{"id":1213,"date":"2014-07-07T20:52:35","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T20:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/07\/07\/whys-this-so-good-no-95-patrick-radden-keefe-and-the-loaded-gun\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T20:20:19","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T20:20:19","slug":"whys-this-so-good-no-95-patrick-radden-keefe-and-the-loaded-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/07\/07\/whys-this-so-good-no-95-patrick-radden-keefe-and-the-loaded-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhy\u2019s this so good?\u201d No. 95: Patrick Radden Keefe and the loaded gun"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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It had been three months since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and stories probing the life and possible influences of the shooter Adam Lanza were still all over the news, so when I opened my New Yorker<\/i> to a piece entitled \u201cA Loaded Gun<\/a>\u201d last February, I assumed it would be about Lanza (who killed himself along with 26 others). Instead, the piece, by Patrick Radden Keefe<\/strong><\/a>, was about Amy Bishop, the Harvard Ph.D. who in February, 2010, opened fire at a biology department meeting after being refused tenure at the University of Alabama. Keefe must have been working on his article long before the Sandy Hook shooting, but the timing of its publication gave it an allegorical effect, adding another possible interpretation to a piece about the way people interpret and reinterpret stories in attempt to make sense of their lives\u2014and their tragedies.<\/p>

\u201cAfter massacres involving gun violence \u2026 one of our national rituals is to search for some overlooked sign that the shooters were capable of such brutality,\u201d Keefe writes near the beginning of his piece. We reinterpret the past, and after the Alabama shooting, Amy Bishop\u2019s biography seemed ripe for such exegesis. In 1986, when Bishop was 21, she shot and killed her younger brother, Seth, in the kitchen of the Bishop home in Braintree, Massachusetts. At the time, law enforcement ruled that the shooting was accidental, but after the Alabama shooting, the case was reopened. Had Amy been \u201ca loaded gun,\u201d a person at risk of committing violence, whose danger her parents and the Braintree Police Department had overlooked at great cost?<\/p>
\u201cA Loaded Gun\u201d\u2014which won the National Magazine Award for feature writing\u2014tells the story of Seth\u2019s shooting three times, each from a different perspective, each cohesive, and each leaving us with a new answer to the question: What does this mean? Our expectations are constantly thwarted, which creates a kind of suspense. We read on to find out what really happened.

In the first iteration, we live the story from the perspective of the Bishop family. The day Seth was killed, Amy\u2019s mother, Judy, was at the stables from around 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Her father, Sam, had also gone out after he and Amy had a \u201cspat\u201d (Amy\u2019s words). Amy told the police that she had loaded the gun out of fear of robbers and had asked Seth to help her unload it before it went off.

Here, the shooting seems a tragic accident that befell a close family. What we know about Judy so far is that she is she was a member of the town’s governing body: a good citizen. After Seth’s death she sometimes spotted a kid on a bike and mistook him for her dead son. Sam, who is Greek, \u201c taciturn and burly, with an Old World reserve,\u201d denied that his son had died at first, which makes him seem fragile: \u201cThey kept saying he was dead, but he didn\u2019t seem dead to me\u2026.He looked at me,\u201d Keefe quotes Sam as saying. A woman renting the cottage on the Bishop property noted that Amy had \u201cclimbed into her parents\u2019 bed\u201d by the time she got home that day. Young Amy seems to be a good student and avid violinist who had a tragic accident with a dangerous weapon and was distraught about it.

\"Ashley<\/a>
Ashley P. Taylor<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Our views of these characters soon change. We learn that Amy only barely graduated Harvard; punched a woman at an IHOP for using a booster seat that she wanted for her child; bragged outrageously, claiming familial ties to novelist John Irving and referring, in one of her unpublished novels, to the University of Alabama, Huntsville, as \u201cthe M.I.T. of the South.\u201d There were other examples of bizarre, troubling behavior.

