Tom Diaz: No History of Guns in This Boy’s Life

WASHINGTON — Tom Diaz did not learn his love for guns from his father, Gregory Diaz. Tom Diaz’s father was a career military man, who came to the United States from Mexico as a teenager and joined a horse cavalry in Texas. He spent his whole life in either the Army or the Air Force. But he served, mainly, as a bandleader. He never liked the firearms.

The only gun ever kept in the Diaz household was given to Tom’s mother, Violet, by family friends at a time when her husband was frequently away from home and her children were very young. It was a typical military-issue firearm, a Colt handgun. Violet never learned to shoot it. She kept it in a locked box, and any time she saw a shadow moving across their property near Ft. Oglethorpe, Ga., she huddled with her three children in the bathroom. She stuck Tom, then an infant, into the empty bathtub for safekeeping.

Diaz never went hunting. He learned about guns the way many boys did in those days, in the Boy Scouts. The Diaz family had moved to Biloxi, Miss., by then, and Tom remembers vividly the first time he saw a gun used to kill a living thing. He was about 11 years old. He and his friends were in the woods. They saw a snake. One boy pulled out his gun and fired.

“I just remember,” he says, “that it was quite impressive to see.”

He asked his parents for a BB gun. They said no.

So his parents did not know what to think when, more than a dozen years later, their son came home to visit packing two satchels: one for his clothes and one for his guns.