Has gun violence ever touched you or someone you knew?

[Igel]

9. Twice.

Father committed suicide in his garage a few years back. Planned and toyed with the idea for at least two months, judging from the evidence. Even replaced all the batteries in the smoke detectors and cleaned the pool an hour or two before pulling the trigger. (He kept a log of pool cleanings and wrote the date on every battery he put in any device.)

He was isolated, depressed, not in good health, and his wife was delusional with newly diagnosed *moderate* dementia. (In other words, he'd been hiding her state for years and trying to ignore it until it was impossible to overlook.)

When I was a kid the guy next door killed an acquaintance/client in the front yard of his parents' house. The guy was a drug addict and fenced burgled goods (and burgled houses himself) to pay for his addiction. There was an altercation in his front yard one night, a punch was thrown at him and he threw a slug back at the guy. (The mother was a classic nutcase of denial--her angel son didn't do the shooting, wasn't involved in drugs, and had never fenced or stolen. He was a good boy. His prints on the gun, additional ammo in his dresser, which also contained stolen stuff from neighborhood burglaries and drugs were all planted by the police who had it in for them. She couldn't even imagine how these guys had picked her front yard. Says a lot about how he got to be how he was. He went away for a long, long time. I was maybe 9 or 10 at the time, and never saw him again before I left the state.)