The daughter and I have more than once seen a film that especially moved us because each of us separately thought it related to the two of us. At the core of these movies has been a strong bond between a girl or a young woman and her father or a father figure. Others may have been entertained by the movie, but for us these films are something more. They apply directly to us. For example, we saw a holiday showing of “Les Miz” in a crowded theater where we could not sit together. I know that it might seem strange to you, but I kept thinking throughout the movie that it was in essence describing the relationship between the daughter and me. At the movie’s conclusion, we met at the back of the theater. I said that was about us. She had been thinking the same. In the midst of people streaming for the exits, we hugged tightly.

This came back to me when I read Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Noah’s father was a Swiss German who could not legally marry Noah’s mother under the South African laws where they lived, but the father tried as much as he could when Noah was small to stay in the boy’s life. Things changed, however, when Noah was thirteen. A stepfather entered his life, and the relationship with his biological father was severed. A decade later, when Noah had success and with his mother’s encouragement, he again sought out his father.

Noah had difficulty in finding this secretive man. Finally, Noah wrote a letter for his father in care of the Swiss embassy in South Africa. It was forwarded. The father responded, and Noah went to meet him again. After some hours together, the father opened a scrapbook recording everything Noah had ever done—newspaper clippings, magazine covers, club listings—from the beginning of Noah’s career through the week of their meeting. Noah says that he could hardly restrain tears. “Seeing him had reaffirmed his choosing of me. He chose to have me in his life. He chose to answer my letter. I was wanted. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

This made me choke up. These were words for the daughter and me. The daughter is adopted. In some sense we chose her, but that is misleading. An adoption agency paired us with her, and how can you know the person a six-month baby will become?

But what Noah’s words brought back to me was a night in Atlanta. I had gone there for a law school conference, and the daughter had gone along because she had never seen Atlanta. We were at a Buckhead restaurant with a Florida public defender in whose office I had spent time on a sabbatical. Back then I did not know the full extent of the daughter’s struggles with identity issues, but some were obvious. She’s adopted; she’s Asian and her mother and I are not; and it was clear from an early age that she was not a traditional girl.  I don’t remember how the topic came up that night, but at some point she said, “I know that I have always been a disappointment to you. I am not the girl you wanted.”

The daughter no doubt knew that we had asked for a girl when we were adopting. I had hoped that I would be good in helping to raise a strong, independent girl who would not simply follow a gender-defined path but would chart her own course. I knew that I wanted a girl who, at least metaphorically, would not run and throw like a girl and would not blindly follow the crowd. I got all of that (and in reality she never threw like a girl). I never had to find out my reactions to being served pretend tea out of little cups by a girl wearing a frilly dress and makeup, because she never did that.

I replied when the daughter said that she was not the person we wanted, “I never cared that you were not a girly girl. I never wanted a girly girl. From our first moment together, I always wanted you.” There is a picture of the first time I held her as she was delivered to us at JFK airport. I like the picture for the look of love and amazement I was giving her. (The picture, however, also less happily reminds me of how young and thin I once was.) I continued, “I never felt that I was a traditional boy. I always felt that I was an outsider. I loved you because you were you. I loved that you were not the same as others. I have always wanted you the way you are. I have always wanted you and that won’t change.” (It hasn’t.) I gave her a hug, and she returned it with what I believe is the strongest hug she has ever given me. And although we did not discuss it then, I also believed that she always wanted me as her dad. So, Trevor Noah’s words resonate not so much the being chose part, but for being wanted. Being wanted, is the greatest gift you can give to another human being, and the daughter and I give that to each other.

Noah went on to say something else that also applied to the daughter and me. After the lost decade, he wanted to know his father again, so he set out to interview him. He soon realized this was a mistake. He wanted a relationship, but he realized that relationships don’t come out of facts and information. “Relationships,” he wrote, “are built in the silences.” Time has to be spent together often in what seem like inconsequential ways for a true relationship.

