By Jim Knipfel

WHEN I WAS growing up, we never, ever kept a gun in the house. Everyone else in town did, it seemed. All my friends had guns, often as early as age 11 or 12. But not us.

Gun-safety classes were offered regularly in junior high and high school, and most students signed up for them (they were a requirement if you wanted to get licensed). It wasn't at all uncommon to see kids, boys and girls alike, strolling down the school hallways with rifles. Nobody ever thought these kids were about to go on a killing spree; they just assumed (correctly) that they were on their way to class.

The simple reason for all the guns was that Green Bay was a big hunting town. Deer, duck, pheasant, bear, muskrat—each local animal had its own season, and every season most everyone went out after them.

Not us, though. And as a result of not belonging to a hunting family, I had to stay in school those two weeks in November when everyone else was off in the woods.

Since we didn't hunt and there was no crime to worry about back then, there was no solid reason to keep a gun in the house. It was probably a good thing, too, given the shape I was in when I was a teenager.

The closest we ever came to having any firearms around came after my sister got married. Her husband Bob was (and still is) an avid outdoorsman, and so maintained a small arsenal of weapons. He was always very good about the guns. He kept them locked away, and made sure in later years that his daughters (and I) never had any access to them.

The only time I ever fired a gun was in 1979, when my folks and I went to visit a friend of my dad's who lived in the woods of southern Wisconsin. Dieter was one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet. Short fellow with a red beard, a passion for trains, and lots of money. He'd built himself a log cabin near Baraboo and arranged to have an old train caboose moved onto his property.

While we were visiting him during the fall of '79, he set up some cans and handed me a .38. This, I admit, thrilled me no end. I took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger. The report was a hell of a lot louder than I expected.

Five minutes and several shots later, all the cans were still well intact, so I handed the gun back to Dieter in defeat. (For all the other things I may have done in the years that followed, I never fired another gun.)

After I handed it back to him, Dieter offered the gun to my dad, who didn't seem at all interested and waved the gun away. Despite the fact that he grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin and spent over two decades in the military, guns were never part of his makeup. He never had anything against them that I'm aware of; they just weren't his thing.

That's why I was so shocked when he told me that he was driving down to Dieter's place again, and that he was bringing a handgun back home with him. Before I could ask him why the hell he was doing such a damn fool thing, he and my mom were on their way.

I have absolutely nothing against firearms. I know several gun collectors, both here in the city and elsewhere, and they're all decent, upstanding folks who are almost obsessive when it comes to gun safety. There's even an NRA lifetime membership card in my wallet right now. (It's not mine; some guy just gave it to me years ago and I kept it.) But I'm also smart enough to know it would be idiotic of me to keep a gun around my own apartment. Something or someone (likely me) would end up dying stupidly.

That's why I worry about my dad. He's 71 now, and my mom's 68. What the hell did they need a gun now for? Were drunken biker gangs running wild in the streets of their suburb? Did they want to use it to assassinate the crows and squirrels that have found refuge in their backyard? I had no idea, and the whole prospect worried me a little bit. So on the Saturday after they returned from Dieter's, I picked up the phone and gave them a call.

I didn't want to come right out with it, so I let them get me all caught up on family business and the weather first. Then I asked them how the trip was, wondering if they'd bring it up themselves.

"Oh, we had such a nice time," my dad said. To be honest, they could've been attacked by bears during an electrical storm and he likely would've said the same thing.

"And now we have ourselves a little gun," my mom added, which seemed as good an opening as any.

"I was going to ask you about that."

"Oh, it's just an itty-bitty thing," she said.

"Yeah, but still—"

"And it's safe," my dad insisted, "The gun and the bullets won't ever be apart."

"What?" my mom asked.

"Together," my dad corrected himself. "I mean together. They won't be anywhere near each other. It's really just a tiny thing, anyway, that fires the smallest kind of bullet they make."

"Yeah," I said. "Fine. But why'd you get a gun in the first place?"

My dad took one of those deep breaths he always takes when he's about to explain something he finds unpleasant, or that he's not completely comfortable with. It was the kind of breath he always took before passing along bad news.

"Well, I'll tell you," he said, "I look around the country, at all the things that are happening these days, and it's crazy. Even over in Howard [a small town a few miles outside of Green Bay] they just had six break-ins. People just barge right into the house. And this is Green Bay, for godsakes!"

Then, as I sort of expected, the Mexican issue came up. Over the past several years, Mexicans and other minority groups have been flooding into Green Bay, and no one can quite figure out why. This has made long-term residents uneasy. Not helping matters is the fact that the local crime rate has gone up considerably.

"So if someone tries to kick their way in here," my mom said, "we'll at least have a gun with no bullets."

"We'll be able to throw it at 'em, I suppose," my dad suggested.

"That might be safer."

"Naah," he said, "believe me—I'm as afraid of that thing as it is of me. In a few weeks I probably won't even remember where I hid it."

"That's good, too."

The conversation then drifted away from guns and crime to my niece's upcoming basketball game.

In a way, I would've preferred to learn that the gun was for shooting crows, but I guess they gave me the answer I expected. Thing is, I'm not really all that worried—not really worried, anyway—that they'll end up shooting themselves or even some would-be robber. My real concern is for the safety of the television. The Packers were set to play the Vikings the next day, and believe you me, things can get pretty ugly around the house whenever that happens. o