by John Boch
GSL members are exceptional people. I’m far from perfect, but I like to help good people in bad circumstances—and GSL gives me the means to do it.
Here’s an act of kindness that still sits in my chest like a live round.
I get calls. Not the spam ones. The real ones. The ones that come out of nowhere from desperate people asking for help. When those calls end, the air in the room feels different.
This was one of those.
A woman called early Monday morning. Her mom had given her my name and number. She said she’d had a bad weekend.
I’m no stranger to bad weekends lately—my own “spirited” divorce has been a masterclass in emotional waterboarding. She had me beat by a mile.
Saturday night—roughly thirty-six hours earlier—three punks forced their way into her home. The one on point carried a butcher knife and went straight for her thirteen-year-old son, lunging at him, trying to put steel in the kid. She warned him. He lunged. She warned him again. He ran his mouth and lunged again. So she shot him. Once. (I told her there’s no extra paperwork for a second round.)
The intruder hit the floor. Her son was unhurt. That was the good part.
Then she did something most people wouldn’t. She worked to slow the bleeding and helped keep the man who had just tried to kill her child from dying on her floor. That wouldn’t happen at most houses. It sure as hell wouldn’t happen at mine.
Then the system did what the system does.
She told the cops she shot him. Then she told the responding officers she wanted to speak with an attorney before giving a statement. They cuffed her. Stuffed her in the back of a cruiser. Held her in an interrogation room. Took her gun. Four hours later they cut her loose with no charges and no apology. The same officers who might have found her dead child if she hadn’t pulled the trigger now treated her like the threat.
She was still shaking—not from the shooting, but from what came after. The prosecutor wanted her to come in for a statement. I advised her to decline his offer and tell him she couldn’t afford an attorney.
Worse, family and friends of the punk she shot were already talking revenge. She was camping at a relative’s house, trying to stay alive.
I asked if the police took her gun. I already knew the answer.
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“You got another one?”
“No.”
“You want one?”
The silence on the other end was the sound of an exhausted, scared woman who couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.
“You’re kidding, right? I mean… you don’t even know me.”
I thought she was a perfect candidate for one of those occasional GSL guns I win by dropping twenty bucks in the ticket jar at most of our meetings—the ones that make people groan when they hear John Boch won another one. One of those was still sitting in my safe: a Ruger Security-9 Compact with a laser. Perfect.
I ran the private transfer through the ISP, got the approval, and asked when she wanted to meet.
Of course a gun without ammo is just an expensive paperweight. So I tossed in two boxes of Winchester Law Enforcement defensive ammo. Because she had a carry license, I bought her a holster too. Then I threw in a couple copies of GunNews so she’d know who Guns Save Life was.
She drove down and met me at about seventy-three hours after we agreed to the transfer. Right after that storm tore through Bloomington-Normal. I handed her the bag at Freedom Sport Shop in El Paso. No speech. No ceremony. Just handed it over like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Because in that moment, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Okay—it also felt a little awkward.
A single mother who did everything right still ended up without a gun, under credible death threats from the friends and family of the man/child who force entry into her home and tried to stab her son to death.
The least I could do was make sure the next time someone came through that door, she wouldn’t face them empty-handed.
Editor’s note: There’s an update coming. OMG, is there ever.