I read Gun Violence by Mikki Kendall in the ER.

Last month one of our assigned chapters for class from Mikki Kendall’s book Hood Feminism was called Gun Violence. The Tuesday night before we discussed Mikki Kendall’s work I found myself in the emergency room. As I sat in the crowded waiting room anxiously awaiting to find out if I was okay (I was) I wanted to pass the time, as a college student I decided to do what school work I could, resulting in my choosing to get my reading done. Each page turn increased in intensity. As I sat there I read bluntly about the true violence of guns and issues of police brutality. My mind immediately went to George Floyd and Brianna Taylor. It’s been years but I still think about their stories, and I still feel the same outrage I felt when it all happened. As Mikki Kendall’s words painted a very real picture of our world, the act of guns taking innocent lives and issues of police brutality that have still not been solved, it was as if everything around me stopped until I looked up. I looked up from my book and saw it, the very thing I was reading about, an object created for protection that evolved into a violent means of mass destruction. I saw a gun. It was fastened to the police officer’s waist and even as a white woman, I questioned if I felt safe. I was face to face with it, 15 feet away from me as the officer paced back and forth, he was speaking to these two older women, one was in a pink blouse. I started listening, with a gun in such a clear view and Mikki Kendall’s words filling my mind, I became curious. He was asking these ladies about what had happened at the house. He asked them about a man, asking when he had left the house. And yet again I thought of Mikki Kendall, I thought of her book, the stories of domestic abuse, gun violence in domestic abuse, was this a case where these two women were abused? Did they fear for their lives like she once did? Were they bruised and battered? They didn’t seem to have any pressing injuries from what I could tell but abuse can be hidden, marks and scars can be covered, and the psychological aspect of abuse cannot be seen from the outside. I saw all the sick people around me, the frat guy who broke his pinky and kept talking about South Park, and then he said if he didn’t get seen soon he would “shoot up the place”. He was obviously joking but it wasn’t funny. I thought about the lives in that waiting room and how one wrong move could kill us all. Gun violence is real, I fear guns but I also feel safe with guns. It’s a means of protection yet protection has just become destruction vs destruction. You’re protected by a gun yet it protects you by killing someone. I worry about my future children, will they live in a world where six-year-olds get shot at school? Will gun violence ever face real reform or will the people in power just keep pretending to care. We say we support change yet all we see is the NRA, a money pit dedicated to protecting the items ready to kill our kids, our friends, and our minority populations. And when children die at school we invest in bulletproof backpacks instead of outlawing the weapons used to kill them. In issues of police brutality, it is oftentimes that the people using their guns for ”protection” aren’t the ones who need to be protected. In the many instances of police brutality, it is the ones who lie there dead that were never really a threat to begin with. I read Gun Violence by Mikki Kendall in the ER, I will never look at guns the same.