I grew up in New Jersey, where I lived with my mother, father, and older brother. Mom, an RN, was the peacemaker in our family, and Dad, a banker, set the standards for the behavior of their two children. In August of 1964, as I was soon to enter my sophomore year at Wilson College, I finished two months working at the local Shop-Rite and went to stay with cousins at their camp on the east shore of Lake George.
One day, the phone rang – the usual three rings on the party line – and my cousin answered to the news from Mom that Dad had been shot in a bank holdup. He was still alive but in surgery. I wanted nothing more than to go home, to hug Mom, and see for myself that Dad was okay. I had to wait, though, for my aunt and uncle to arrive from New Jersey to take me home.
Dad was in the hospital, his room guarded at all times by a police officer. Dad had been shot three times: one bullet went in the side of his jaw, one hit his chest, and the third hit his back, as he had turned around after the second shot. He was on the telephone, talking to someone in a bank in New York City. Apparently, the shooter thought he was calling the police. (Actually, however, it was the woman he was talking to on the phone who called the local police).
It was only afterward that we learned why my father was still alive. The gun was .22 caliber, and the cop said the ammunition was old. Apparently, old ammunition doesn’t shatter bone but follows the bone. The first shot followed his jawline under the tongue. His mouth was a mess, raw, and had bled profusely. He had the third bullet inside him for the rest of his life, as the surgeon feared that it was too close to Dad’s heart to be removed safely. Until then, I had never seen my father even close to tears, but in the weeks following the shooting, he cried easily. It was the first time that I had ever realized that Dad was vulnerable, and that was a hard lesson to learn at age nineteen!
For some time after the shooting, a couple of FBI agents would turn up to ask Dad if he could identify his shooter. But the two men who had robbed the bank that day Dad was shot had been wearing rubber Halloween masks. There was no way he knew what they looked like. Every time that they showed Dad pictures of possible shooters, he went through more frazzled nerves.
It was then that I began to realize how helpless any human being is at the wrong end of a gun, even as strong as my father was, at that time he was just 54 years old! Then, of course, we never heard of mass shootings except occasionally among the mafia! But since Columbine, there have been so many! Every one of those human beings has been just as helpless to stop the violence as my Dad was 60 years ago! And survivors have much the same long-lasting effects as Dad – and I have had them because his experience was significant in my life.
He was never quite the same, though he lived for another 20 years. And I have thanked God many, many times since Dad died in 1984, that he lived, that I had so much more understanding of what a fine human being he was, and what a loving father he was. He died while I was in seminary, and he was so proud that I had been a teacher and was preparing to be a pastor.
I am grateful for the good that God made from a frightening time in my life and the lives of all my family. But I have also become determined to do whatever I can to keep the trauma and especially the loss of life of due to our seemingly insatiable addiction to gun violence. Surely, we do not need weapons of war in the hands of any but soldiers – and I wish we didn’t need them then! Surely, hunters and skeet or target shooters don’t need the ability to shoot off dozens of rounds. The very least we can do is to follow good sense procedures for storing firearms and especially keeping them out of the hands of children and people with violent tendencies.
