I have been around guns my entire life. I will be around guns for the rest of my life. Any attempt to get guns off of the street is an impossibility—and a policy based on the impossible is a failure at best and counterproductive at worst. Guns have been a part of American culture since Washington’s troops brought their own pieces to the fray. Black Americans have been here since the very beginning. We’ve been around guns long before we’ve been living in the ghetto.

When I was fourteen years old, I came home from school to find my cousins sawing a bunch of wood. “What are you guys doing?” I asked them.

They kept sawing and didn’t look up. Hsss, hsss. “Just building a room,” one eventually said.

“A room?”

Hsss, hsss. “Yeah.” Hsss, hsss. “A room.”

“Who’s it for?”

Hsss, hsss. “It’s for you, motherfucker.”

Sure enough, they built this little room for me outside of the main house, and that’s where I had to sleep from then on. Maybe my parents felt I was getting into trouble too much, maybe they were sick of my bullshit, maybe they wanted to ostracize me. I was never told what the plan was. I just knew what the result was, and that was spectacular: I was fourteen and basically had my own studio apartment. They made the space up and it was actually pretty damn cool. It had a carpet, a bed, and electricity. I had a fan for when it was hot, and a heater for when it was cold.

The setup was terrific except for one crucial thing: It didn’t have a bathroom. My parents locked the door at nine o’clock at night, and locked me out of the house in the process. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter if I had to pee. I just went to the peach tree that we had and pissed on that out of necessity. After a while, I started pissing on those peaches just out of spite. I knew exactly which fruit to aim for, too, since the low-hanging peaches at the bottom were the sweetest. Every Sunday my mother would make peach cobbler, and every Sunday I would never eat it because I knew I had pissed on the fruit. I won’t eat peach cobbler to this day.

That sort of solved the bathroom problem. There was a whole other problem that I had to deal with. Sleeping in that room by myself was horrifying. I was out there all alone. It doesn’t matter how tough you are: When you’re fourteen and you’re sleeping in complete isolation every night, it gets pretty creepy pretty quickly. They brought in another bed, and my brother Kevin started sleeping in that room with me. I was glad to have his company.

Unlike the main house, my room didn’t have a lock on it. It did have a sliding glass door, so every night I would put a stick between the door and the frame so no one could slide it open. The door was at the foot of Kevin’s bed. He couldn’t see through it when he was asleep, but from my bed I always had a perfect view of the outdoors.

One night there was a full moon, an especially bright one. I could see everything outside, and that’s how I watched a big, strange man come up to the glass door. To be fair, I don’t know if my imagination made him bigger or if he was just a big man. Whatever the case was, it wasn’t a good thing. The man looked to his right, then he looked to his left, and then he tried to open the door. Nobody could hear Kevin or me if there was any trouble, and this most certainly was trouble. There was no way the man could have seen me or anything else inside my room. I knew how dark it was from the outside. My heart was beating very fast. I didn’t want anything to happen to me or to my brother. Fortunately, I knew exactly what to do.

I grabbed my gun.

In the silent darkness, I chambered a round. Click click. The man heard the sound and he knew exactly what it meant. Everyone knows what that sound means. He turned around and walked off just like nothing had ever happened. After a minute, I took out the stick that was holding the sliding door closed and went outside in my boxers to look for the dude. With my little .25 in hand, I felt safe—and I was safe. I never found the man, and it’s probably a good thing for both of us that I didn’t.

Even though I’m not a hunter, I grew up with guns and I always carry them. There is a tendency to put people in categories, and as a progressive I’m expected to be opposed to guns. But all we are is the sum total of our life experiences. Guns, to me, aren’t a political issue so much as they are a cultural issue. We live in a gun culture, and I grew up in a gun culture.

The first time I ever saw a gun was in fourth grade. This classmate of mine named Vincent had a cute .25 in a little box. He just showed it to us and nothing really came of it. It was a couple of years after that that I became aware of what that small metal weapon could do. A bunch of us were hanging out at the elementary school that was down the street from my house. It was dark one night, and all the kids were there drinking beer and talking shit.

