I own a handgun. I’m planning to buy another. Does that make me part of the problem?

Some people go their entire lives without ever wrapping their hands around the grip of a pistol, or the barrel of a rifle or shotgun.

My father will be one of them.

My father was turned on to Quakerism when he was growing up in eastern Connecticut and graduated from a college in Indiana founded by Quakers. You may not know much about Quakerism, but what’s relevant here is this: Quakers believe that violence in general is wrong, and are dedicated to pacifism.

As many Quakers did, my father successfully claimed conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War in the ’60s.

As many Quakers did, my father believed the answer to violence is not more violence.

But I’m sure I didn’t think about any of that the first time I held a gun in my hands, when a fellow college student loaned it to me one weekend (for no other reason — and I’m being completely honest when I say this — than because college students do stupid things). What I remember thinking about is how powerful and how exhilarated and how scared I felt at the same time, and how frustrating it was that I couldn’t find some place to take it where I could pull the trigger.

I also remember it was a Glock.

The brand name was a big deal to me. I’d been fantasizing about holding a Glock in my hands for years.

Why? That’s an easy one: John McClane.

Bruce Willis’ character in the “Die Hard” movies may not have made me want to become a cop who spends two hours murdering terrorists, but he definitely made me want to know what it felt like to hold a gun in my hands.

In fact, the scene from the series that influenced my thoughts about guns as much as anything in my life is in “Die Hard 2” — released in 1990, when I was 16.

As a terrorist threat builds in the first half of the movie, McClane tries to convince the chief of police of Dulles International Airport by saying: “That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun, made in Germany. Doesn’t show up on your airport X-Ray machines here, and it costs more than you make in a month.”

Those lines of dialogue may not have made me want to try to smuggle a handgun through airport security, but they definitely made me curious about porcelain guns, and German engineering, and Glock 7s.

I had no idea at the time — because Google didn’t exist yet — but years later I would learn that the Glock 7 and porcelain guns are both fictional creations, not quite but almost as preposterous as the notion of a sworn cop who mass-murders terrorists, cracks jokes about the murders, and gets away with them all.

The name Glock stuck, though, and when I hit the first of my many mid-life crises at age 35, I finally bit the proverbial bullet and picked out a Glock 19 at a gun shop in Belmont. This particular 9-mm pistol caught my eye because it had a slide finished with a high-gloss polish that actually kind of made it look a bit like porcelain.

I’ve actually never told anyone this story, about how a (great) movie that glorifies guns and violence at least partially inspired me to becoming a gun owner. But I decided to share it to illustrate the fact that people will buy firearms for some pretty stupid reasons.

Yes, I’ve told some people I got it for home defense, but the truth is simply that it looked cool and target shooting sounded like fun.

In some significant ways, in the 12-plus years since, I’ve become more thoughtful about being a gun owner. I’ve learned how to clean it. I’ve learned how to shoot it. I’ve learned how to store it properly with a child in the home. I’ve taught that child (now an adult) about gun safety and how to handle it. I’ve taken concealed-carry training.

I don’t know, however, whether I’ve become any more thoughtful about being a guy buyer.

This spring, I’m entering the “just-browsing” phase of buying a second firearm. And if you couldn’t relate to my first stupid reason for buying a gun (I wouldn’t blame you), maybe you can relate to this stupid one: because everyone else is doing it.

People will argue that they felt more compelled than ever to buy a gun in the past year because they’re worried that liberal-leaning politicians and lawmakers want to take away the Second Amendment, or that they’re more afraid because of COVID-19 and the specter of more political unrest or more riots.

But I think that, by and large, it’s because everyone else is doing it.

History has proven repeatedly that we’ll buy things simply because we know them to be hard to get, and that history played out with toilet paper in the spring, PlayStation 5s in the fall, and firearms for pretty much the entire past year.

In 2020, Americans purchased nearly 23 million firearms, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal gun background-check data. That’s an all-time record — one that could easily be broken this year if the current pace keeps up. For the first three months of 2021, the FBI reported that nearly 12 1/2 million Americans have initiated gun background checks.

Meanwhile, there were 19,379 gun violence deaths in the U.S. in 2020, according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. That’s the highest number of gun violence deaths in the U.S. in more than 20 years.

There can’t not be a correlation.

It’s something that certainly crossed my mind multiple times over the past few months, as I endured the long wait to get approved for another permit to purchase a handgun. (In a testament to the backlog of applications, I applied Oct. 24 and got my approval March 15.)

It’s something that continues to weigh on me, when I let it, as I browse guns online hoping for something I like to finally show as not sold out amid this drawn-out period of sky-high demand.

I thought about it when I read about the gunman who shot and killed eight people in Atlanta, and when I read about the gunman who shot and killed 10 people in Colorado, and when I read about former NFL player Phillip Adams fatally shooting six people in Rock Hill, South Carolina, last week.

As someone who bought a gun for a stupid reason, and as someone who’s thinking about buying another for a different stupid reason, am I part of the problem here?

My knee-jerk reaction is to say this:

I’m a law-abiding citizen. I’m in good mental health. I’ve been a responsible gun owner for many years. I’m definitely NOT part of the problem.

But when I explore my thoughts more deeply, I realize that that kind of attitude doesn’t sit quite right with me. I mean, those are certainly true statements. That kind of attitude just feels — I don’t know. I guess it feels unhelpful. Or unproductive. Or ... something.

We tend to think about guns and gun ownership as a black-and-white issue, with “gun nuts” like John McClane on one side and “flaming liberals” like my dad on the other.

I imagine, though, that I’m not the only one caught somewhere in between.

In between feeling like I’m entitled to exercise my Second Amendment rights as an American — I am — and feeling like the gun problem in America is completely out of control.

It is.