Guns, The Trophy of Machismo

When I heard a series of loud shots last night as I was cooking dinner, at first I thought it must just be kids setting off fireworks. But the wailing that followed was far too anguished to belong to goofing-off kids. When we went to investigate, we found out that a man had been shot in a house down the street from us.

This wasn't the first instance of a shooting that we'd heard about since coming to San Nicolas. Earlier this year, two guys got into a drunken fight in one of the tiny communities far out on a bumpy road from San Nicolas. They both whipped out their guns, and one of them was killed.

These instances beg the question: In a town as tiny as San Nicolas, where gangs and drugs are virtually nonexistent, what causes these shootings? The answer is pretty simple: guns.

From the stories we've heard, it seems that not so many years ago, San Nicolas was a little like the wild West. Horses were the only mode of transportation; cow paths were the only streets. There was no official law enforcement. Cowboys rode around frequenting seedy saloons, and every one of them carried a pistol.

Needless to say, owning a gun still seems to be a trophy of machismo around here. Before Davie's baseball career was prematurely terminated, he remembers how at games, his manager would go around collecting the players' pistols so that they wouldn't be tempted to use them during the game. One day, five players pulled guns out of their pockets to hand over to the manager.

It makes sense that in the campo farmers would need rifles to shoot animals once in a while. One evening Davie was hunting down a possum that had wandered into our yard, and our neighbor Henry handily ran in to fetch a rifle to shoot it with. But pistols are a different matter. Pistols are meant to kill people, not animals. And from the evidence we've seen, it seems like people around San Nicolas genuinely feel the need to carry pistols for self defense.

When we asked around about how people get all these guns, our friend the librarian told us that it's a lot easier to get a gun illegally than to get one legally. To get a gun legally, you have to take several tests to make sure you can shoot well, which probably tacks on an extra fee. So instead, most people go the illegal route, trusting that the small police force in San Nicolas will never catch their illegal purchases – which is probably true.

Here, there are the classic wild West stories of good guns triumphing over bad guys. After the shooting last night, we stood in the street with the rest of San Nicolas huddled in little groups, trying to sort out what had happened. A woman wandered up to us and told us about the time when some thieves tried to rob one of the stores in town. Their efforts were quickly thwarted when the citizens of San Nicolas whipped out their own guns and held the thieves up until the police could arrive on the scene to take the thieves away.

But I imagine that more often than not, the stories that involve guns end more like the one last night did. Speculation around town is that the motive was a business beef that the shooter had with the man he shot. Whatever the motive, the fact is that the shooter entered the house and shot the man twice – once in the face, once in the back – while the man held his baby child. The shooter escaped into the mountains and the victim was taken to the hospital in Esteli, where at least for the moment he is still living.

The fact is that shooting breeds more shooting, whatever the motives. But I hope that whether or not that baby remembers the moment that his father was shot, he will grow up and decide, with the rest of his generation, that owning a gun doesn't make you a man. Tonight, join us in saying a little prayer for that baby and his father.

Footnote: I know we just finished saying how many guns there are in San Nicolas, but I want to clarify that Davie and I also feel very safe here. Everyone in town agrees that here, this kind of shooting is always directed at a specific person against whom the shooter has a personal vendetta. Senseless mass shootings just don't happen, and even robberies are quite rare. Since everyone knows each other, it would be very hard to get away with this kind of thing. We have an extremely safe house and very good neighbors.