Every songbird and squirrel in my neighborhood paid for my developing skills at marksmanship. We had a black-painted cast-iron mailbox at the end of our driveway that was the shame of the neighborhood due to the countless BB "pits" knocked into it. That mailbox was anything I needed it to be as I stalked it from the thicket across the street: Jap sentry, Kraut solider, gook, injun. It never suspected that across the street, lying low and moving soundlessly, a per-pubescent sniper was pumping that gun to eleven. From my second story window I could take it out consistently - pump, lean the gun on the sill, aim and fire. I could hear the satisfying "ping" of the copper BB hitting from eighty yards away. I recall one time, home sick from school, watching a neighbor coming home, swinging some sort of bag from his hand. As soon as he came even with my mailbox - my range! - I popped up, took aim and fired free hand. I heard the smack of the BB into his bag before I dropped to the floor. But I was a kid, so two seconds later I was peering over the sill, and he was staring back at me. I paid for that one when my parents took the gun away. And rightfully so . . .
I'm older now and own quite a few guns - rifles and shotguns, all for hunting. But not all the guns I own are hunting weapons, and these are the ones in retrospect I'm uneasy about. I have a pistol - a big, bulky single action .357 magnum cowboy gun. I have no illusions about hunting with that gun, though I'm a pretty good shot with it. I bought it to shoot at people in a Worst Case Scenario situation. The grim reality behind handguns is, though you can stretch the point with fringe hunters, pistols are made for killing people. So are assault rifles.
Years ago, when the Soviet Bloc fell apart, America - the Windfall Heaven of all Weaponry - became a clearing house for SKS assault rifles. We found them in our local hunting stores in crates stacked up like Christmas toys at Wal-Mart, all still shiny and redolent of the spicy reek of cosmoline packing grease. When they came to my hometown they were eighty bucks a piece. Eighty bucks! I later got mine for one-twenty but still!What a bargain!
I shot a lot of rounds through it at the local shooting range, but the first time it made an impression on me was at a Critter Hunt on a friend's hunting land. Anyone who hunts deer at a certain latitude in Georgia knows about armadillos. These tiny animals make noise way beyond their size - every armadillo sounds like a trophy buck striding through the underbrush. We've all seen the riverbanks dug up and plowed over, as if hogs two hundred pounds heavier had been at work. These animals are part of the larger environmental disaster perpetrated by human beings - they continue to spread north, beyond their original homerange, with no natural predators to keep them in check. So a hunt was called to eliminate these pests from the bottom lands along this particular section of the Flint River. I, of course, brought the SKS.
That first morning we saw no animals and I was eager to pull the trigger. Armadillo fever! Eventually I soothed the need by lining up the iron sights on a knot-hole on an oak tree and pulled the trigger - not once, but six times,emptying the clip as fast as I could pull that horrible trigger. And the trigger is horrible, too, it's too loose, breaks too far back to ensure accuracy. Still, when you have a semi-automatic assault rifle - I challenge you to pull the trigger just once on an open target.
I won't bore you with boasts of my accuracy; it's enough to say that I never missed the tree. All six bullets hit a tree that was roughly the circumference of a human body. It was when I walked around to the far side of the tree that I had my epiphany: every 7.62 round that hit that tree passed right through it, seemingly unopposed. There were six exit "wounds". Remember when you were a kid playing army, taking cover behind trees when the "enemy" opened fire? Nope. Not a reality. Anyone hiding behind that tree would have been hit by every bullet. I crouched there in the leaves on a beautiful autumn morning in middle Georgia and speculated what all this meant. Your average American house, built of faux wood, with faux plaster "sheet rock" separating the rooms - it's conceivable that my SKS could shoot through the house and kill someone on the other side. Six times . . . or thirty times if I bought one of the magazines available in any of my favorite hunting catalogs . . .
Immediately after the Newtown Massacre - and it was a Massacre, let's not play with terms like "tragedy" - I went to my son's elementary school to pick him up. All those lovely children wearing their "reindeer" antlers made out of craft materials, carrying "goody-bags" from Christmas parties. Those babies slaughtered at Sandy Hook were probably engaged in something similar that morning. I thought about that tree I shot up - everyone of those babies killed was hit more than once - some of them five times, because that's the nature of an assault rifle. Keep on pulling that trigger. It's hard not to.
What is the purpose of an assault rifle? It's to kill people. Some people make a case of using them for hunting, but you can use anything for hunting: a crossbow, a knife, a spear, a grenade. The design of an assault rifle is to simply, chillingly, kill people efficiently. And let's be honest here, when we talk of "assault rifles" we mean any weapon capable of semi-automatic fire, chambered for high velocity rounds and capable of mounting clips up to 30 rounds. If we banned every assault rifle and they all magically disappeared, it would not impact in any way our ability to honestly hunt deer. On the other hand, using a lever-action Marlin with a magazine capacity of maybe five would severely restrict your ability to perpetrate a massacre.