That also resonated, but in a slightly different manner from way Noah meant. To understate it, the daughter as a tyke was never chatty. She was not the kind of girl who babbled about her day—what Suzy said or how Tommy got in trouble with the teacher. And she certainly did not like to be asked questions. That somehow always made her feel on the spot and uncomfortable. Instead, we spent hours together when I drove her to school, or we watched TV, or we were on a plane to Florida, or driving to the country, or on our way to a movie, or on our way to a tennis practice or tournament, and little was ever said. However, out of those many long silences she did occasionally say something. Without the silences, I knew, she would have said nothing. Our relationships really were built out of those silences.

So, Trevor Noah, I thank you for your book. Your story is touching and moving and eye-opening, but I especially thank you for reminding me of my bond with my daughter and some of the many reasons for it.

“Reinhardt shuddered awake, again, clawing himself up from that dream, that night of a winter field, the indolent drift of smoke amidst along the hummocked ground, the staccato line of the condemned and the children’s screams.” Luke McCallin, The Man from Berlin.

“Upholstery is often a self-taught craft.” Steve Cone, Singer Upholstery: Basics Plus.

“It is after midnight on one of those Friday nights when the guests have all gone home and the host and hostess are left in their drunkenness to try and put things right.” A.M. Homes, Music for Torching.

“These are the central questions that the great philosopher David Hume said are of unspeakable importance: How does the mind work, and beyond that why does it work in such a way and not another, and from those two considerations together, what is man’s ultimate nature?” Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature.

“In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit.

“Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

“Over the years I have found that there is one room that generates question after question and that room is the bathroom.” Linda Cobb, Talking Dirty with the Queen of Clean.

“She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.” Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life.

“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness—the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding that knowledge from the cheesy, Julie Roberts-loving masses, who no right whatsoever to be fluent in the work of Samuel (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.” David Kamp with Lawrence Levi, The Film Snob’s Dictionary.

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Donna Tartt, The Secret History.

I learned more about gun violence in our country about ten years later when I found out that somebody with whom I had played tennis and golf, with whom I had had conversations and drinks had died. He had killed himself. With a gun. This somehow impelled me to look up information that I was only partly familiar with before.

I had thought that many people died each year from gun violence, and that was right—nearly thirty-four thousand every year—with about 60,000 non-fatal firearm injuries every year. But I learned that most, not quite two-thirds of the deaths, were by suicide, and I reflected on all the impassioned debates about assault weapons, the size of magazines, armor-piercing bullets, and open carry laws and thought how little those issues were likely to affect the majority of those who die from gunshots—suicides. Mass shootings, as has happened yet again, deservedly get widespread attention with almost always futile pleas that the government should do something to help prevent them, but I learned that these are only a blip in the homicides by firearms each year, and the more common killings seldom get much national attention.  My intuition was correct that handguns, not rifles, were the real issue for most murders. About seventy percent of all homicides are committed by people wielding handguns. And,yes, we are violent with our guns. America’s firearms homicide rate is more than twenty-five times the average of other developed countries.

All these thoughts about rifles and pistols came back because of a recent weekend I spent with guns, many, many guns. I have a friend—let’s call him Al–who has a firearms collection. Al does not fit my preconceptions of a gun nut. He is a corporate executive who was raised in New York City and has lived for a long time on the west side of Manhattan. He is a liberal. He is anti-Trump, and his wife is even more so. But he owns a lot of guns.

He is quick to say that his gun collection stems from his relationship with his father, who fought in World War II. I don’t know his full story, but I have the feeling that he returned without his full health. He did teach Al something about guns, but he died while Al was a teenager. Al says, with a smile, that perhaps he should see a shrink, but instead he collects guns, primarily, but not exclusively, weapons from the Second World War. And it is an extensive collection. Al keeps the firearms stored in a big safe, but every so often he displays them on racks in his basement, which takes him several hours to set up. He did it recently for me, the spouse, the daughter, a nephew, and the nephew’s husband.

