Jet-lagged in Boston, I nurse a beer in my hotel bar and fall into conversation with a man attending an asphalt convention. After I exhaust all lines of inquiry about asphalt — “it’s like pie-crust, you’ve gotta get the recipe right” — talk turns to guns.
He’s ex-military and tells me he keeps a weapon right by his bed. But what if you forgot your friend was staying and you… “Wouldn’t happen.” He asks what I’d do if an intruder broke in while I slept: “You’re just a little ol’ woman, and your husband can’t protect you.” I have no answer to this. So I try to visualise a loaded gun next to my phone charger and hand cream. Would I feel safer?
Back home in Seattle, this man has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “Think how useful I’d be in England, when you have all these stabbings.” He has read online that British cities are far more dangerous than any in the US, so I wearily google homicide rates and show him London: 1.1 per 100,000.
OK, I say, let’s do your capital city. “No, no, don’t do DC, it’s crazy!” It sure is: 27.3 per 100,000. Even Seattle is 6. (Paris, Madrid and Rome are all about 1.)
He has never been to Europe, queries the crime figures, can’t compute that the key factor here might be guns. Once I’d have merely been amused by this garden-variety US exceptionalism and world-blindness, but not right now.
— Janice Turner in No, I don’t want to keep a gun by my bed