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By Emma Nadler
Caregiver and Psychotherapist
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A few weeks ago in Michigan, several states away from where I live in Minnesota, nine people were shot, including two children at a splash pad water park. The gunman had fired almost 30 rounds into the crowd and then ended his own life. It appeared to be a random event. This horrific trauma, which did not captivate the news cycle, is a part of our country, kids, and our playgrounds. It is now fairly common.
Many years earlier, on a perfect July afternoon in 1988, the heel of a gun rested heavily on my shoulder. The air smelled of sawdust and fresh grass, and a hint of smoke hung in the air. Some people went to Camp Birchwood for the horses. I liked the ponies, but I liked the guns more. Who needed horses—fickle, gorgeous horses, with all their trotting and the prancing—when you could brandish a rifle? I peered into the scope steadily. When I pulled the trigger, I felt that familiar jolt. The kickback punched right into me, and I liked it.
In my suburban upper-middle-class family, somehow, against all odds, I was good at shooting guns. Good and getting better, since I did it every single day. Not bad for age nine? Or not good, depending on how you look at it. I saved all my targets and mailed some home to my parents—I'm sure they were thrilled. When I asked my mom about it recently, she said, "I wasn't worried. It was a different time—there weren't a lot of mass shootings back then. It was a sport."
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A few weeks ago, in June 2024, the United States Supreme Court ruled to eliminate the ban on bump stocks, which enable a gun to fire at almost the same rate as a machine gun. This makes these rapid-fire weapons legal for personal ownership. What is the need for everyday citizens to have access to semi-automatics? This is far from sport.
At the end of camp, I removed each dusty, cream-colored target from the wall near my bunk, and placed them in between sweatshirts in my duffel for safekeeping. Once home, after saying hello to my hamster, I mounted my favorite—with close to three bullseyes—on the bulletin board above my bed.
I didn't even take that target down after my friend Ryan died. He was a brooding poet, a sweet talker, a slouchy yet magnetic sixteen-year-old who worked at the corner gas station over the summer. He always asked me how I was doing, and he waited to hear the answer. He wasn't just asking because that's something a person should do. He didn't do things only because you should, and it went both ways—he didn't stop doing things just because you shouldn't.
When I was 15 and Ryan was still alive, I walked down Kelly Avenue to visit him at Amoco as much as I could, flushed with excitement and buzzed from Parliaments. There was no one else like him, not anyone I knew, anyway. This was before I understood that there is no one else like anyone. I am now over 40 years old, and things like this have become more obvious.
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After the funeral, back at Ryan's house, his mother looked at the whole group of us, barely sophomores with dimly lit eyes. I gazed back at her briefly until I began to imagine what it might be like to be her at that moment. Then I looked away. She swung her thin arm towards Ryan's room and said, "Go ahead, take anything you want." We trounced up the stairs.
I loved Ryan, although not in a girlfriend way. I did love him in a you're-my-friend-and-sometimes-we-make-out-way. I loved him because in many ways I was him—imaginative and far too sensitive for this world.
On October 21st, when we were sophomores, Ryan was at a party at someone's house from his new school. He probably stood in a basement in a cardigan and worn-out jeans, nodding to people, leaning against the wall.
The girl's father had a gun, and the parents were not home. Someone found the gun in an unlocked case. After shooting it into the fireplace a number of times, they believed it was unloaded. Everyone else went out for smoke except Ryan and the girl. I don't know what happened next, except that maybe Ryan held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. I do know this: the gun had one bullet, and it went straight into his beautiful brain.
My friend who dated Ryan—for real—for years, and I drove to his grave in her white soft-top Jeep. Ryan's tombstone, which read Actor Poet Writer Musician and Friend, was nestled in a small cemetery in the neighborhood where he grew up, just a few miles from our homes. Once we lost Ryan, I understood viscerally, for the first time but also not the last, that some mistakes cannot be reversed. When I think back on the years surrounding his death, I remember the heaviness that permeated everything.
Mostly, I mourned Ryan alone while scribbling rambling poems in my journal. They were dark, gutted, and really depressing. Just like I was. I thought this form of expression was the best thing I had to offer, and that's how I know my sadness was enormous. For years, I missed Ryan every time I passed that Amoco gas station on the corner, which was every time I went anywhere.
When I think of Ryan now, I think mostly about his mother. As a mother of two myself, one who has major cognitive delays and medical disabilities, I can imagine what it must be like to be her, carrying this unspeakable slice of grief.
At camp, the guns I fired were so detached from destruction. Decades away from motherhood, I did not know how much of our lives are uncertain, and that any life can end in a minute—sometimes at the hands of a stranger who happened to acquire a gun. I hadn't yet met my son, or my gorgeous, wayward daughter, both of whom have made my life inconceivably more meaningful, jubilant, and honestly, terrifying. I love them so much that to lose them seems shattering. How does any parent come back from that?
When I spent those exuberant hours at the shooting range, I was nine years old, wearing matching pull-on shorts and t-shirt sets. My best friend was a hamster, and my favorite food was butter noodles. I was innocent. And Ryan was innocent, too. Just like thousands of other people who have lost their lives to gun violence. We could change this by enacting laws to support the survival of innocent citizens.
How I wish I could return to a time when bullets hit the target, and nothing else. And how I wish that every parent would talk to their kids about firearms, that every father and mother and aunt and uncle would lock their guns away. How I wish that we could live in a country that has more people than guns, instead of the other way around.
Emma Nadler is a psychotherapist, author, and speaker. Her memoir, The Unlikely Village of Eden, is a funny and hopeful memoir about learning to adapt and accept when life doesn't go to plan, redefining community, and creating your own imperfect path.
All views expressed are the author's own.
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