One dictionary defines anecdote as: “a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.”
There’s a tendency to reduce the validity of anecdotes when they’re used within an argument or debate, which is unfortunate, because anecdotes are often told from a first-person perspective, and we all live life from a first-person perspective. Every day. Our encounters with first-person-perspective anecdotal experience accounts for much of who we are and what we become, for good or ill.
This article is someone else’s first-person anecdote, but I’m passing it along because it resembles an anecdote from my own life.
I, too, had a scary experience with a gun when I was a kid. It was my grandfather’s 16-gauge shotgun. I was too inexperienced with guns at the time to be allowed unsupervised access to any kind of firearm, much less with something that had the power to blow a hole through the side of my grandparent’s house. Which is what I did. If either of my grandparents had been walking outside, past the place where all the buckshot tore through the wall, the story would’ve had a tragically different ending. As things turned out, thankfully nobody got injured.
Well, unless you count the galactic ass-ripping my grandfather received when my grandmother realized that he’d placed a loaded and cocked 16-gauge shotgun back into its vinyl case. (It didn’t matter to her that my grandfather had flipped the safety to the “safe” position.)
The reality of my anecdote is pretty basic: I was a young and naive guttersnipe who had absolutely no business being alone with a gun. The fact that my grandparents lived in the country, and that the gun was used to scare predators away from the hen house . . . a legitimate use . . . wasn’t the issue. The fact that someone my age would be infrequent visitor in their house didn’t matter. The fact that my grandfather broke a cardinal rule about guns didn’t matter. What mattered is that I blew a hole through the side of their house.
With a gun.
That’s what matters.
