I’m a youngish woman with a small, white metal box pinned to my coat. Painted on the box is a familiar red cross. The box has a lid and a latch. Inside the box is a small, grey, plastic pistol. Tiny grooves line the barrel and a near-microscopic trigger marks the place where you’d put your finger if it were small enough. The gun can be removed from its carrying case: a container, it seems, everyone is drawn to open.

“What’s inside?” Bandages? Antiseptic? Finger splint? An uplifting poem painstakingly copied from Reader’s Digest? A thimbleful of whiskey?

No. A tiny gun.

“Oh. But what does it mean?”

“I thought you were a pacifist.”

“That’s a pleasant message.”

In Toronto, this city we claim is safer than any place in the U.S.A. because firearms are, for the most part, illegal, a woman with a gun is as much a curiosity as a menace to society. We Canadians pride ourselves on our low gun-related death rate, our humanity, our moral superiority to our southerly neighbours. We think of guns as props in movies. We think of guns as something that only enforcers of the law should carry. We cling to our purses in fear when we cross the border, even if we’re on a plane or in a car.

No one is surprised when I admit the pin was sent to me from a woman from Illinois.

“She’s from the N.R.A., right?”

No, from art school.

Take it out of the box. Hold it in your hand. Tiny and detailed, it’s difficult not to marvel at its perfection. Not that I’ve seen the life-size original on which it was modeled. Not that I’ve held its bulk in my hands, run my hand down its length, checked to make certain it was loaded, felt the power of release as the first bullet sought its target.

I can’t even hit the outer rim of a dartboard, for heaven’s sake. Can you imagine someone as cock-eyed and clumsy as me with a real, live gun? Not even a water pistol.

I encourage you to inspect it, I tell people. Consider the work spent creating something so miniature and well defined. How does it make you feel? What do you want to do with it? Do you wish it were the real thing? Who are you when you hold this weapon, as impotent and childish as it seems in this form?

After twenty-four hours, I remove the box from my coat and place it with other valuables for safekeeping. The small metal box is still white, with a red cross painted on it, welded together by the woman in Illinois. Inside, there remains a tiny, grey pistol.

I am still the woman who doesn’t trust war, the mass media or the weapons industry. I am still the woman who hasn’t been desensitized to news reports of murder, especially in Toronto, my city, the city that I wish would remain as clean and safe as our collective optimism imagines it to be. There’s nothing as secure as self-made reality.

No one asks about the box or the gun again; I don’t remind them.