Guns in Frail Hands
By DALE RUSSAKOFF
NYT
She is a 90-year-old widow with mild Alzheimer’s disease, and her son is begging her, for safety’s sake, to give up something she considers essential to her independence and sense of control.
“You can’t take it away from me,” she told him recently. “It’s all I’ve got.”
This may sound like a classic confrontation with an elderly mother who won’t give up her car. But it’s in fact about a loaded .38-caliber handgun that she keeps wrapped in a scarf in her top dresser drawer in a Southern California retirement community.
She says she needs it for protection. Her son is afraid she will get angry or confused and shoot someone — possibly him. “I’d rather eat barbed wire than deal with this,” said her son, Chuck, who asked that his last name not be used to avoid drawing the retirement community into his dispute with his mother.
Like cars, guns symbolize independence and individualism to many Americans. In states where gun ownership is a way of life, the elderly population is as likely as anyone to be armed and, in the view of many family members and professionals who care for them, possibly dangerous.
(More here.)
NYT
She is a 90-year-old widow with mild Alzheimer’s disease, and her son is begging her, for safety’s sake, to give up something she considers essential to her independence and sense of control.
“You can’t take it away from me,” she told him recently. “It’s all I’ve got.”
This may sound like a classic confrontation with an elderly mother who won’t give up her car. But it’s in fact about a loaded .38-caliber handgun that she keeps wrapped in a scarf in her top dresser drawer in a Southern California retirement community.
She says she needs it for protection. Her son is afraid she will get angry or confused and shoot someone — possibly him. “I’d rather eat barbed wire than deal with this,” said her son, Chuck, who asked that his last name not be used to avoid drawing the retirement community into his dispute with his mother.
Like cars, guns symbolize independence and individualism to many Americans. In states where gun ownership is a way of life, the elderly population is as likely as anyone to be armed and, in the view of many family members and professionals who care for them, possibly dangerous.
(More here.)
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