All-American Shooting

When bullets flew past my two-year-old son last fall in New York, I didn't think about anything but throwing my body around him. I was four months pregnant.

The shooting happened before dusk on a Brownstone-lined block on a lovely Meg Ryan New York Autumn Day. I was sitting on the stoop of our Clinton Hill rental with two of our friends. My son was on the sidewalk amusing us by (incorrectly) counting the cars on his magnetic train set while my husband hovered over him.

Kids played on scooters down the street. A few minutes before, our neighbors had unloaded their toddler and baby and groceries from a collapsable wagon and schlepped them all into their vestibule with impressive coordination. The dad gestured to my pregnant stomach and said “Just you wait!”

When we heard the gunshots from around the corner, we thought they were pops from firecrackers. Then a teenage boy I later learned was named Jaden Turnage rounded the corner. He was terrified. He locked eyes with me as he bolted past, frantic. Then the pops got louder. Then a second person ran toward us, holding a handgun in his right hand. As he passed us the gun was three feet from my son’s head.

I shrieked my son’s name at my husband who took a moment to register what was happening. In an instant, the distance between the stoop where I sat and the sidewalk where my child was playing felt so enormous they might have existed in different realms.

There is a common phenomenon in dreams when the dreamer imagines herself walking through invisible muck, feet trudging with agonizing slowness as time bends and everything gets prolonged and loopy. This is what happened in the time it took for my husband to grab our son, run to the stoop, climb the stairs, and enter the building. He later chastised me for putting my body between them and the gunman, setting a pick, until they were inside the house. I did not remember doing this until days later. I know he would have done the same thing.

I called the police and said there was a man firing a gun on our street, chasing someone in a grey, long-sleeved shirt. I later learned Jaden Turnage was shot in the chest and killed just feet from where we stood. He was sixteen years old.

Jaden Turnage’s uncle told the New York Daily News: “He was a loving kid who loved to play basketball. He was a normal teenager, an average 16-year-old who liked to hang out with his friends. He was never in any trouble. A lot of things happen like this for no apparent reason.”

This did not have to happen. The weapon that killed Jaden was not an assault rifle. It was a small, easily concealable handgun. The shooter carried it for blocks before firing. If my husband or I or our friends had a gun (ha), we would not have known what or whom to shoot. If Jaden had a gun and tried to return fire while running, any of the rest of us could have been hit.

Open carry laws are psychotic, murderous fantasies that are now codified into law. That a childish John Wayne myth of “good guys with guns” persists after mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde where armed security guards and entire police units were powerless to stop killings would be baffling if it weren’t so typically American. So long as the NRA has a stranglehold on our elected politicians and the Federalist Society controls the Supreme Court, the will of the people to survive is an adorable, easily dismissed inconvenience.

Today I'm thinking about the look of terror on my son's face as I screamed his name. I’m thinking of the remarkable grace of our friends who helped us pretend everything was okay as we gave our son dinner and put him to bed, laughing with him about the “loud man.” I’m thinking about the stranger in the West Village who helped me to my feet when I hit the ground a week later after a car backfired. Mostly, I’m thinking about Jaden Turnage and his family. And I’m thinking about how Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and credibly accused rapist Brett Kavanaugh never have to know the anguish anyone in that scenario faced.

The sickening truth remains: For the majority of United States Representatives and Supreme Court Justices, the most upsetting part of this story is when a fetus briefly got in the way.