Oregon, when I first got there, was a goddamn utopia for a guy like me. A land of fresh air, oversized burgers, and the kind of gun laws that made a man feel like a fucking cowboy again. I’d just moved up from California, where buying a piece meant crawling through a nine-circle-of-hell bureaucracy and waiting longer than a prison sentence. But here? You just walked into a store, pointed at something black and deadly, slapped some cash on the counter, signed your name, and they handed it over like it was a goddamn cheeseburger. I loved it.
So, naturally, I bought one. A Smith & Wesson 9mm, small, sleek, the kind of thing you could tuck into your waistband like a dirty little secret. It fit right into a fanny pack—yes, a fanny pack, for Christ’s sake. Because when you’re carrying a loaded weapon in public, you want something discreet, something that looks like the world’s most dangerous dad pouch.
I was starting my engineering career, raising a young family, a real pillar of the community on paper. But all I could think about was how cool it was to carry a gun. Made no goddamn sense. This was small-town Oregon. The biggest threat was getting a dirty look from some hippie at Whole Foods for buying non-organic kale. But there was something intoxicating about it, knowing I could put that piece of steel on my hip and walk into a McMenamins like some kind of armed outlaw, ready for a showdown over a basket of Cajun tots.
My dad came up to visit from L.A., and we did what we always did: we hit the gun stores. He had his shopping list, picking out pistols and rifles like he was stocking up for the apocalypse. And somewhere between admiring a tactical shotgun and debating if I really needed another semi-auto, I realized my 9mm didn’t quite fit right in my hand. A small thing, but it gnawed at me.
So I bought a rubber grip.
Simple enough. Just slip it on, get a better feel. But the damn thing covered up the magazine release. No problem. I had a blade back at my office at TSK, a high-tech semiconductor joint. I figured I’d just cut out a little section. Easy.
We all headed over there—my grumpy, pregnant wife, the baby, my oldest running around the warehouse like a meth-head, my dad, my brother. The old man and my brother were marveling at the place, all the expensive tech and engineering toys, probably wondering how a screw-up like me ended up in charge of anything.
I went straight to my desk, pulled out a fresh razor blade, and got to work on that rubber grip.
First cut—clean, smooth, professional. Looked like it came from the factory. I felt like a goddamn gunsmith.
Second cut—just as perfect.
Now, like the idiot I was, I wanted to test it.
I slammed the magazine in. A satisfying click. I ejected it. Nice and easy. I was loving the feel of it. So I did it again. And again. A little rhythm of competence.
Then—muscle memory, the dumb animal part of the brain, took over.
Without thinking, I pulled back the slide. Chambered a round.
Then—without thinking—I did what I had practiced a hundred times in my head but never in my office.
I aimed at the warehouse door and squeezed the trigger.
BOOM.
The shot wasn’t just loud; it was obscene. A goddamn cannon going off in a library. The smell of gunpowder hit me like a physical blow, thick and accusatory. I just stood there, frozen, gun hot in my hand, staring at the door, my stomach somewhere down around my ankles.
Then, my dad walked out of the bathroom, slowly, deliberately drying his hands on a paper towel. He looked at me, looked at the gun, looked at the thin, blasphemous wisp of smoke curling out of the barrel, and said, his voice perfectly calm:
“I hope that wasn’t what I think it was.”
The baby started crying, a piercing wail. My wife came around the corner, her face a hormonal cocktail of exhaustion, rage, and pure, undiluted, “what-the-actual-fuck-did-I-marry?” My brother peered out from the hallway, his eyebrows up near his hairline, like he had just discovered I was a certified lunatic.
And me? I was staring at the hole.
A neat, clean little bullet hole, dead center in the warehouse door.
I swallowed. On the other side of that door? A million dollars worth of fragile semiconductor equipment. My career flashed before my eyes. Lawsuits. A headline in The Oregonian: ‘Local Idiot Engineer Shoots Warehouse, Loses Everything.’ I wanted to puke.
I walked to the door like a man on death row, opened it slowly, expecting to see a smoking pile of my future. The bullet had gone in clean. But on the other side? Jesus. The exit wound was ugly. The drywall looked like it had been punched by God himself. But—miraculously—it had missed everything. Every damn piece of million-dollar equipment. It had hit the concrete wall behind them and died right there, buried in the brick like it had just given up, too disgusted with its owner to do any real damage.
My dad, ever the pragmatist, walked over, helped me grab a “Caution: Forklift Area” sign from another wall—a sign just slightly larger than the bullet hole—and we slapped it right over the damage.
Perfect.
No one would ever know.
Except, of course, I knew. And in that moment, my whole obsession with guns just… evaporated. It died right there with the echo of that stupid, arrogant bang.
I never carried again. The idea of a 9mm on my hip stopped feeling like freedom and started feeling like an idiot magnet. I didn’t need a gun. I was six-foot-four. Who the hell was gonna mess with me? And even if they did, what was I really gonna do? Pull a piece in a Safeway parking lot over a fender bender? Start blasting away and then try to explain to the cops that I had no choice?
The Second Amendment lost its shine that day. It turned out to be just another cheap, dangerous toy I was too dumb to play with.
And I never wore the fanny pack again.
