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

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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........

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