There were single-action revolvers and double-action revolvers. There were semi-automatic pistols, including a Glock. There were American and German rifles from WWII. He had semi-automatic rifles, some of which could become fully automatic. He had other machine guns; I think there were eighteen in total, for which he needed special permits that required him to be fingerprinted eighteen times.

He collected only weapons in mint condition, and the wood of the stocks shone and the metal was all oiled and burnished. Frankly, putting aside their lethal purpose, many were beautiful.

Al was incredibly knowledgeable about each of the firearms and was patient in answering our questions, which no doubt were often naïve. But we were there not just to learn about the firearms, but to shoot some of them. We loaded a few into Al’s SUV and drove to a field with a picnic table. We moved the table to a bottom of a slight incline. We set up bottles and cans up the hill. Although to a marksman they may not have been far away, it seemed quite a distance to me. Al showed us how to load the magazine for a .22 target pistol. Al gave us stern, but friendly, instruction in safety and how to fire the gun. And one by one we did. The spouse missed everything, as did the nephew and husband. The daughter, however, who had always wanted to shoot a handgun and was now getting her first chance, hit one of the targets. That made me happy. I, too, hit a target. That made me happy, but pissed off the daughter a bit. No competition here!

We moved on to a larger handgun, with similar results. Then there was a rifle. Only the daughter and I wanted to shoot it. She hit something, and so did I.            We then scoured the site for spent cartridges, packed up, and headed to Al’s home so that he could lock up the guns in his safe.

I felt I had learned something important that day besides that I still liked firing a gun and occasionally could hit a target. I already knew Al believed he had right to his gun collection, but in talking to Al that day I realized that this right to him was not like other Constitutional rights, such as the right to speak freely or have a jury trial. Those other rights, as important as they are, are for the public functioning of the country. His right to own a gun was something more personal, even something intimate. It went to his identity. Without those guns he was not the same person. That feeling for him no doubt has complex roots, but it is real and sincere. And I suspect that many other gun owners feel something similar to what Al feels.

Al, however, may also have beliefs that aren’t shared by the others. He supports universal background checks and other rules that will improve gun safety. He does not see why people should be allowed to carry guns openly. He thinks it is ok that he has been fingerprinted eighteen times. He has a right to his guns, but society has a right to try to make sure that guns are not misused.

And for me, it was a satisfying day. I only wished that I had hit more targets.

And I continue to despair that we will find a way to lessen our gun violence.

My law school teaching brought me into few intersections with guns except for the occasional case or statute I taught that involved firearms. Then, about fifteen years ago, while still an academic, I went to Israel with others on a fellowship to study terrorism. As part of this junket, we were taken to various police and military installations, and, of course, there were guns. At one of them, after a tremendous display of marksmanship by those trained for hostage situations, our group was taken to a range and, after brief instruction, given automatic pistols to fire at targets. I felt quite comfortable firing off some rounds and was told that I had done quite well. I never saw the target, and the praise may have been given to all us, but I prefer to believe that the remarks to me were right on.) I enjoyed the experience, and a picture of me aiming the pistol hangs in the passageway to my bedroom.

The sight of guns, however, was not limited to military installations. Armed forces personnel were carrying rifles almost everywhere we went. Buying gum at a highway rest stop, I found I was standing behind one rifle in the queue and in front of another. Military people were carrying guns walking down the streets of Tel Aviv, which is where I saw one of my favorite Israeli sights. A woman in an army uniform was on a corner talking with a colleague. She had a rifle slung over one shoulder, and over her other shoulder was slung the biggest, reddest purse I have ever seen. The need for all this seemed obvious, and after a little adjustment, I hardly noticed this open display of weaponry. A normal society and many visible firearms were not incompatible. But even so, there were fetters on these military weapons. Security checkpoints were almost everywhere, and the military personnel often had to show something, I am not sure what, to carry their rifle into an establishment.        Those of us not visibly carrying a gun also had to go through numerous security procedures.  Before walking into a grocery store, for example, I was, as was everyone else, “wanded.”  I did wonder about the efficacy of much of this.  Entering our hotel, we had to go through metal detectors but after a few days, but after a few days, we were simply waved in. I went to a restaurant and had to go through a checkpoint, where I was searched. A couple days later, I returned to that eating place (they had pork, and I was hungering for it), and the security guy asked, “Got a gun?” I replied, “No,” and without further ado, was allowed to enter.

