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The truthfulness problem is that there was actually no shotgun. As Kenneth Janken explains in his biography of White, “[t]he shotgun made its first appearance in a 1930 profile of White by Heywood Broun in The Nation” and was nowhere to be found in White’s “first extant account of the mob menacing his home” in a 1927 letter (17). Moreover, White’s mother and sisters remembered the story differently. As his sister Alice wrote in response to the 1930 profile, she read the article in The Nation “with much amusement. Where did the shot-gun come from?” White seems to have had no deliberate intention to deceive his readers when he included the shotgun in his autobiography. He told his mother in a letter that his “memory was quite definite on the matter of the guns” (Janken 17). Nevertheless, White’s mother and sisters are more reliable because they had less invested in the issue of whether or not there was a gun. As Janken concludes:

The keys to understanding fully why Walter White fabricated the armed defense of his house—when the truth of his involvement was both heroic and horrific enough—lie properly in his adult efforts to raise his national profile. He wanted to show whites that black men (including himself) were just like white men in their determination to be brave protectors of the family, and he wanted to stifle the rumblings of his black critics who questioned his race loyalty. (17-18)