A thug shot my father 20 years ago. As a black Republican, I still believe in the 2nd Amendment — and in gun reform

At 1:13 a.m. on November 23, 1996, I stood in my parents’ house in Penn Hills, Pa., and pressed play on my father’s answering machine. Seven messages. The last came from a hospital worker, her voice as calm as if she were describing a spring morning: My father was in the ICU. He had been shot. He had been taken down twice for surgery on his belly and had “a way to go.”

I was 24 — a college dropout working the twilight shift dispatching ATM repairs, an unmarried father trying to keep my toddler daughter fed on $6 an hour. My father was a steelworker at USX Clairton Works, born during World War II, forged in poverty and the civil-rights era, the man who pushed three kids through some of the best schools around.

Two weeks earlier, he’d told me I had wasted everything he’d invested in me.

I later learned the shooting had happened days before the voicemail. A home invasion at an associate’s house. My father confronted the robber, tried to disarm him and took one bullet in the gut before the kid ran. He had been unable to speak — unable even to give the hospital his own phone number. For days, no one in our family knew.

When I reached his ICU bed, his head was swollen beyond recognition. His midsection had been left open under mesh and gauze because there was too much swelling to close him up. In a hospital elevator on the way in, alone, I dropped to my knees and made God a deal: Spare his life, and I’ll fast the first three days of every month for the rest of mine.

Then I heard a voice from somewhere say something, I will never be able to explain, clear as a bell: “He’ll be out of the ICU by Wednesday.”

The damage to our family came from more than just the bullet. My father spent 11 months in the hospital — 10 of them on a feeding tube. In those first days, my extended family nearly came apart. Relatives told me I was delusional for believing he’d live. One threatened to fight me in the hospital if I didn’t switch him to end-of-life comfort measures only. Another threatened to go to court for power of attorney. I hid the truth about my father’s condition from my sister, a dean’s list student at Hampton, for days. I was worried about how it would affect her studies. My father’s fiercest reason to live was keeping her in school, and I wasn’t going to do anything that would jeopardize it.

She got off the bus that Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We walked into the ICU just as they were wheeling him out to a regular room. Out of the ICU. By Wednesday. He is still with us today.

Thirty years later, I still fast the first three days of every month. Thirteen years after that night, I walked across the stage at Davidson College to finish the degree I’d abandoned — with my own children watching. The news cycle about his shooting came and went within a few days. A generation later, we’re overcoming the effects of gun violence.

When people ask where I stand on guns, I don’t give them the answer they expect from a Black man, or the one they expect from a Republican. I respect the Second Amendment. But I also believe what the numbers tell us: Roughly 44,000 Americans die from firearms a year. More than 7 in 10 murder victims are shot. And gun deaths among children ages 1 to 17 have risen 106% since 2013 — the leading cause of death for that age group since 2020.

In 2013, former Senators Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) tried to enact common-sense gun reform. Their goal was simple: Create a reasonable and effective mandatory background check for gun buyers. We must revisit that commitment.

The founders never claimed their work was finished — that’s what “a more perfect union” means. There is a right greater than the right to bear arms: the right to a liberty-filled life. My father fought for his in an ICU bed for 11 months. The least the rest of us can do is have an honest conversation.

Lenny McAllister is a political commentator and the author of “A Venn Diagram of One: An American Story” (Frederick Douglass Books), out August 11.