I did not know what to make of all of this. This was a society with many visible firearms, but the guns I saw were carried by trained personnel, and there were many security checkpoints to see if unauthorized people were carrying weapons. I was led to believe that the society had little gun violence, but the connection, if any, between visible weapons, the ubiquitous security, and a low gun homicide rate was not clear to me.

My anti-gun views became modified when I bought a home in the Poconos a dozen years after I had moved on from being a public defender. A building 110 years old like this Pennsylvania house always needs work and remodeling, and this brought local plumbers, stone masons, electricians, roofers, painters, and floor refinishers into the house. They were hardworking and did good jobs. I respected them. I almost always talked with them. I liked them, and invariably they were devoted hunters. I learned not to expect any work on the house to get done on the opening day of the various hunting seasons. Many of them depended on hunting to supply a goodly proportion of the protein for their families, and in an area where wages have mostly been stagnant, a good hunting season made a difference in the family finances. These were responsible citizens who enjoyed and, to an extent, depended on their guns, and it was hard for me to think how a government that would not seem tyrannical could take their rifles and shotguns away.

Furthermore, the Pennsylvania house is located in a spot with too many deer. As a kid, it was a thrill to see a deer on a country drive because the deer population had not expanded as it has now in many parts of the country. The habitat good for deer has widened, and their predators have all but disappeared. I now see deer regularly. That seems nice, but too many deer are destructive. Of course, they regularly destroy gardens, but their huge numbers also eliminate the undergrowth in wooded areas, changing, not for the better, the life cycle of forests. The increased number of deer has helped with to spread Lyme disease, a problem of increasing proportions in many part of the country. And with larger deer herds, diseases among the deer have increased. For all these reason, I have come to conclude that it is right to increase the, as euphemism has it, harvest of the deer. That can be done in a number of ways, but a sensible way involves hunters and guns.

I began to think, “Leave rifles alone, but find ways to regulate and limit handguns.” It was handguns that had done all that horrific damage I had seen in my criminal defense days, and little hunting is done with a handgun. I tried this theory out on a young man in Pennsylvania who was moving furniture for us. He was a hunter (of course), and he politely assented that perhaps there could be more controls on handguns than rifles, but I could tell that his agreement was merely a form of politeness. He owned at least one handgun, and there was no way he was going to part with it, and certainly he felt that there should be no restrictions on him if he wanted to buy another. He knew the problems of handguns in the cities, but that was someone else’s problem. Long before Trump, I could see how his response indicated the divide in this country along city, suburban, and rural lines. He believed that he had right not only to a rifle and a shotgun, but also to a handgun. Cities were almost as foreign to him as another country, and he should not have to give up his rights to improve cities. And I thought, “Who is to say he’s wrong? How many people in the cities would be willing to give up what they see as a right to make rural lives better?”

Simon’s Bronx Primitive and Delmar’s Bad Girl illustrated the prevalence of abortions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

If the abortion rate dropped from Kate Simon’s youth, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote, and the spread of birth control was hard work that took years to have any widespread effect. Four decades after Simon and Delmar, there was still often limited discussion of birth control. In a senior class when I was in high school, for example, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without its becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, practices kept contraception as much out of sight as possible. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that actually prohibited birth control.

