I saw a man with a gun once. It was just the other day. He pulled it out of his pocket to show me.

“It’s titanium,” he said, “I carry it everywhere. I once showed it to a group of German campers and it scared the living daylights out of them,” he said with a smirk.

I can relate to those Germans because right at this moment I had to stop myself from dropping my jaw in disbelief. A guy with a gun was standing not six feet away from me. To hide my shocked expression, I turned away to look at the orange poppies growing under the Sugar Bush next to my tent. When I saw his gun, I was suddenly torn out of my comfort zone, out of my false sense of safety, right back into the violence that’s out there, a violence that should not be here with us at this quiet campground. The gun was a like foreign object tossed at our complacency while we were all having fun sharing stories and some beers in the great American outdoors.

My camping chair was just a few feet from a fire pit that crackled and snapped as the flames burst open the dried sap-filled logs. The campground burned down a few years ago, along with many of the multi-million dollar mansions in this part of Malibu, California. There’s still the presence of the raging wildfire right on the other side of a sycamore tree, right where everything was still charred by the inferno.

It was great to get away for the weekend. Sleeping under the stars while being lulled to sleep by the ocean swell that was breaking just a few hundred yards from where we camped, was my kind of idea of relaxation. This place felt far away from everything that was happening in this world, from the news, and from the flashing headlines telling us about the latest gun massacre.

I was glad to be far away from the barrage of information pumped out at us from the radio, television, and internet feeds. Away is what I needed. In my real life, I live inside those events. My day job had trauma and bad news written all over it. I was a television news producer.

“I think everyone should be carrying,” he said as he tapped the outside of his shorts’ pocket where his titanium handgun lived. “I would feel safer if everyone carried.”

His smile and friendly face hid a darker part of who he was and what he was saying. He was the good guy with the gun. He was a retired cop. I couldn’t believe my ears that an ex-cop would be saying this to us. He must know that guns in the hands of bad people kill people.

Maybe his life inside prisons and out on the hostile streets running towards that danger we all run away from made him fearful. Did those bad guys turn him into something I don’t want police officers to be, afraid of? If he was afraid, how should I feel about what I see out there?

I know one thing, I wouldn’t trust myself to have a weapon.

Me and guns? I don’t think so. I could just see myself now pulling out the gun to threaten my husband if he wouldn’t take out the trash. Perhaps I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger if I was triggered by the right situation.

They say many of the gun injuries and deaths involve domestic disputes. If everyone had a gun there would be more funerals than divorces.

I decided to challenge my cop friend.

“Answer me this question, why didn’t those cops go into the school?” I asked him. “What was that all about?” I said turning my camp chair in his direction and staring him straight in the eyes.

“I think they were afraid of the bad guy with the gun?” I smiled cynically.

He lifted his leg onto the picnic table. A hummingbird buzzed his neck. He swatted at it and it flew off to find a sweet wildflower to suck on hiding beneath the burned trees. My friend adjusted his black beanie that covered his bald 62-year-old head and said, “It has everything to do with Defund the Police.

What did he mean by Defund the Police and Uvalde? Didn’t the Uvalde police department have more armored vehicles and body armor with an arsenal of high-powered weapons than most small towns? They seemed fully funded.

“It’s really messed up how Defund the Police has changed the police departments in this country,” he said. “It’s affected them. I blame it all on Defund the Police.”

“Oh come on. You must be kidding me. You’re telling me that guys who are trained to run into the line of fire to “serve and protect” were spooked by that bogus slogan?”

Defund the Police was a fringe movement that was not supported by the majority of Americans. A majority of Americans had no desire to defund their police departments. I believe Defund the Police stayed alive as a political tool to get Americans scared that anarchy was standing at the gates. But how could it explain the actions of the Uvalde cops?

“The cops really can’t do their jobs after Defund the Police became a thing,” he said while he adjusted his shorts which were sagging with the weight of that handgun.

“All I know is that I am ready. I have a closet full of ammo, I’ve got thousands of rounds so I’m ready no matter what happens,” he said.

I knew I needed to stop right there or this conversation would roll off the rails of civility. Someone else should k up the conversation. But all the other campers were still stuck back at “we have an armed camper in our midst!” I was waiting for them to catch up yet and help me out but they all stared in the fire to avoid a confrontation with this guy with a gun.

My mind wandered away from this campsite for a moment. Why the hell does he have a closet full of ammo? I pictured this hall closet in his nice suburban home just east of Pasadena, and a wall of boxes filled with shiny bullets.

Then I looked at his neighbors and all their neat tract homes lined up in a row. I saw their groomed front lawns and two-car garages hiding a sinister truth. They all had closets filled with boxes of bullets. Their backyard pools were filled with bullets. There were bullets everywhere.

And my mind wandered across state lines. I saw the bullet casings of the Uvalde shooter’s gun covering the laminate floor of the small elementary school. The shells pilled up under the desks lay against blood-covered green high-top tennis shoes and on top of canvas backpacks, and, the pool next to the bodies of the children who would still be alive if it weren’t for all those bullets.

The flames were subsiding now it was ready to cook our brats and open another beer.

I stood up and bent over the grill and threw the brats right onto the center of the grill. The cool dogs sizzled when they hit the iron grate.

I stepped over to the table and grabbed my sharp camping knife and cut into the fresh buns getting them ready to hold my grilled brats. I opened a packet of mustard. As I tore at the plastic pack some of the yellow sauce shot out and hit the bottom of my friend’s shorts right where his gun was hidden. I looked up at the face of this man with the gun.

He smiled and rubbed the mustard off.

“That’s alright, accidents happen. It wasn’t your fault,” he said as he adjusted the killing machine in his pocket.