, written on a faded printout taped below the gun counter, which drew attention to suicide prevention. The ATF questionnaire did not ask whether I might be contemplating taking my own life.

In Massachusetts, I couldn’t just go buy a gun

Massachusetts has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. It is also among the states that make it hardest to buy a gun. All told, it would take me two months from the time I applied for a license and took a firearms safety course to the moment when I stood at the checkout with my new 9mm pistol.

In fact, I had completed the firearms safety course twice. The first time was in 2018, and I was the only woman alongside four white men. When I repeated the training last spring, of the 11 of us in the classroom, four were women and the majority were people of color. This did not surprise me: Half of first-time gun buyers during the pandemic were women, and nearly half were people of color.

Following our instructor’s guidance, we watched a PowerPoint presentation about state laws and then picked up the handguns arranged in a row on a table. We loaded and unloaded them multiple times and aimed them at the targets on the wall. We did this again and again, repeating the same steps until our actions became rote. By the end, we performed the steps with our eyes closed. Next, we went into the range and fired live rounds. After a couple of hours, with our instructor’s signature on the certificate, we were cleared to apply for our gun licenses.

I also needed to write aletter to the deputy superintendent of my local police department. In it, I wrote that I wanted a firearm “to have the means to protect myself.” The truth was that I was still more afraid of owning a gun, of having it anywhere close to my body, than of the real or imagined threats it would supposedly protect me against. I knew that having a firearm at home increased the likelihood of my dying from a gunshot wound.

“I do not take this decision to apply for a license to carry a firearm lightly,” I wrote in my letter. The rest of the application asked for extraneous personal details, which revealed more about my racial background and social status than my qualifications to be a gun owner. I called on two friends to write letters of reference and took them with me when I went to the police department to give my fingerprints. A month later, my license was ready.

Am I part of the problem?

At the gun store north of Boston, the clerk called the FBI to run my background check. Once it was completed, he handed me a note from the state attorney general’s office warning of my liability for deaths should I fail to store the gun properly. He put my gun and a few boxes of ammo in a large, thick black plastic bag — like the ones organized crime groups I studied in Mexico use to dispose of human body parts — and shook my hand. I drove home cautiously, frightened of my cargo bouncing in the trunk, wary of being stopped by the police. Would the presence of a gun in my car make the officers afraid of me? What would they do? What should I do?

I kept my gun a secret, afraid of telling my friends and colleagues about it, unsure of how they might react. Too many Americans live with the physical and psychological scars of gun violence. Just a few weeks ago, I learned that a colleague’s father committed suicide with a gun. A few days before that, another friend had told me about losing his dad the same way. I sat there, across the table from my colleague, my fork hovering over a plate of curry, looking at her and looking down and not knowing what to say. As I write this, one of the students at the university where I teach, an undergraduate who grew up in Palestine and was visiting family in Vermont for Thanksgiving when he and his two friends were shot, is recovering in the hospital, paralyzed by the bullet that lodged in his spine. Too often when I turn on the radio, there is news of yet another shooting. And another, and another.

At the same time, the store that sold me my gun keeps sending promotional emails announcing new inventory and discount prices. Sometimes, they land in my inbox right next to the breaking news headlines of the latest mass shooting.

I still don’t know whether I will keep my gun. When I heard that a city nearby would host a gun buyback program, I marked the dates on my calendar. But it went by, and I didn’t give up my gun. My fear and discomfort have diminished, the gun is now familiar, and I am surprised by how insignificant it is, how small compared with its outsized role in my imagination and its potential to harm me and those around me. My heart still pounds after I go shoot at the range, which I do rarely these days, though the adrenaline now dissipates faster. But I remain conflicted about being a gun owner in a society that is highly unequal and defined by systemic racism, where a gun’s capacity to both threaten and protect makes polarization worse.

I thought being a gun owner could give me a voice that would be audible across the pro-gun and anti-gun divide in our society, a permission to speak, to say that yes, I have a gun, and yes, I agree with gun laws — the ones that made me learn to use a gun and wait a couple of months before buying one — because, yes, they do save lives. But I am also worried that I could be making things worse. After all, guns are a powerful and contested symbol of all that is right and wrong about America.

That handful of steel in my dresser has never been an ordinary object. It may not be directly implicated, but it is part of the problem. Am I?