Many states at one time proscribed birth control, but by 1960, only a couple still had such laws, including Connecticut which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing contraception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried, and we should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too big. What could be more big brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that government once prohibited the use of birth control.

The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to find this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

It was settled, then. All had access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control.  Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortion decreases with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again will make birth-control availability more difficult.

The present administration has announced changes to the health-care rules to make getting contraception more difficult. Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The proposal now extends that exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just closely held ones. In addition, the exemption would extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley ringing the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholder’s. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex. Did anything even like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

On top of this, a person who has spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception has been appointed to the position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans. Add to this the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Remember that federal money cannot be used for abortions so that a federal defunding of Planned Parenthood will have little effect on those procedures, but it will affect the availability of contraception. (And, of course, the latest healthcare bill was put forward without a single woman on the drafting group.)

We are on a dangerous path. Many states and the federal government have put such onerous restrictions on abortion that, although a constitutional right, it is not in fact available for many women. That is a step back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk. And now we will make obtaining birth control more difficult with the result being that many women, generally poor women, will not have contraception. I suppose the good news is that we will be giving a new generation of novelists and memoirists like Delmar and Simon something to write about.

I know many families with only one, two, or three kids. Perhaps it is because in this age many couples have finally learned what previous generations did not, to use the rhythm method successfully. Or perhaps it is because passion or tenderness or intimacy dies out with modern couples as it did not a hundred years ago. But I am guessing that the prime reason is that these couples use birth control. They have found that birth control makes their lives, their relationships, their families better. Birth control should be available to all in our society.

[“Gun Confusion,” Parts I and II of which were posted on Oct. 4 and Oct. 6, will resume on Oct. 13. “Gun Confusion” is being interrupted for a reprise of this essay which once again is especially timely.]

Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were probably not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot is a working-class, New York City woman who does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

Even though it is against the law, she gets a concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

Dot and her husband Eddie cannot talk freely with each other about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in different from the way we use the term now, it is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about both childbirth and abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.“

To prevent such suicides and murders, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another, performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother already had had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

Bad Girl and Bronx Primitive indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, as were willful infant deaths. (We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it were so great the special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after being born.) One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and beyond, men, at least, believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant. Surely this ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of birth control in our modern sense of that term so that the only meaningful “birth control” available then was abortion.

Continued from last post

For a long time after my teenage years, I did not fire a gun, but as an adult I dealt with guns and saw some of their effects all too frequently. I was a public defender in New York City during what many might call the bad old days. New York City had stricter gun laws than most places which made it illegal, except in a few special circumstances, to carry or even own a handgun. I represented taxi cab drivers and bodega clerks charged with illegally possessing a handgun. I represented teenagers whose need for a gun might seem less obvious but, when I asked why they had a gun, gave the same reply as the others: “For protection.” (I recently met a woman in rural Mountainhome, PA., who carried a gun in her purse “for protection.” I found this a curious answer. For almost all of the last fifty years, I have lived in what are called “high crime neighborhoods,” and the spouse, the daughter, and I have all been the victim of crimes. I, for example, have been robbed at knifepoint twice, and the spouse has been robbed, too. I have been assaulted on the subway, and so has the daughter. I never have thought that if had been carrying a gun, I would have been “protected” from these crimes. Thus, by the time I saw the knife in the robber’s hand, it would have been too late to retrieve a gun from my pocket. If I started to try to pull out a gun, would the robber have run away? Maybe. If I had tried to pull out a gun, would I have got stabbed. Maybe.)

I also represented and saw in court many charged with the use of guns in the commission of other crimes—robberies, rapes, assaults, murder.  I heard the heart-wrenching testimony of a young woman forced to disrobe at gunpoint; the grandmother commanded to yield her purse and did so when the robber opened his coat and displayed a gun in his waistband; the child who described the argument between his parents and testified that the mother reached into a kitchen drawer, pulled out a gun, and shot his father; a father, weeping uncontrollably, testifying about identifying, at the morgue, his son, who had been killed by a gunshot after a brief midsummer argument on a Brooklyn stoop.