This cat named Derek—who’s a preacher now—picked up this .357 Magnum and shot it three times in the air. Boom! Boom! Boom! It was the first time I’d ever heard a gun. The force of that sound was also the first time I’d ever felt a gun, because the power of that thing reverberated through the air. The shock waves alone were enough to scare me. I couldn’t get my head around what it would feel like if one of those bullets hit you. I went home right after that, jarred.

But I wouldn’t have to use my imagination about the power of guns for much longer. Up the block from me lived two brothers who used to get drunk all the time. Then they used to get drunk and argue all the time. Eventually, they would get drunk, argue, and shoot guns into the air all the time.

Everyone knows where this story is going.

They were brothers and they loved each other. One day, though, they got too drunk and too argumentative and too trigger-happy. We didn’t see one brother accidentally kill the other brother. We simply saw the effects of him getting shot, and we saw the police and the ambulance come.

Now I had seen guns, I had felt their power, and I had seen their effects when used irresponsibly. It was in seventh grade that I first saw guns being used at their worst. There was a kid named Bradley who was a couple of years older than me. Bradley was this light-skinned dude with a lot of hair, and all the broads loved him. His ambition was to be an Eagle Scout. Bradley would go to scout meetings, and he wore a scout uniform. At the time he was a Life Scout or whatever the level is before you get your Eagle patch. I was obviously never meant to be any kind of scout, so I never really found out. But a ninth grader who is trying to be a scout is obviously on his way to becoming a pretty upstanding citizen.

I was playing ping-pong in my buddy Tommy’s garage when this other kid rolled up on a bike. “They shot Bradley,” he told us.

I couldn’t even believe it. “Bradley is never getting in trouble,” I blurted. “He’s a good dude.”

The kid shrugged. “That don’t matter. They got him.”

We followed the kid to where Bradley was still lying on the street. We got there way before the cops or the ambulance came, of course. We never had to worry about them coming to save nobody. I’ve never seen that happen. I saw Bradley there on the ground, struggling to breathe. The blood was everywhere. I would say that it looked “like a crime scene” but for the fact that it actually was a crime scene.

I quickly learned what had happened. These cats in my neighborhood always, always, always started shit. The previous Saturday had been no exception, and they’d been at a party with some Crips where they once again started shit. Cut to the present. They were standing on a corner and some dudes pulled up—those same Crips. Everybody knew what time it was, so everybody ran. Everyone, that is, except Bradley. He was sitting on his bicycle, thinking he ain’t in it, so he didn’t flee. Those Crips pulled out a .30 and emptied a clip into him.

I watched Bradley lying there, and then he took this deep, long breath that I had never heard a person take before. It’s almost impossible to describe what that breath sounds like to someone who has never seen a person die. Decades later, I read a Stephen King novel and he mentioned that a character “expelled the last of his tidal breath.” That was what it like, a pulling in and a last push out just like the tide.

All the various ways that I’d seen cats with guns informed the way that I saw the world. I knew that it was better to have one than to not have one. The cats with them didn’t have to worry; the cats without them did. We used to always say that it was “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” We said that so often it was practically our version of “Have a nice day.”

It was when I was fifteen years old that I finally got a gun of my own. Even though it was only a little .25, I just wasn’t scared anymore. Not only wasn’t I scared, I wasn’t even cautious. I felt like I could do what I wanted, and that I could go where I wanted. I felt powerful. There was a different feeling with it in my pocket. When confronted with danger, everyone’s usual reaction is either fight or flight. Only for me, now there wasn’t no flight.

That same year, I was walking home when a car started to pull up alongside me. The driver cut his lights off and slowed down. I knew exactly what that was. The guy in the car was from a different neighborhood and he started talking shit. Before I’d gotten my heater, I would have been running long before he rolled to a stop. Now I was still scared—but I was excited at the same time. I wanted to see what would happen. He got louder, and then I got louder. Quickly I said, “Nigga, I’ve got a piece. Fuck this.” I flashed my little .25, and he drove away. After that, I never was the same.

I always had my gun on me from that point on. Gradually, it went from being thought of as a tool of defense to a tool of offense—or even vengeance. When I was nineteen, I was at the Redondo Beach pier with a bunch of people late one night. My neighbor, a big, strong dude, started fucking around and picked me up by my shirt. Then he hung me over the pier, still joking, until he lost his grip and accidentally dropped me in the water.

