{"id":25857,"date":"2012-01-26T06:26:37","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T12:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=25857"},"modified":"2012-01-26T06:26:37","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T12:26:37","slug":"the-unthinkable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=25857","title":{"rendered":"The Unthinkable"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can remember a time when Soldier Of Fortune <\/em>might have run a piece on a latte-drinking liberal woman, scared by some close calls with crime\u00a0opted to buy a gun<\/a>:<\/p>\n

More than once [while living in Los Angeles] I called 911. What\u2019s bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn\u2019t even know where R. stored it. It never occurred to me that a gun might quiet my blaring inner alarms.<\/p>\n

Until last year, that is, when I moved to Montana to live with my new boyfriend, now fianc\u00e9. Montana is one of only 12 states that allow residents to carry a loaded gun in public\u2014\u201copen carry\u201d\u2014either on foot or in a vehicle, without a permit. (To carry a concealed weapon, you do need a permit, obtainable after completing a training or safety course.)<\/p>\n

Firearms, in other words, are a seamless part of the culture here. I don\u2019t see people examining fruit in the produce aisle at Albertsons with a gun in plain sight, but I have glimpsed quite a few guns idly resting, like a map or some other quotidian object, on the dashboard of a car. People also talk about guns casually and often, the way people in New York talk about long workdays and people in L.A. talk about yoga classes. My boyfriend\u2019s father\u2019s girlfriend, a sixtysomething former stewardess who lives in Jackson Hole, tells me she keeps a pistol in her car because she often drives long stretches, crisscrossing her way between Wyoming and Arizona. Another woman I befriended, a quirky, devoutly Christian two-time divorc\u00e9e in her fifties, takes her teenage son to the shooting range on weekends instead of to the movies. Leaving a sporting-goods store one evening, I pass a young couple with a yellow Labrador. \u201cThank you, thank you, thank you!\u201d squeals the woman, who has frosted pink lipstick and a blond ponytail snaking down her back. \u201cThis is for my birthday, right?\u201d She\u2019s carrying a large box containing a shotgun. As Lindsay McCrum, a photographer who published the bluntly titled book Chicks With Guns, has said: \u201cWhen you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But that’s not Soldier Of Fortune \u00a0<\/em>It’s Elle<\/em>. And I\u00a0can not<\/em> remember a time when\u00a0Elle\u00a0<\/em>would have done anything but sniff with horror at the thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can remember a time when Soldier Of Fortune might have run a piece on a latte-drinking liberal woman, scared by some close calls with crime\u00a0opted to buy a gun: More than once [while living in Los Angeles] I called 911. What\u2019s bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25857"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25859,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25857\/revisions\/25859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}