Artwork by Candice Evers
I never expected to search for a “female-friendly shotgun.” Or to end up matching with a Mossberg Maverick 88: a $300, 12-gauge, pump-action made in Texas, just like me. Then again, I never expected America to get this spooky.
I had made it to middle age as a Black woman, gun-free, armed only with a 16-year-old tortoiseshell cat. My San Francisco studio had locks, latches, and a shrieking alarm system: Iggy Obama Pop’s startled meows, often triggered when I was deep in REM.
Then last year’s election season descended. By September, the Wall Street Journal ran a headline: “The Most Surprising New Gun Owners Are U.S. Liberals.” I rolled my eyes. Man-bites-dog nonsense, I thought. Because everyone knows Republicans keep guns in their homes and call them “members of the family” at more than twice the rate of Democrats, and more often than Independents (who clock in at 29%, says Gallup). The Rupert Murdoch-controlled newspaper was obviously tripping over “Armed Liberal America.”
Come October, something in me shifted when one presidential candidate suggested that her Secret Service detail wasn’t enough, so she had a Glock! I thought of the other, that July, dodging an assassination solo—with the Secret Service stumbling in after. Even bodyguards aren’t enough, I began thinking as the election polls darkened, tilting toward the guy calling my profession and party “enemies.” Suddenly, “Good Trouble” tote bags and “America WTF?” protest signs felt like flimsy shields.
Fear took hold of me. What if I stumbled into a street battle—maybe a showdown between a well-regulated militia, tech bros with 3-D printed ghost guns, Confederate cosplayers, plus robot dogs unleashed by the Insurrection Act and mounted with MP5 submachine guns?
“A word of advice for that situation,” my old newsroom buddy, Nate, told me over the phone. “Flee.”
I tried discussing civil war paranoia with my therapist, yet we mostly circled back to how “Little Keli” didn’t get her needs met—for attention or the space to express her feelings. I guess it’s progress that Big Keli can put her robot dog anxieties into words now.
I’m from the “Come and Take It” republic. (The ‘it’ was a cannon Texas rebels wouldn’t give up to the 1830s Mexican government.) Modern Texas has more guns than any other state, so odds are some of us first met firearms as kids. I was 7 when I found one tucked under my godmother’s bed pillow.
She lived by Martin Luther King Drive, in San Antonio. The simple house she shared with a Baptist deacon doubled as free-range daycare for me and the neighborhood foster kids. Trained in the Tooth Fairy arts, I naturally looked under every pillow in every room. One day, ravaging indoors with a child posse, I found a barely-veiled, snub-nose revolver. The paper bag it was stored in, softened by pillow pressure, didn’t even crinkle; it just puffed up a cloud of dander. For an unattended child, unbagging this new prop was like discovering a forbidden apple turnover wrapped in wax paper.
“Oooh let me see,” said one of my bold companions, as they tried to steal my turn.
“Nuh uh. I found it,” I said.
I curled my thin back over the bed’s polyester blanket to block the seeker and hold my place. I gloved the wood-grip hard against my stomach, and slowly stretched my pointer finger toward the trigger like a snail reaching for a dead leaf.
Then: “Maybe the candy’s under the bed?” another kid suggested.
We’d been tearing the room apart for Kit Kats and Twix—eventually discovered underneath the bed, deep in the kingdom of dust bunnies. I returned the gun to its pillow where it could continue dreaming, most likely, of another Texas rebellion.
My adopted home, California, has the nation’s strongest gun laws. But even here, the written firearm test is so easy that a bullet could pass it. There’s no explicit question about why you would want a gun. It’s assumed you’re buying it for duck hunting or home defense. I’ve thought of a more fantastical reason: infiltrating the “Sons of Guns” crowd by joining the National Rifle Association, then leading gun reform from the inside. Imagine what the country’s biggest gun lobby might do with more Democrats involved? This bluer NRA might advocate for universal background checks, renew a federal assault weapons ban, fight for a national red flag law to keep guns from violent jackasses and the mentally ill… But let’s be real: if Democrats ran the NRA, they’d just make every gun come with a trigger warning.
Take my deep-blue California city: Gun shops are banned, but gun violence is a moving target—sometimes more, sometimes less. The San Francisco police update a crime dashboard, which some of us check like it’s the weather. Guns travel. So many flow illegally from the U.S. to Mexico, it’s called America’s Iron River. No surprise, then, that an hour away from my gun-sale-banning city, there’s a shop that locks its glass door after every customer enters. They check your ID. Heavy metal plays like the soundtrack of a first-person shooter game. Long guns decorate the walls. Short guns gleam in a display case like bloodthirsty jewelry.