Being dropped into that water felt like I was being smothered. Those waves were very rough, it was pitch black, and underwater my clothes seemed like they weighed thirty or forty pounds. It felt like somebody was trying to pull me down. It was horrifically frightening. I don’t know how I lived. I struggled to get out of the water, and I still don’t know how long it took. The concept of time was completely out the window. Finally I made it to the shore. I walked straight from the beach past everybody. I went to my car, opened my glove compartment, and got my gun. I went back to where everyone was, but my neighbor wasn’t there.

Now, let me explain the difference between a prank and an assault: A prank is when both parties are in on it. I wasn’t laughing. I had almost died, and my Jheri curl was ruined. My neighbor knew that it was a wrap. He knew what I was going to do. If he would have still been there, I would have shot him. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I drove home, soaking wet and freezing. I pulled into a parking lot where I could see my neighbor’s door, and I waited for that motherfucker. It was a couple of days that I did that. Fortunately for him—and for me—I didn’t see him. I was literally going to kill him, after he literally almost killed me. By the time I saw him later, I had calmed down and he apologized.

It wasn’t like my neighbor would have been surprised if I shot him. Everyone in my neighborhood knew the drill. Even after I became a comedian and those days were long behind me, my mentality really never changed.

When I was a grown man and a dad, my brother came over to my house. We had never been close growing up. A large part of that, I think, was because of how much better our mother treated him. It wasn’t his fault, but he always reminded me of those times and I didn’t like it. Now that we were adults, we decided to make a concerted effort to try to become closer.

I was hanging out with him downstairs, just catching up, while the rest of my family was upstairs doing their own thing. It quickly came out that my brother had just gotten fired from his latest menial job. He had gotten into an argument with his boss, and I have yet to find any boss on any job who enjoys being argued with. My brother was complaining and complaining and complaining about how it was unfair, expecting me to give him sympathy instead of simply telling him the truth.

Well, I did tell him the truth. “It’s your fault, man.”

If my brother’s going to argue with the man who signs his paycheck, of course he’s going to argue with his sibling. The argument got louder and louder, and it kept escalating and escalating. It got to the point where my brother stood up and delivered a low blow. “Does your wife know,” he yelled, “that you been out there fucking these bitches at Birdland West?” There was no question that it was loud enough for LaDonna to hear, and there was no question that it was meant to be loud enough for LaDonna to hear.

I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Now let me digress for a second. I know I’m breaking form, I get it, but I really need to make one thing clear. What I have to say is so important that it might save someone’s life. It’s so important that I’m going to put it in a special fancy box so that whoever sees this will always remember it. I’m such a humanitarian, I’m also putting it in this special fancy box so that even the cheap assholes flipping through this book at the store, wondering what that fool D. L. Hughley has to say, will catch their eye on this page and pause for a second to read it. Here it is:

If a motherfucker says “Wait right here” or “I’ll be right back,” you’d best not be waiting there when he gets back.

This is a universal truth. Don’t sit around, don’t wait, don’t get your girl, don’t get your coat. Just get the fuck out. I don’t know how many parties I went to that were broken up with one of those phrases. People hear that, and people leave. That’s it!

So I went upstairs to get my gun, and my wife forced herself in my way. LaDonna pleaded with me to stop, because she too knew what it says up in that special fancy box. “Please, don’t!” she yelled. “Come on, it’s not worth it! You would shoot your own brother?”

My wife and I often have a difference of opinion about the value of certain things. In this case, it most assuredly would have been worth it. There was no negotiating with me because I was seeing red. There was nothing she could do to stop me. My brother knew even more than my wife did what it says in that special fancy box. There was not a trace of him by the time I got back downstairs. He had driven off and was long gone.

There’s obviously a profound difference between how I grew up around guns and how most rural Americans grow up with them. Their primary introduction to guns is through hunting, and their dads teach them how to use them responsibly. For me, it was for when you’re going to pop a cap in a motherfucker or rob someone. It’s just the same thing as how a lot of parents don’t want their kids to learn on the street about sex. That’s precisely how I learned about guns. As a consequence, my relationship with them wasn’t as healthy as, say, some kid in Omaha’s might have been. It was only in 2008 when I stopped having a gun with me. That’s when I got an apartment in New York, and it would have been illegal to have a gun there. For me, it was a weird and unprecedented experience to be in a big city where I couldn’t have a gun.

