I know I perfectly fit the stereotype of someone who doesn’t understand the importance of gun culture, or how your identity is intimately connected with defending your family. I tell the story of my toy gun because I want to come clean with my gun-owning friends in the South and the West. Three days ago, a killer brought over 30 rapid-fire guns into his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and shot concert-goers outside his window on the 32nd Floor. I thought of my toy machine gun this week because of the endless debate our country has over gun control. My fate was sealed - I was to become a man of triple score words and not a marksman. Later that year, my mother threw the gun into the garbage. Within a week, I discovered my mother’s hiding place (she naively hid it in my own closet!) but at this point, I was so into scrabble, I forgot about the gun. My parents thanked my aunt for this “unique” birthday gift, but after the party, my mother hid the plastic toy gun somewhere in the house and told me that I couldn’t play with it. Maybe it was a remnant of anti-Jewish pogroms back in Russia and Poland, or the Holocaust itself, but in my family, whenever you saw your neighbors with guns, you knew it was not a good sign for the Jewish people. She was also the first non-Jew in our family, and simply unaware that I was nothing like Ralphie, dreaming of his bb gun in “A Christmas Story.” My Jewish family from Brooklyn and the Bronx were very afraid of guns. She was the most accomplished person in the room. My aunt was blonde, gorgeous, educated, and worked as a psychiatrist. It was a plastic toy machine gun that made realistic rat-a-tat sounds when you pressed the trigger, a gift from my aunt, the wife of my father’s youngest brother. The second memorable gift was so infamous that it became a running joke with my mother that has continued for decades. I could draw a line from that day i got the Scrabble set with my love of dictionaries, to becoming an English major in college, to wanting to write rather than go to law school. Soon, I was beating my mother in her own game. I immediately loved this board game, and quickly became obsessed with finding the best triple score words with the “X” tile. I remember little about the event except for two specific gifts that I received on that day, both which became legendary in my own mind. It was one of the few times both sides of my family sitting in the same room at the same time. My extended family was invited to our apartment in Queens. On my sixth birthday, my parents threw me a birthday party.
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