The story also begins to explore another side of Judy. When Amy\u2019s husband, Jim, called Judy to tell her about the Alabama shooting, she responded, \u201cJim, did you have a gun<\/i> in the house?\u201d This quotation sets the tone for a new way of interpreting events: Judy thought Amy was dangerous. Did she know something more about Seth\u2019s shooting?

In the second iteration of the story, we learn that in old police reports it was not clear that the shooting was accidental. After Seth collapsed, Amy ran off and tried to steal a car by holding up a Ford dealership; she pointed her shotgun at some mechanics and at the police officer who apprehended her.

To show himself and the reader how it would feel to use the weapon with which Amy killed Seth, Keefe tried shooting a friend\u2019s 12-gauge shotgun. He describes how to load and reload the gun and how to \u201crack the slide\u201d between shots. While shooting, he remembered a detail from police reports: When police examined Amy\u2019s gun, they found it loaded. \u201cSo at some point after shooting Seth and before being arrested, Amy must have racked the slide, jettisoning the shell that had killed her brother and loading a fresh one in its place.\u201d This is one of the most affecting moments in Keefe’s piece, because it suggests that Amy had been prepared to shoot someone else after she \u201caccidentally\u201d killed her brother.

Amy had threatened a policeman\u2014why did they let her go? The answer came in another tone-shifting snippet of dialogue. \u201cJohn Polio,\u201d said Paul Frazier, who was the Braintree chief of police when Keefe interviewed him. Polio was police chief at the time of Seth’s death.

According to a Braintree police offer, Judy came down to the station while Amy was being questioned and shouted, \u201cWhere\u2019s John V.?\u201d referring to Polio, who was known for cracking down on police corruption. Judy had apparently supported him in her dealings with local politics. \u201cIn this telling,\u201d Keefe writes, \u201cthe famously incorruptible Polio ended up granting the ultimate political favor.\u201d Judy\u2019s citizenship is recast as an abuse of influence.

But now Polio, retired, is \u201ca frail old man with concave cheeks, wearing a white baseball cap that said \u201c#1 Grandpa.\u201d This image conflicts with the earlier portrait of a police chief who would \u201cfix a murder\u201d for a political favor. He remembers that Amy had been \u201c\u2018horsing around\u2019 with the family shotgun when it went off.\u201d Polio seems to not quite remember what happened, which both makes him seem innocent and highlights the fact that this cold case might be difficult to revive.

Keefe isn\u2019t just telling an ambiguous story; he also comments on his own storytelling and on the evolution of his characters:
The newly disclosed evidence reframed the public persona of Amy Bishop. After the Alabama shootings, the media had initially portrayed her as an oddity, a “nutty professor” whose actions were an extreme expression of the pressures of academic life. Now she was depicted as something more malevolent and familiar: the bad seed.<\/blockquote>
Judy\u2019s persona also shifted: \u201cThe grief-stricken mother transformed into a manipulative schemer who had subverted the law in order to protect her wayward child.\u201d But more than one archetype fits: Keefe alludes to Euripedes (a fitting choice, given Bishop’s Greek background), the film Mildred Pierce<\/i>, and the improbable story of an Inuit mother fending off a bear to save a child \u201cone winter day … some years ago,\u201d a passage with the quality of a bedtime story.

The third version of Seth\u2019s shooting, gleaned from Amy\u2019s novels, more police reports, and an anonymous tip from a townsperson, comes closer to revealing what might have been going on in Bishop\u2019s head the day she shot her brother. The anonymous source confides to Keefe that the \u201cspat\u201d between Amy and her father was so serious that Judy canceled an appointment for tea that day with the source\u2019s friend, Saran Gillies. \u201cThe hypothesis that these two women secretly shared,\u201d Keefe writes, \u201cwas that Amy had no intention of killing her brother. What she may have intended, when she descended the stairs with the shotgun, was to kill her father.

Keefe doesn’t believe the anonymous source’s story more than the others and posits that Amy might have brandished the gun “to make a demonstration.”