Like you, I had seen many acts of gun violence portrayed on the screen, many of them chilling and gut-wrenching, but this was real life, and I began to think more about the various survivors of gun violence, something that was then seldom depicted in popular culture. PTSD was just coming into the common parlance (ask me about defending Vietnam veterans), but surely those I had seen no doubt had a long-lasting effects from what guns had helped put them through. I thought about this a lot when representing a young man who, at gunpoint, had committed a degrading sexual assault on a woman and an assault on her boyfriend. My client had never been in trouble before. He had been a good high school student and a track star who had gained a scholarship to an Illinois college. He had taken care of a CEO’s children, and that executive was willing to go to bat for him. The crime was disturbing, and so was the client’s reaction to it. When discussing it, he showed no remorse, but he also showed no other emotion. His affect was completely flat. It was as if he had drifted into another world. “How would you feel if this had happened to your mother? Your sister?” In a monotone: “I guess I would not like that.”  I kept probing and found that his father had left the family when the client was three or four. A bit later he had a stepfather, and a very good one. The stepfather attended the school performances and helped with homework. He took the boy to church. He introduced him to track and attended the meets. It was a close family until the boy was twelve and the birth father broke into the home and shot the stepfather in front of the boy, who was found, blood-soaked and hugging the stepfather’s body. Learning this, I could only wonder if an act of gun violence had begot later gun violence.

These experiences made me anti-gun.

I was on my stomach with elbows propped on the ground. I could maintain the right height, or I guess “elevation” is the correct word, but I could not hold the sights steady. They moved slowly and laterally over the target. I decided that the best I could do was judge the rapidity of the movement and fire right before the bull’s-eye was in the sights. I was on the firing range at a Boy Scout camp, although I think I was only a Cub Scout, and it was the first time I had shot a real gun—it was a rifle and I assume a .22. We had received some sort of instruction, but I had learned long before from countless western and war movies and TV shows—don’t pull the trigger; squeeze it. The targets were collected, and I was eager to see how I had done.  I had scored well—very well. (Unlike in archery, where I sucked.) This was fun.

In my first and only week at a sleepaway camp, I went back to the rifle range whenever I could. I was quite pleased with my marksmanship as were the instructors. Toward the end of the week I went again to the range. This time I went wearing shoes but no socks. In those days, apparently, no respectable human being went sockless. The instructor was shocked at my cavalier dismissal of the conventional attire and said, “No one is allowed here unless they are wearing socks.” I disregarded the grammatical lapse, but I did feel anger. What did socks have to do with firing a rifle safely? I could not see the connection, and although only twelve, my emerging anti-authoritarian streak was fueled. Further, although we had been given many rules at our time at camp, this was not one of them. This guy was just making it up on spot. (Of course, maybe, there had never before been a need for such a rule since everyone else wore socks to the range.) I don’t remember whether I put socks on, but I did not go back to the range. This experience added to my doubts about my suitability for scouting and soon I left the organization. You might also say that I was ahead of my time in being offended by senseless regulations.

We did not have guns in our house growing up. Guns in those days meant hunting, and my father did not hunt. He did fish and took the family to local lakes. We used casting rods, and I still remember the thrill of a strike and the landing of what I was assured was a very large smallmouth bass. But no hunting, although this was Wisconsin, and, of course, many people went hunting for geese and ducks and deer. In autumn, I would often see a buck tied to the hood of a car as it was driven to the butcher. Deer were killed not just for the thrill of the hunt, but also to be eaten. I found the sight of the dead deer simultaneously disgusting and exhilarating, and I sometimes benefited from the deer-killing. A destination for hunters was the butcher shop attached to the grocery store where my mother clerked. The butchers turned the scraps of the deer meat into summer sausage. The butchers could not legally sell any of the hunters’ kill, but they would often give some of the venison sausage to my mother, and I would happily eat it.

