Recorded Books Inc. - Melancholy Accidents

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MELANCHOLY ACCIDENTS

Copyright 2016 by Peter Manseau

Melville House Publishing

46 John Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

and

8 Blackstock Mews

Islington

London N4 2BT

mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-507-0

Design by Marina Drukman

v3.1

People shoot,

but its God who delivers the bullet.

SVETLANA ALEKSIEVICH

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J UST SHORT OF THE MUZZLE of the upturned pistol that is the state of Idaho, Kootenai County is home to an adult population of around 100,000, and nearly 20,000 concealed-carry gun permits. Every year, county officials process so many new requests from citizens hoping to wear firearms hidden under jackets, slung on their hips, or strapped to their ankles, that you might think this picturesque community of mountains, lakes, and backcountry was a lawless wasteland, rather than a popular destination for outdoor sports enthusiasts. Over the past decade, the number of annual concealed-carry permit applications has increased tenfold, from fewer than 300 in 2007 to more than 3,000 in 2015. The sheriffs office has limited the number of hours its lobby is open for other business. The paperwork involved in arming the public simply takes up too much time.

Few Kootenai residents would want it any other way. Even the County Commissioner has a concealed-weapons permit. He wears his holstered sidearm during town meetings, because, he once explained, You just never know when something is going to happen.

A twenty-nine-year-old mother spending the holidays in the county in 2014 must have felt similarly. As she and her two-year-old son walked the aisles of the Walmart Supercenter a few miles west of Coeur dAlene National Forest just before New Years Eve, she kept her legally concealed 9mm Smith and Wesson semiautomatic in a purse designed for that purpose, within a zippered pocket on the side of a leather shoulder bag almost indistinguishable from many available in the womens accessories section of the store.

A Christmas gift from her husband, the concealed-carry purse was a $100 urban shoulder bag, made by an Illinois company called Gun Toten Mamas. According to the manufacturers site, the bag can hold a weapon ranging in size from a snub-nosed revolver to a 1911 Commander, along with a water bottle or book, maps, wallet, and munchies. Beneath the front flap, a six-pocket organizer provides ample room for pens, papers, cell phone, keys, loose change, iPOD, BlackBerry, etc. A loaded handgun, in other words, was just one more tool for the modern mom on the go.

As a Gun Toten Mamas slogan put it, to be armed and fashionable allowed women to Take control in style. And not to worry if your new handbags leather seemed a bit stiff; it would become butter soft within weeks of use.

This particular gun purse never had that chance. As mother and child made their way through Walmart, the toddler unzipped the gun pocket and reached inside. He drew the 9mm out of its Velcroed holster, pointed it up from his seat in the shopping cart, and fired at his mother from point-blank range.

Speaking soon after, local law enforcement expressed sympathy, but stopped short of surprise. Its pretty common around here, a lieutenant at the sheriffs office said. A lot of people carry loaded guns.

Comments from the dead womans family likewise lent the shooting an air of inevitability. They lived their lives around weapons, the mothers loved ones explained. They were veterans of rifle clubs and hunting trips, so blasts like those that rang through the supercenter on a Tuesday morning were not usually cause for alarm; they echoed naturally through their days.

Were gun people, her father-in-law said.

Though it was just one of the more than 1,500 accidental gun deaths to occur in America that year, the December 2014 incident at the Kootenai County Walmart instantly received international attention. Reports in the United Kingdom highlighted Idaho state legislation that expanded areas where concealed weapons would be allowed. In France, journalists reminded readers of the nearly 300 million guns in the United States. An Australian columnist noted that such numbers make gun accidents common, even though adult victims of mishaps involving toddlers remained rare. Normally when they handle a gun, he wrote, very young children kill themselves or other children.

Children killing adults with guns is a statistical subset small and sorrowful enough that it always receives at least local press coverage. Just three weeks earlier, an Oklahoma three-year-old had killed his mother while she changed his infant sisters diaper. And a few months before that, a nine-year-old in Arizona had killed her shooting-range instructor with an Uzi.

But something about the Idaho Walmart shooting seemed to cry out for telling and retelling, around the world and across all media. What made this story so compelling? Was it its setting, within the national ritual of the post-holiday shopping trip? Or perhaps it was the almost universal image at its core: the distracted mother hunting for deals as a curious child digs through her purse. The details, as The New York Times noted, are shatteringly ordinary. Each of themthe scene, the characters, and the perfect storm of bad judgment and misfortunecombined to give even the most basic reporting the narrative power of a carefully crafted short story.

Though the facts of the shooting were recounted with an urgency typical of the Internet age, they added up to something more haunting and elusive than we jaded consumers of twenty-four-hour news usually encounter. Here was a memento mori peculiar to our culture; a sudden recognition that guns now move through the American landscape with such ubiquity that even a family stroll through Walmart can lead to a game of Russian roulette. The story suggested that the question we collectively face is not if the guns all around us will fire, but when.

In the days following the Kootenai County tragedy, the hashtag #IdahoWalmart lit up social media. With Facebook, Instagram, and especially Twitter having become the primary means by which stories of unfortunate events are shared, lamented, and disputed, tweets and status updates about the store, the state, and the weapon hit the same sad notes for weeks. As such things do, however, this singular shooting occupied the publics outrage and imagination for a short time, only to be replaced by another.

Yet the hunger for such stories remains, as does our fascination with them. #IdahoWalmart will be a distant memory by the time these words are published, but the dark shadow that guns cast on American culture will undoubtedly endure in other digital forms. When future historians sift through the collection of several hundred billion tweets Twitter has agreed to archive at the Library of Congress, scholars studying life and death in the early-twenty-first-century United States may pay particular attention to one eight-character chain among the endless online traces that will likely survive us all: #GunFail. Used most effectively by David Waldman of the website