This opinion column was submitted by D. Clark, a Nevada resident.

There is a big metal box in my garage, filled with guns. It’s bolted to the floor, more secure than anything else I’ve put in my home. There’s a lock on this box, so no one but my spouse and I can get inside. I have to walk past two small bicycles, one with training wheels, before I can get to it. Once I’ve put in the code, and the electronic lock whirrs, I spin the bank-vault handle. Then, once the door opens, I find 16 guns and ammunition for each.

Four handguns, all gifts. Two I gifted my spouse, another they gifted me. The last one was gifted to both of us by my father-in-law.

Then come the long guns, those two-handed weapons of various styles and uses.

Three shotguns. One for bird hunting. Another with a pistol grip meant to protect from intruders. The last one is here simply because my grandfather no longer wanted it.

Five small-caliber rifles. Gifts, all of them, from my father-in-law. The one we actually use has a scope mounted on top. We can hit a dime at a hundred yards if it isn’t windy.

Three muzzleloader rifles. These guns, technically legal to buy over the internet and have shipped directly to your home, are designed to be loaded one bullet at a time. It’s a deliberate and lengthy process for each round, but it’s also the only kind of gun I’ve actually used to hunt.

Then, hiding among the others, is a plastic rifle I often forget to count. A BB gun. Modeled and styled just like its bigger siblings, this gun is for children. It’s for children to use so they can one day use the larger ones.

As I write this, one of my children is sitting in a classroom on the last day of school — at least I hope he is. They had a “soft lockdown” earlier this year. The school declined to give the parents any details about the incident, but my child saw violence. He was in the hallway, headed to refill his water bottle in the bathroom when whatever happened started. He’d been ushered into the library while the lockdown continued, and eventually sprinted to his classroom and his teacher locked the door behind him.

He still thinks about that sometimes. So do I.

A helpless feeling has grown in me with each shooting that goes by. Every day as I drop my children off at school, I watch them until the very moment they pass through the doors, the thought that it might be the last time I see them right at the front of my mind. I make a mental note of the pants and shirt they’ve chosen to wear that day, in case someone needs me to remember. Is this what I’m supposed to feel when I drop them off? Do they feel my unease as I hug them goodbye?

I don’t have answers. I have guns. Guns that were largely accumulated as gifts from others. They’re cultural relics, some of them. One is a muzzleloader with an outdated firing mechanism I’ll likely never use. But I can’t get rid of them. Even if I wanted to, how would that be done in a meaningful way? I can’t put them out with the garbage like a busted drill. They’re dangerous. I’m sure there are places I could take them, but something more than barriers to disposal have kept them here. They represent things like freedom, responsibility, security, self-sufficiency and family heritage. We do use them sometimes, mostly for target practice. We’re honing a skill. It’s fun. And, in the case of the muzzleloader, that skill had been useful for my first hunt. I killed a deer. We ate the meat from it for a year.

My feelings about them are complex. I once wrote a paper in junior high school about guns. We’d just learned about satire and Jonathan Swift’s perennial satire example of using children to feed society. I penned my own proposal: give every single person in America a weapon. How real Swift’s proposal to feed children to society has become. How real the satire of guns for everyone could eventually be.

I know I’m not alone in this unmoored feeling. It’s connected to my own place at the heart of the problem as a gun owner. Millions of people have guns sitting in gun safes like mine, in bedside drawers, in shoe boxes under the stairs, or propped against the wall next to the back door. Some of those people must be like me, and have these conflicting emotions whirling inside them like so much unsettled dust.

My spouse said it well when I brought my feelings up to them recently: “I’d throw all our guns in the trash tomorrow if it meant no more babies would die,” they said. “Not that easy, though.”

No, It’s not that easy. If only the answers to this problem were as clear as the consequences of inaction. I close the heavy door of my metal box, taking care to make sure that all 16 guns are there. I lock them away and I won’t have to worry about them. These ones, at least.

D. Clark is a Nevada resident.

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