I am certain that many of my friends had guns in their houses, but this was not a topic of conversation. No one bragged about their arsenal or insisted they were safer because of the firearms stashed in the basement or closet. No one owned guns as status symbols. It was just accepted that if someone in the family was a hunter, there were rifles or shotguns in the house.

One of these friends was Greg, and during a high school summer, he suggested that he, Steve, and I go out shooting. Although I had not held a rifle since my scouting days, I agreed. We went to a farm outside of town that must have been owned by a relative of Greg’s and, like cowboys in a movie, we set up bottles and cans on fence posts. Being a timid, adolescent boy, I was worried about embarrassing myself and let the others shoot first. The first targets were easy, and we moved further and further away. Finally, I felt like I could hardly see the bottle on the post. Greg and Steve missed. I took aim with the one gun we had and as the “Schlitz” I could not read but knew was there wandered in and out of the sights, I again timed my waverings as well as I could, squeezed the trigger, and saw the bottle explode.

I did not gloat. (Never have in my entire life. I swear.) But certainly my face and body showed a certain satisfaction. Greg got angry. It was his gun. He was the shooter. He had to be better at this than Steve or I. Greg fumed and pointed up at a reasonably distant tree. “If you are so good, hit that bird up there.” This was a rifle, not a shotgun, and I thought, “No way.” But I aimed and fired. The bird fell in pieces to the ground, and I felt sick to my stomach. I had senselessly killed something because of a dare, and I never wanted to shoot a gun again.

(To be continued.)

As a result of Hurricane Irma, a Florida nursing home lost power to its cooling system, and eight of the home’s residents died. A few days later, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced a new rule that nursing homes and assisted-living facilities must have generators to maintain reasonable temperatures for four days if power fails. Apparently at least some of the time, a conservative like Scott, feels that governmental regulation is a good thing, even if the regulation imposes a cost on private industry. Now, Governor Scott, can we talk about global warming?

Often when a football player injures one leg, people from the sideline help him to stand up, and the player then puts his arm around one of those helpers and the player limps off. The helping person is often, not surprisingly, much smaller than the player, and the player often can’t put much weight on the helper, and the two often have trouble syncing their walk. Instead, the teams ought to keep canes on the sidelines. The player would be able to get off the field better with a cane than with his arm around another. But I guess the cane would undercut the image of manly youthfulness, or is it youthful manliness?

A tall, young man sat down next to me on the subway. He was cradling a basketball with large letters inked onto it. I asked, “Are you any good?” When he got over his surprise that someone was speaking to him, he stated, “I’m ok.” “Are you being modest?” After a pause, “Yes, I am being humble. I play professionally.” He went on to say that he had played in Colombia, Europe, and next year in Toronto. I asked if he still had the hope of playing in the U.S., and he said, “The dream is still alive, but if I don’t make it, I am earning a good living now and enjoying life.”

On a different subway ride, the man next to me home was reading Tropic of Cancer.  I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t figure what.

Liberals have gotten one rhetorical label correct when they called them “Dreamers.”

Remember when President Trump was standing during the national anthem was his arms at his sides, and Melania whispered in his ear apparently saying that he should put his hand over his heart, which he then did?

Yet another doomsday, end-of-the world prediction has circulated recently. How many such predictions have been made in the last century or two?  In your lifetime? How many of them have been accurate?

Reading Al Franken’s latest book, Giant of the Senate, I realized that it was better being a satirist before becoming a politician than being a joke after being elected.

She saw the brace on my left wrist and asked if I had had carpal tunnel surgery. I said that it was just a sprain, but I thought that she had asked was nice. Until she went on at length about her carpal tunnel surgery. (But now I am going to have carpal tunnel surgery on my right wrist. Would you like to hear about in some detail?)