TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2026
This morning, I saw a news headline in my email in-box that referred to a gunman having killed some people at a library in Chico, California. My first thought was that it was probably a domestic dispute. Don’t ask me why I thought that. When the unfamiliar interrupts one’s attention to the mundane tasks of early morning, one posits that which seems immediately possible as an explanation.
Instead, it is reported that the gunamn had no known connection to the two people who were killed. News reports further claim that an 18-year-old, who allegedly had aspirations to kill many people, has been taken into custody as the suspect who committed the murders.
If these reports are accurate, it suggests hat two adults woke up yesterday morning and had not the slightest notion that they would be gunned down by a total stranger for no other reason than they were an available target on the gunman’s path to infamy. How is this not, yet once again, an instance of an unfathomable sickness in our society?
“Thought and prayers….” will predictably be recited.
“Is there a hole for me to get sick in?” sang Bob Dylan.
******
Over 30 years ago, I wrote a monologue entitled “Whose Gun,” which Jordan Jones published in an issue of BAKUNIN magazine. I reprint it now with the fraught knowledge that someone who reads it might themselves someday become a victim of the easy access, in this country, that mentally ill people have to guns. Foreknowledge is inherently granted to the literate. Foreboding contingencies, yes; but queasy anticipation is not the same as the abrupt trajectory of personal catastrophe.
I hope that all who read “Whose Gun” are spared the fate of those who were in Chico’s library, though who knows? Perhaps I, too, am sauntering toward that desolate crossroads. Why me? Why would I deserve this fate? Why should those who were murdered in a library in Chico deserve to die in that manner? The can be no sufficient memorial for this “shadowed ground.”
“Justice” is a farce of a stage play, directed by a callous manic-depressive.
WHOSE GUN
You don’t want to shoot me.
You don’t want to shoot me.
You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.
You want to shoot the man who pretended to be your father.
It’s not dying I’m afraid of
But the pain of the facelessness of it —
Your facelessness.
Your face is not one to ask questions.
You’re too numb to ask questions.
You’ve stupefied yourself.
You want me to pretend.
You imagine death simply is not —
Simply not —
The not that blends sweat and fear
Into spit on the ground —
Skin hooked into the part that can’t be buried.
You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.
You want to kill the part of me that can’t be buried.
If you could kill just that
You would be happier.
But you can’t.
No matter how often you shoot
That part won’t die.
I won’t live to see it live.
I won’t live to see it live.
It’s not me that living.
It’s not me that’s living.
That your face should be the last one I see.
That is the crime that can’t be forgiven.
That’s what makes you evil.
I hated flying in airplanes
Because I didn’t want to die next to people I never knew.
The plane slamming into the mountain’s side —
Each bullet the pilot
Knowing the engine’s on fire.
My stove. I don’t like to cook
But I’ll miss my stove.
It’s a messy stove. The dishes
Aren’t done. Sometimes I’ll come home and eat
Spaghetti sauce I made the day before
And I’ll eat it cold, forkful after forkful,
Not even warming it up.
My friends might think I’ll miss
My records or my books or my dog
Leash and its long black coil
Of leather, but I’ll miss my stove.
Imagine shooting a stove.
But you, with your fucking gun
Don’t know the difference between heating a sauce
Or boiling an egg.
A stove has a face that I’ll never forget.
The face of onions.
Brown onions.
I gave them onion names.
Uncle Double Onion. A strong one.
Strassel onion — the sound of an onion growing.
Now the onion grows with green peppers,
Mushrooms, garlic and tomato sauce.
Its name grows like a vine with gourds,
yellow, brown and orange.
You don’t want to shoot my stove.
Who else do you want to shoot?
My stove accepted me.
You don’t want to shoot me.
You don’t want to shoot
Anybody but the ones you need to shoot.
They aren’t here
And they deserve to be shot.
If you can judge me,
I can judge them.
I stopped at this store:
Green beans, cranberry sauce, cat food.
You walked up, took my wallet
And car keys. How long do you want
Me to plead? I am more than my stove.
I hardly ever think of my stove.
It’s there. In my kitchen.
If my stove were next to the front door
Or my bed, I might think of it more often.
What does your gun have to do with my stove?
I cook one thing at a time.
You fire one bullet at a time.
My legs look good.
I like their muscles.
Not many people have seen my legs.
You can’t kill me by shooting me in the legs.
You could, but it would be difficult.
It would be easier to shoot me in the face.
The forehead. The eyes.
The side of my head.
Or in my chest.
If only I could imagine your face
As well as I can see my stove!
But your face is not a face
That should be remembered.
It should be forgotten
Like a night when one has gone to sleep hungry.
You’re not hungry. You’re angry.
You have stopped your anger with sleep
More often than gone hungry.
Whose gun?
Whose moment of insatiable defiance?
When you could have shot me
And said, much later, he deserved to die.
You want to shoot so many others.
You want to shoot all these others
Except they aren’t here.
You want to shoot all these others,
So you don’t have any choice —
You shoot me or you shoot them.
You don’t have any other choice.
You don’t want to shoot me
But you need to shoot them.
You don’t have any other choice.
About Bill Mohr