My father has dementia and fourteen guns in the house, and my brother and I have not agreed on anything for eight months.

Dad's seventy-nine. Diagnosed in 2023, moderate now. He lives alone in the house I grew up in, in a rural county, forty minutes from me.

The collection is real — he hunted his whole life and some of it was his father's. Two shotguns in a cabinet in the den, a rifle over the door, and the rest in a safe in the basement. He knows the combination. He checks it. Checking the safe is one of the things dementia has not taken, which I've learned is how it works: it takes the new and leaves the groove.

What's happened in eight months, in order:

In March he called the sheriff at two in the morning about someone in the yard. There was no one in the yard. He had a shotgun with him on the porch when the deputy arrived. The deputy knew him and handled it kindly and left.

In June he couldn't find the truck keys and accused the neighbor's grandson — a nineteen-year-old who mows his lawn — of taking them. He went over there. He didn't take anything with him, but he went over there angry, and the boy's mother called me after, and she was good about it, and she was also scared.

In September he asked me who I was. For about forty seconds. Then it came back.

My brother's position: they're Dad's guns, Dad's house, Dad's rights, and taking them is the thing that would actually kill him — that it would be the day he stops being himself. He's not a fool and that isn't nothing. Dad has said, twice, clearly, on a good day: "Don't you dare."

My position: there's a nineteen-year-old who mows the lawn.

What I've done: I asked the doctor, who was sympathetic and said this is a family matter, which is true and useless. I looked into what the county can do and I don't like what I found, in either direction. I asked a cousin to talk to him. And in July I did something I haven't told my brother — I took the firing pins out of the two in the den.

He hasn't noticed. That's four months of me lying to my father in his own house, and it only covers two of fourteen.

My brother has the other key to the basement and won't give it to me.

Here's the thing underneath all of it. I'm not actually afraid of a tragedy, statistically. I'm afraid of being the son who took his father's life away in order to be able to sleep.

I need to hear from people who've been through this exact thing — a parent with dementia and firearms. Who moved them, how, and what did it cost? And did anybody find a way to do it with the parent's agreement on a good day, in writing, early? And to anyone who waited: I'd rather hear that now than find out myself.