Roxane Gay Presents: Stand Your Ground

In this fifth and final installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist delivers her own bold and deeply personal exploration of gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective.

In the early 1990s, when she first heard Aerosmith’s hit song “Janie’s Got a Gun,” about a young, sexually abused girl who gets her hands on a gun and can finally avenge herself, Roxane Gay wondered, “if I were facing a flesh and blood person with the cool of a gun’s grip against the palm of my warm hand, would I actually be able to pull the trigger?”  

So begins a fearless and thought-provoking meditation by a woman who has “no fondness for guns” but nonetheless owns one. Gay lays bare the facts along with her experiences, exploring the uniquely American phenomenon of contemporary gun culture; the horrifying statistics that show the scope of gun violence; the gun industry’s eagerness to target women; the Second Amendment and who is and is not served by it; and what it means to stand one’s ground.

Through it all, she tries to reconcile her feminism with gun ownership and makes it clear that while she has joined the ranks of American gun owners, she is not among the converted: “If I had to give up gun ownership to make the world safer, to eradicate all gun violence, I would do so in a heartbeat. Individual rights shouldn’t supersede the greater good. Our safety should not be held hostage by political greed and indifference and impotence. The Second Amendment is not, in fact, sacrosanct—it is a law, written by flawed men, and it should be as subject to change as it is to interpretation.

“A gun is a tool,” she writes, “nothing more and nothing less, but I know how to use that tool. I know how to use it quite well, and I will only get better. I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers.”