Why do we allow our citizens to have them besides the mania of gun lust that haunts our society? Why do you need one? Is it to "keep your family safe" as I hear from people? How many times in recent history has some god-fearing homeowner utilized his assault rifle to keep a pack of mad dog killers from breaking into his home and menacing his family? A simple pump action shot gun will suffice there and probably do a better job - that assault rifle, if you miss your target, will go through your walls. How many times has a citizenry, armed with its culturally mandated right to keep an assault rifle, grabbed them up and run towards the sound of shooting to prevent a massacre from getting out of hand?
I'm afraid the odds are firmly on the Dark Side with this one, my friends. Massacres are perpetrated by crazy people who mostly buy their guns legally - not rapists and drug fiends. And let's go ahead and throw pistols in there too. I hear it from my friends on the Free Gun side all the time - the real problem is that not enough Americans are armed. That would solve everything. If most Americans were packing, these things wouldn't happen. Rep. Louie Gohmert on Fox Sunday had the temerity to say, "I wish to God she (Sandy Hook principal Hochsprung) had had an M4 in her office locked up so when she heard gun fire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off before he could kill those precious kids.”
I'm calling bullshit on all of that. I'm going to go ahead and speculate that at any one of the many gun-based massacres that have taken place in the last twenty years there were people present who were "packing". Enough of my friends and acquaintances carry guns to theaters, sporting events, etc. I'm willing to go out on a limb here and suggest that at the Aurora, Colorado shooting there was at least one person in the theater who was carrying a concealed weapon. But we'll never know because which one of them would admit that they were there, carrying a gun, and followed their very human instinct to duck, cover and run?
Because that's the reality - it takes law enforcement professionals and soldiers a tremendous amount of training, and "untraining" of natural instincts, to run towards the sound of gun fire. A disquieting ratio of soldiers under fire do not return fire, despite their training and the proximity of danger. How many of our citizens would have the wherewithal to lock and load and return fire? There is not one logical reason why we need more guns any more than there's a logical reason why we shouldn't manage and control guns - the way Australia did following the Port Arthur massacre, again perpetrated by a madman with an assault rifle.
Right now, even as I write this, the NRA will be funneling the millions of dollars at its disposal to kill the very idea of gun control, refurbishing the old myth that it's somehow enshrined in the Constitution, ignoring the words written by our God Fearing Founding Fathers - in accordance with a well-regulated militia. Well-regulated? Does that not mean . . . well, regulation? Militias, of course, existed in the 18th century because America had a visceral suspicion of professional armies, but once the idea of professional armies took over, the days of the militia were gone . . . like horse-draw wagons and a blacksmith in every village.
Violent crime in America has been on a five year low. Murders, rapes, muggings, etc are all falling. This has nothing to do with an "over-armed" citizenry spoiling for a fight, ready to "Stand Their Ground".
". . . criminologists point to a variety of factors for the continuing decline in overall violence. They cite a more settled crack cocaine market, an increase in incarcerations, an aging population, data-driven policing, and changes in technology that include a big increase in surveillance cameras."
CNN
Note that there's no indication that violent crime is down due to the Average American carrying a Glock to the grocery store. Note that by "violent crime" we don't mean massacres like the Newtown one. Those sorts of things are on the upswing . . .
And here's another thing on the upswing, the numbers of mentally unstable people who cannot get help or medication is on the rise. Hand in hand with our problems with gun control is our unspoken tragedy of untreated mentally ill citizens. Despite the shrieks of the Obamacare Haters, private health care options do not do enough to help those who are mentally ill seek treatment or afford medication. This trend towards ignoring the mental health crisis began in the 1970s and was enshrined in the Reagan Revolution of the Eighties. The problem, as Reagan told us with his loveable "Aw Shucks" manner, was Government. Take government out of the situation and private industry will solve the issues better and more economically.
Except it didn't and it can't. We currently live in a society where it's easier to buy an assault rifle and an extended magazine than to get medications for mental illness.
Take every single pistol and assault rifle out of the hands of untrained private citizens and violent crimes will not go up. We can hunt and protect our homes with average deer rifles and shot guns, weapons that are difficult to conceal and which have a low rate of fire.Think it won't work? It worked in Australia, a rugged nation of frontier individuals - conservative Prime Minister Howard, a good friend to George W. Bush said, "Let us not become victims of this American Disease" after an Australian opened fire on innocent civilians in 1996. He meant an overabundance of guns and a mania equating gun ownership with freedom allowing military human-killer weapons to fall into the hands of anyone, including the mentally ill.
Or at least let's have a serious, real debate about the issue. If our bridges were collapsing across this nation we'd have a debate about how to fix them and how to fund it; if our planes were crashing into each other in the skies above our national cities we'd have a debate on how to fix the situation. When terrorists used our airliners as weapons of mass destruction no one fought the idea that we needed a national debate on how to solve the problem.
Why can't we have a similar debate on gun control? Go ahead and look at the faces of the murdered children and tell me we can't or shouldn't have a debate on gun ownership.
Part of my morning routine involves reading European news sites in order to get a broad view on world and economic events - I can't bring myself to do it this morning. I can't bring myself to read about the horror of the American Disease from the viewpoint of a continent that can't understand why we refuse to see the root cause of the problem.
I'm ashamed.
