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.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 bed, his head was swollen beyond recognition.His midsection had been left open under mesh and gauze because there was too much swelling to close him up.

In a hospital elevator on the way in, alone, I dropped to my knees and made God a deal: Spare his life, and I’ll fast the first three days of every month for the rest of mine.Then I heard a voice from somewhere say something, I will never be able to explain, clear as a bell: “He’ll be out of the ICU by Wednesday.”The damage to our family came from more than just the bullet.My father spent 11 months in the hospital — 10 of them on a feeding tube.

In those first days, my extended family nearly came apart.Relatives told me I was delusional for believing he’d live.

One threatened to fight me in the hospital if I didn’t switch him to end-of-life comfort meas...