One guy, ruddy-cheeked above his beard, tried to sell me a lady handgun—compact, with a rose-gold handle, and heavily promoted by a champion female shooter. It was the color of Coco Chanel’s perfume, except this one dispensed scent and death. Still, that beautiful weapon couldn’t compare to a firearm nearly as long as a cello, its ch-chk click sounding like a final warning.
After the 10-day waiting period, my circle greeted my new shotgun with side-eye and jokes.
“Can your cat pull the trigger?” asked my emergency contact, Houman.
“Are you going to shoot me?” my boyfriend Reza asked, smirking. He’s a gun owner himself, but he rarely resists the chance to question my seriousness.
“Isn’t buying this weapon contributing to America’s gun violence problem?” asked my conscience. This is what it sounds like when personal anxieties collide with political ideals.
One Wall Street Journal commenter back in 2024 mocked the liberal gun buyer as “a chicken supporting KFC.” To them, I’m a hypocrite. My case for strong gun laws gets deep-fried the second I start craving a Sig Sauer.
Sometimes I justify myself with what Oakland rapper and filmmaker Boots Riley once said during a live storytelling event: “fishing villages write fishing songs.” We are a gun nation. With 4% of the world’s population, America holds 46% of civilian-owned firearms. Rifles and muskets attended our first Thanksgiving. (Whether turkey was actually there is a matter of debate.) Our national anthem is about a smoky battle lit by gunpowder’s red glare. Maybe I haven’t betrayed a Democratic push for stricter laws. Maybe now I’m in harmony with something intrinsic to America.
These justifications never fly with my friends who live nonviolence year-round, not just on MLK Day. “Surprise!” I tell them. “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had armed guards during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and applied for a gun permit.” His views grew more Gandhian afterward, sure, but not everyone in the Civil Rights Movement went unarmed like King.
We forget: outside the marches, sit-ins, and speeches, activists turned to guns for their everyday self-defense. Daisy Bates, the NAACP leader who protected the Little Rock Nine and was the only invited female speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, once wrote to NAACP lawyer (and future Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall about her pistol, promising to “keep ‘Old Betsy’ well-oiled.” For the firebombings. And for the roadside bigots.
There’s a justice league of Black icons—Bates, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black Panthers—all of them comfortable with the safety off. NAACP cofounder, anti-lynching activist, and journalist Ida B. Wells put it plainly: “The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.”
Wells’ words echoed in my mind when I saw this stat: After George Floyd’s murder, Black women led a national gun rush from 2020 to 2022. (In 2021 alone, the sisterhood increased its firepower by 87%.) Because Black women are the most loyal Democratic voters, I have to imagine they wrestled with the same contradictions that I do.
“Sometimes peace needs protection,” I tried telling one self-proclaimed militant pacifist, a white neighbor who shook his head as he walked away, leaving me thinking what an oxymoron that label is—like “jumbo shrimp” or “eco-friendly plastic.”
Still, am I entirely at peace with my decision? Peace is probably not in my 2025-2028 astrology chart.
Now that I’m strapped up, I finally get that Tina Turner lyric—I’ve been thinking of my own protection. It scares me to feel this way.
A few Bay Area women—gunless for now—have asked me to take them to the range. I’d hate for their first shot to be with my budget pump-action. It lacks a reciprocating mechanism, which means all the force slams back into your body like a donkey kick. Stabilize the butt on your pectoral muscle, and you’ll never forget the abuse. After a day with my Kickback Queen, even my bra cup feels like padded torture. I steer the gun-curious toward gentler firepower—something with less punch, more control. I’ve done the homework, testing my boyfriend’s arsenal—Glocks, a Ruger, even an AR-15—always handed over with a reminder to dial down the comedy.
Owning a gun increases your chance of getting shot alongside your family, so I treat them all like they’re loaded. I keep mine pointed in a safe direction. I never touch the trigger until I’m ready to shoot. I don’t stash it in a paper bag under a pillow, like my godmother did. I tell houseguests there’s a gun in the apartment, and no one brings kids.
Eight months with my shotgun hasn’t turned me into a fanatic yet. I still believe in greater gun control. And when it comes to stopping authoritarianism, I still put my faith in classic liberal weapons: political education, unions, and community organizing.