I’m not some gun nut, of course. I don’t like people who love guns—that’s kind of past the point where I am. I don’t get those who go to NRA meetings and feel like the only thing standing between us and a totalitarian government is our firearms. I have a healthy kind of respect and fear for guns and what they can do. There are seven guns for every single human being that lives in America, and I am right on the button with that statistic. I personally have seven guns, three of which are semiautomatic. But let me be real clear: I’m not a hunter. There’s personally no sporting element in gun ownership for me whatsoever. I just think guns are necessary, even if I might wish that they weren’t.

I wanted to recount all my history with firearms for several reasons. A lot of people see me on TV espousing a strong progressive viewpoint, and they assume that I get my talking points from the DNC or whomever. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the racial stereotype, I have not drunk the progressive Kool-Aid. I consider myself a political progressive for the simple reason that the progressive perspective hews much, much closer to how I see the world. But the gun issue is really one where I don’t agree with many people on the left.

I don’t understand the position that guns are inherently “bad.” They obviously can be a very bad thing sometimes, and I think that there could probably be more restrictions, but I don’t think they should be ever taken away. Sometimes you need a bad thing to counter a worse thing. Our entering World War II was a horrible thing with a gigantic cost, financial and otherwise—but it sure as fuck was superior to the alternative. For me, a gun feels like a strong friend that you need to trust and one that you have to have.

This idea that if only guns were outlawed then everything’s going to be fine is not a very realistic one. It parallels the dumb Republican idea that somehow we’re going to get rid of all the illegal immigrants. If guns were banned tomorrow, and if illegal immigration ceased tomorrow, how would we deal with the millions that were already here in this country? It doesn’t make sense even theoretically. Any perspective predicated on eradicating one or the other is doomed to fail. It’s just like Prohibition. It might be a nice idea as a vague concept, but implementation is literally impossible—and any attempt would bring exorbitant costs, financial and otherwise.

As someone who is on the road every week, I’ve seen how diverse America really is. The relationship of Americans to guns is no different. In big cities like New York, the more reasonable and the more urbane people are, the less that they like guns. But in other places it’s simply as much a part of life as shopping at Walmart, hating blacks, and loving Jesus. Guns are a symbol of American independence. I did a gig in Boise and learned that they passed a law in 2001 that says you could carry your rifle in your truck at school, in case you were coming home and you wanted to go hunting. In Arizona, you’re allowed to have concealed weapons at a bar. I went to a strip club in Florida, and they had one of those signs listing all the things you couldn’t do. At the end of the long list, it specifically said, NO GUNS IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT. If some people have to think twice about whether they’re going to bring a gun to see a stripper, can their mentality reasonably be changed? They equate safety with guns, just like I do. A cop might not get there in time. But a gun can be relied upon. It doesn’t think or make choices for itself. It does as it’s told, every time. That’s the definition of reliable.

The other perspective, the idea that the police department is that thing that makes you safe, I don’t find very reasonable—to say the least. When I see a cop, I see trouble, not salvation. In order for gun control to work, everything would have to work. The police would have to get there immediately, they’d have to be courteous, and they’d have to be effective. And while we’re at it, I’d like a palace on the moon.

The same way that many “Christians” applaud the idea of a poor, retarded man being given the death penalty, Americans are really talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to guns. There is no greater arbiter of American values than Walmart. It is the center of the middle American community and represents our hopes, dreams, and aspirations, God help us. You can buy guns at Walmart, but you can’t buy a rap album that mentions guns in the lyrics. I like Jay-Z’s hooks, but I’ve never seen him stretch out a room. I’ve never witnessed one of his songs slaughter six people at a political rally. It’s not like Biggie’s rhymes took out Tupac; they didn’t turn up the volume to take the dude out. Battling on wax doesn’t kill anybody.

