My father.

When I was born, my father was a policeman in our small suburban town just a little ways north of New York City. Several years later, he opened a gun supply store, and his main clients were other first responders and sportsmen like himself. My brother and I used to sit on the floor behind the display cases, making "sculptures" out of used bullet casings and pretending we knew how to answer the customers' questions. Sometimes, my father took us to the shooting range and taught us how to aim and fire, how to clean guns, how to assemble and disassemble them. I still remember the small, silvery Colt handgun, the weight and coolness of it, and my pride when I hit a bulls eye on my very first try. My father, who owned that Colt and many other firearms, was a self-identified conservative, a gun collector, and a member of the NRA. He proudly displayed a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of his beat-up black Pathfinder. At the same time, he made sure to hang a massive American flag from our front porch every Fourth of July - the biggest on the block. This was because my father was nothing if not a patriot.

My father was what some today might refer to as a "gun nut". But he was also the kindest, gentlest man I knew. When I was little, he would wait in the car to drive me home after school, always holding a favorite snack - usually a chocolate croissant from a local bakery and an Arizona iced tea. When I got older, he would often leave notes saying "I love you," or pieces of paper with a simple heart drawing, on my steering wheel to find when I left school in the afternoons. In the days after he died, we discovered that he had purchased and personally delivered a huge package of toys to the local children's hospital. We found letters between him and leaders of Native American reservations in the Dakotas, where he had been quietly donating warm clothes and boots for years. He was so beloved in our town that even the baristas at the local Starbucks were brokenhearted at his death, and they all signed a coffee cup - his usual Venti - to be buried with him.

In the aftermath of Newtown, with the memories of my father's life and death still an integral part of my daily existence, I struggle with the question of how he would have reacted to the slaughter of twenty first-graders, six educators, and a mother in a town forty-five minutes away from where he raised his own children. He died about a year and a half after the Columbine massacre, and I still remember his quiet grief as we watched the once-unthinkable (now all-too-familiar) scenes of chaos and anguish as students streamed from the school with their hands above their heads. My father may have loved guns, but he loved them at a time when we couldn't imagine the many young men who would exploit their access to them to massacre innocent people in schools; in universities; in movie theaters; in malls; in museums; and at political meet-and-greet events.

My father was a staunch defender of the Second Amendment. I would not be surprised if he thought that guns in homes, or more armed guards in schools, were part of the solution. We would have debated these ideas rationally and calmly, because my father was not prone to rash anger or jumping to conclusions.

While I can never know for sure, I can make a choice. And I choose to believe that my father would not have reacted like Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, whose resistance to a renewed assault weapons ban is based, at least in part, on the fact that they are "fun" - the "Ferrari" of firearms. Or like this man who commented on an Avon Patch piece:

I'm real sorry that this happened, I'm not the cause of it and it makes me cry as much as the next guy. To tell you the truth I will never give up my guns or clips. I don't have any assault weapons. I do have a couple semi automatic handguns. One with a high capacity clip. I'm not giving up my guns just to make you feel good at night just not going to happen.

My father was a father first, a father above all. He could not have seen the faces of those twenty Newtown children without thinking of his own babies, whom he always tried so hard to protect. Even if he thought assault weapons and high capacity clips were cool, he would never have placed his own fun above the well-being of the nation he loved. He would never have abrogated responsibility like the men quoted above - he would never have rested on the idea that he didn't pull the trigger, and thus it was not his problem. Because, again, he was a patriot. My father tried hard to be selfless, and yes, if it made the parents in this country "feel good at night" to know that ordinary citizens could not access military-style weapons, then he would have been willing to give them up if he owned or sold them. He would have made that personal sacrifice for the greater good. This is how I choose to remember him.