In order to help us relate to the idea of a demonstration gone too far, Keefe again puts himself into the story. Keefe recalls a time from a childhood trip to the beach when, angry at his father, he threw a rock, meaning to splash him; instead, the rock hit him. In relating the way his anger had once turned to violence, if accidentally, Keefe identifies with Amy and forces us to do the same. If our objective narrator once hurt a member of his family by accident, the idea that Amy Bishop accidentally shot her brother becomes plausible once more. We may not sympathize with the Amy Bishop in prison today, but we start to feel some empathy for her 21-year-old self.

We next learn that one of Amy\u2019s unpublished novels includes a scenario that seems a hybrid between Keefe\u2019s story and Amy\u2019s: a girl throws a rock, meaning to scare a friend, and ends up hitting and killing her brother. The account from the novel is the one Keefe essentially believes: \u201cThe passage echoed what seemed to be the most plausible account of Seth\u2019s death: in a fit of anger, a young woman wields a dangerous weapon, intending to frighten one person, but ends up killing another.\u201d

As with Polio, Judy and Sam have a vulnerability and innocence in old age that seems incompatible with a coverup. Keefe goes to visit the Bishops, and Judy seems like any older woman\u2014traditional perhaps leaning toward tacky:
She was wearing an oversized Mark Eck\u014d T-shirt that was tagged with fake graffiti. Her hair, which was still voluminous, had turned translucent white. \u201cGrowing old,\u201d she said with a smile. \u201cIt\u2019s not for sissies.\u201d<\/em><\/blockquote>
Judy serves Keefe a tuna sandwich \u201cat the kitchen table\u201d\u2014homeyness squared. Sam continues to puzzle over Seth\u2019s death, describing his research into what can make guns discharge automatically.

Keefe\u2019s telling of the story ends ambiguously. After Keefe tells Judy about the time he threw a rock at his dad and suggests something similar might have happened with Amy, Judy denies that her daughter meant to hurt anyone. It\u2019s hard not to be unsettled by the final paragraph:
\u201cAll I know is what happened. I was there.\u201d She looked at me intently, her eyes glazed with tears. \u201cI was there,\u201d she repeated. \u201cI was there.\u201d She held her stare, unblinking, until, eventually, I grew uncomfortable and looked away.<\/em><\/blockquote>
The inconclusive ending mirrors the way the story was left in life: Amy Bishop never went to trial for charges related to Seth\u2019s death because she had already received a life sentence for the Alabama shooting.

\u201cA Loaded Gun\u201d teaches us not to place too much stock in stories, because their interpretations can be so slippery:
When violence suddenly ruptures the course of our lives, we tend to tell ourselves stories in order to make it more explicable. Confronted with scrambled pieces of evidence, we arrange them into a narrative. Faced with the same tragic facts, those who concluded that Amy Bishop murdered her brother and those who concluded that she didn\u2019t both took messy events and formed them into a story. But neither story was particularly convincing.<\/em><\/blockquote>
If Keefe had just told the story several ways, without the meta-commentary, we would be left scratching our heads. Instead, he tells a tale about the very fallibility of storytelling, one which, bleak though its conclusion may be, we can believe.

Ashley P. Taylor<\/strong> is a writer in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared on blogs of the <\/em>New York Times, the <\/em>Huffington Post, <\/em>The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. <\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It had been three months since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and stories probing the life and possible influences of the shooter Adam Lanza were still all over the news, so when I opened my New Yorker to a piece entitled \u201cA Loaded Gun\u201d last February, I assumed it would be about Lanza […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[163],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-why-is-this-so-good","authors-ashley-p-taylor"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cWhy\u2019s this so good?\u201d No. 95: Patrick Radden Keefe and the loaded gun - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/07\/07\/whys-this-so-good-no-95-patrick-radden-keefe-and-the-loaded-gun\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cWhy\u2019s this so good?\u201d No. 95: Patrick Radden Keefe and the loaded gun - 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