Gun violence is another example of American hypocrisy. Growing up, people used to do drive-by shootings all the time. I probably saw more drive-bys than I saw ice cream trucks. If I heard jingling, I didn’t know if Mister Softee was rolling down the block or if someone got a cap popped into him at the laundry and dropped all his quarters. Yet the first time this country got nationally aware of it was when this little Asian girl got killed in Westwood. Then the media was in an uproar about how drive-bys were a problem. Well, gun violence was always a problem for us—and that’s why it’s always had to be a solution for us as well.

The question that no one dares broach is this: If guns are as prevalent among young people in our inner cities as they are in our rural areas, why is so much of the gun violence found in the former—and so little in the latter? I’m sick of hearing that bullshit line, “Guns don’t kill people; people do.” Those people wouldn’t be trying to kill anybody if they didn’t have a gun. They certainly wouldn’t be successful if they were throwing rocks. It’s a vapid cliché that doesn’t get to the root of the issue. The real question is, “Why do people kill other people with guns?” The answer is what I’ve been talking about all this time: Black life, especially young black male life, is valued less in this country. It’s especially valued less by other young black males.

Many people in the black community rail against the death penalty. They are pissed off that the only people that the justice system sees as fit to execute are poor, brown, and retarded. But it’s unjust in the opposite sense too: How many people have been given the death penalty for killing black people? The deck is stacked on both ends.

I have to disagree with my fellow progressives on this issue. The death penalty is a deterrent in one very specific sense. I don’t believe that any criminal thinks, “I’m gonna get the death penalty if I do this,” and thereby refrains from committing a crime. That’s a long-time-preference approach. But the motherfucker who gets the death penalty? He’ll never do it again. Death is the ultimate deterrent. The death penalty is really about vengeance, and sometimes vengeance is necessary for the most heinous of crimes.

Yet our community’s focus on the injustice of the death penalty misses the point. There were forty-six people executed in the United States in 2010. That year there were also 6,043 white murder victims as well as 6,470 black murder victims. Over 90 percent of those were murdered by other black people. You ain’t gotta go to Detroit. You don’t see hordes of white people hacking hordes of other white people to death in Rwanda or the Sudan. Black people kill black people all over the world. It’s like Tupac said: “The same crime element that white people are scared of, black people are scared of. While they waiting for legislation to pass, we next door to the killer. All them killers they let out, they’re in that building. Just because we black, we get along with the killers? What is that?” And those words weren’t just true; in his case, they were tragically prophetic.

People get more angry about a cop killing someone instead of when another black kid does it. If we stopped killing ourselves, eventually people would get the message. “You know what? They value their lives, so we better stop fucking around.” Blacks killing each other is not even shocking. It’s the norm—but it’s swept under the rug. If you know, you have to do something about it. If you know, there’s an expectation. But if you don’t, then it doesn’t matter—and we live in a world right now where you can tailor-make your reality. You can live on the Internet and have a pseudo-life there. Because of technology, you can hear only what you want to hear and see what you want to see. If I want to hear this kind of news, I watch one channel; if I want to hear another kind of news, I watch another channel. If I don’t want to listen to the news at all, I can listen to music on my iPod. Uncomfortable truths become ignorable trivia.

I can’t completely explain the phenomenon of why black people place such a small value on the lives of other black people. I can certainly talk about the result of that mentality. It’s men being hacked to death by other men with machetes. It’s men fathering children with women and never seeing those kids. It’s men being as abusive as they can be, or selling dope to somebody who looks like them, or shooting in a neighborhood where people are going to school and kids are outside playing. Judges, cops, and prosecutors might put us in jail. But the thugs and killers of our community are putting us in the ground.

That’s how young, poor children are turned into killers before they’re fully grown: They are taught that they have no future, and see no life beyond their neighborhood. They are treated like criminals and branded as such. They see violence as the means of solving disputes and arm themselves to be safe. They’re trained to appear tough so no one would ever guess that they are suffering. They have no regard for their own lives, so obviously the lives of others are meaningless as well.

If you start walking on this road when you’re a kid, how the hell are you supposed to go to college or make something of yourself? When you’re old enough to get it, it’s already too late. So what’s the answer? Lock them all up? Crime is a symptom of a community in crisis. If everyone in a town developed cancer, the people would get chemo—but they’d also desperately try to figure out why they’re getting sick. I’ve done my best to address the causes. Now let me address the solutions.