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. dako