Catherine Green

It’s important to note, in this story, that the gun never went off. The gun may not have been loaded. The gun may have even been a fake. All it needed to do was convince me that he could kill me at any moment. Guns do that better than anything. This crime was reported—even prosecuted—but the man went free. He can buy a gun whenever he wants to.

This crime doesn’t show up in gun violence statistics. Those only cover shootings. I think it’s important to remember, in our conversation about firearms, how much damage they can do without ever being fired.

This next story of an unfired gun isn’t nearly as traumatic but traumatic nonetheless:

It was the early 1980s and I was 12 or 13, reading a magazine in my dentist’s waiting room in Brooklyn. I suddenly became aware of someone standing in front of me just as I heard another patient say “Oh my god.”

I looked up and into the barrel of a 9mm Browning, cocked. There were about two or three other patients in the waiting room. I remember thinking, “Please don't anyone try to be a hero.” We were all marched into an exam room—I was last in line and, therefore, had the pistol in my back.

The guy relieved the adults of their cash and jewelry (I kept my mouth shut about the couple hundred bucks in my pocket, meant to pay off an outstanding treatment balance for my older brother). The thief closed the door and proceeded to ransack the office for money and drugs.

Happy ending, if you can call it that: I read in the paper a month or so later that the guy killed himself when the cops finally caught up with him at the motel where he was living (which is why I know the pistol make and caliber). He’d robbed a dozen or so doctors and dentists (and their patients) over a few weeks after serving  prison time for similar robberies.

I spent some time researching the stats and claims Nolan cited in the lightly edited email below; you can follow the links I’ve added throughout to get a little more background.

I'm actually not Native. I'm black. But I am fighting for Native people (as well as my own) because their voice is so small and they are constantly silenced.

I've always considered myself to be well versed as far as U.S. and Native history but until recently I didn't know how much I didn't know. I knew America inflicted a genocide on Native people but I had no idea how devastating that genocide was.

One in 3 Native women are raped in their lifetime. Native kids have PTSD rates as high as Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Native children are kidnapped from their homes and placed in the care of white families. Sometimes the kids never see their birth parents again.

As a black man I have been aware of what this nation is still doing to my people. The death by cop situation tears me up inside. But what's crazy is Native people are killed by cops on average more than we are.

One of the most heartbreaking stories was a woman by the name of Sarah Lee Circle Bear. She had two kids and was pregnant. She was jailed for a bond violation. She died in prison after she was in visible pain and was complaining to jail officers because of serious discomfort.

There are over 1,000 missing or murdered Native women in the U.S. and Canada.

Here I’ll jump in, just to clarify: in 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said a review of police files had found more than 1,000 cases of murdered aboriginal women dating back 30 years, according to the Toronto Star. That figure seemed to reflect only Canada’s stats.

Meanwhile, Lauren Chief Elk, co-founder of the Save Wiyabi Project, which independently mapped disappearances of indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada, told Al Jazeera America last year her project had tracked more than 1,000 deaths and disappearances since 2012. (I reached out to the organization to find out the status of the crowdsourced map more than a week ago, but haven’t heard back; the group’s Facebook page indicates the map URL should be http://missingsisters.crowdmap.com/, but that map is either offline or publicly inaccessible.)

So it’s not totally clear to me whether the 1,000 figure refers to Canada alone or the U.S. and Canada together, or in what time frame. The confusion there is probably part of the problem; 2014 was the first time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had compiled that data across police forces up north.

Meanwhile, when the U.S. Department of Justice made tribal communities a priority (on paper, at least) in 2009, improving access to crime databases was outlined as a key goal. According to an agency update in December, that was meant to boost autonomy for tribal leaders in law enforcement. “It is our belief, informed by experience, that challenges faced by tribes are generally best met by tribal solutions,” Tracy Toulou, director of the Office of Tribal Justice, said before a Senate committee.

Though Toulou acknowledged “astonishingly high rates of violence” in tribal communities, I wasn’t able to find specific numbers on the DOJ’s site about murdered and missing women.

Back to Nolan’s email:

And sometimes Native girls and women are lost to sex trafficking.

The hell Native people have to go through is unfathomable. 100 million of their people have died since Europeans came to this North and South America. Sadly that number is still growing.

I had never seen a real gun before in my life, and the Saturday night special he was pointing at me looked too small to be real. I threw a five dollar bill at him and while he was distracted I ran out of my second-floor apartment and down the stairs. The burglar shot me in the back, leaving a .38 bullet between my second and third vertebrae of my spine, paralyzing me from the chest down for the rest of my life.

I was in the ICU of Boston City Hospital a couple of days after the bullet had been surgically removed when two reporters from the Boston Globe came to interview me. Still on a high dose of morphine, I spoke openly about the incident, without thinking of the consequences of what I said. A day later the Boston Globe published a long interview with me on page three, including quotes about being gay. Since most of my family did not know this, I was outed to the world by the newspaper. Ten years later, J. Anthony Lukas would write about this burglary and hate-crime in his Pulitzer-winning book Common Ground.

It is now almost 40 years to the day since that fateful encounter with a gun, and I am profoundly disappointed that gun violence has greatly increased since then [CG note: Research indicates the rates of non-fatal firearm crime and firearm homicides have in fact fallen since 1993], and that no progress in mitigating this epidemic seems possible. While most media focus on the lives lost to gun violence in America, little attention is paid to the thousands of survivors.

I am now 63, retired in Davis, California, alone as usual, and in much neuropathic pain, among other complications of having lived this long as a paraplegic.