Then there’s me. I’m the only attendee younger than 30, the only childless woman, the only Brooklynite. The only person who intends neither to purchase a gun nor carry a gun for protection after this class. I didn’t grow up with firearms in North Carolina, even though I knew they were all around me in the homes of my neighbors and friends. Sometime in the middle of the Obama administration, while I was away at college, my de facto libertarian dad started caring about gun rights and telling me he worried about my safety. First he bought a shotgun, which sits on a chair in a spare bedroom in my parents’ home, next to a few haphazard boxes of shells, atop a cutesy pillow that reads “butter my buns and call me a biscuit.” Next he bought a handgun and urged my mom to buy one, too. She keeps it unloaded under her mattress. You’d be so much safer if you owned a gun, my dad says to me each time I visit. Today is the closest I’ve come to considering that suggestion.