A full-time job in the English department of a nearby college quickly followed. I settled into small-town life, charmed by a community where your neighbors are also your friends and no one worries about locking a door. Eventually I forgot about the big-city stress of crowds, noise and crime.

I felt safe enough to keep my phone number listed so colleagues and students could reach me after hours. I was totally unprepared when I returned home one evening to an answering machine filled with incoherent and horribly threatening messages. I could identify the voice—it belonged to a former student of mine. Shocked and frightened, I called 911, and an officer arrived in time to pick up the phone and hear the man threaten to rape and kill me. The cop recognized the caller as the stalker in a similar incident that had been reported a few years before, and immediately rushed me out of the house. I soon learned that my would-be assailant had been arrested, according to police, drunk, armed with a 19-inch double-edged knife and just minutes from my door.

It was revealed in court testimony that my stalker was a schizophrenic who had fallen through the cracks of the mental-health system. In spite of my 10-year personal-protection order, I live with the fear that he will return unsupervised to my community. Time and again, colleagues and friends have urged me to get a gun to protect myself.

And why shouldn’t I? This part of rural Michigan is home to an avid gun culture. Nov. 15, the opening day of deer-hunting season, is all but an official holiday. It is not uncommon to see the bumper sticker CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT displayed, along with a gun rack, on the back of local pickup trucks.

A good friend recommended several different handguns. The assistant prosecutor on the case told me I’d have no problem getting a concealed-weapons permit. A female deputy offered to teach me how to shoot.

But I haven’t gotten a gun, and I’m not going to. When I questioned them, my friends and colleagues had to admit that they’ve used guns only for recreational purposes, never for self-defense. The assistant prosecutor said that he would never carry a concealed weapon himself. And an ex-cop told me that no matter how much you train, the greatest danger is of hurting yourself.

The truth is when you keep a gun for self-protection, you live with constant paranoia. For me, owning a gun and practicing at a target range would be allowing my sense of victimization to corrupt my deepest values.

Contrary to all the pro-gun arguments, I don’t believe guns are innocent objects. If they were, “gunnies” wouldn’t display them as badges of security and freedom. When someone waves a gun around, he or she is advertising the power to snuff out life. But guns are no deterrent. Like nuclear weapons, they only ensure greater devastation when conflict breaks out or the inevitable human error occurs.

I never needed a weapon in the years prior to my terrifying experience. And while I learned not to flinch at the sight of men and women in fluorescent orange carrying rifles into the woods at the start of deer season, owning a gun for play or protection didn’t occur to me. But I’ve learned firsthand that even small, close-knit communities are subject to the kind of social problems—like disintegrating families and substance abuse—that can propel a troubled person toward violence. So I now carry pepper spray and my cell phone at all times.

In Michigan—and elsewhere—as federal funding for state mental-health care continues to shrink and state psychiatric hospitals are forced to close, the numbers of untreated, incarcerated and homeless mentally ill are rising. People with serious mental illness and violent tendencies need 24-hour care. It costs less to house them in group homes with trained counselors than it does to keep them in prisons or hospitals. But until states fund more of this kind of care, people like my stalker will continue to return unsupervised to our communities.

And people like me will be forced to consider getting guns to protect ourselves. I am lucky. I survived, though not unchanged. I know my fear cannot be managed with a gun. The only reasonable response is to do what I can to help fix the mental-health system. Awareness, education and proper funding will save more lives and relieve more fear than all the guns we can buy.

Photo: For me, owning a gun and practicing at a target range would be allowing my sense of victimization to corrupt my deepest values