CARJACK! WHERE’S MY GUN?

The gun issue is not all that black and white

I was raised in a Republican family by two ex-military parents. But as far as I knew, we never had a gun in the house. Except that they gave me an old, used BB gun one Christmas.

Of course, the first thing I did that afternoon was grab my friends (and their old BB guns) and run to the loft of a barn nearby, where we spent a couple hours shooting at everything that went by. Keep in mind, these were 10-year-old kids who knew nothing about guns and had never shot before. So you can imagine how many targets we hit . . . zero.

Until the end of the day when I, against all reasonable possibility, shot a bird. Shocked, I went looking for the bird and, eventually, found it. It wasn’t dead, but it was in a lot of pain, and so I had to kill it.

I suppose that, for a normal 10-year-old boy, the shooting of the bird would have been cause for celebration and a whole lot of bragging. But I was a little different (I still don’t kill bugs except for scorpions), and I was heartbroken about what I had done. I didn’t touch another gun for 50 years.

Sometime during those 50 years, gun control became a big deal. It probably wasn’t until the mass killings started to become common that the issue became somewhat serious for me (and most other people). But even then, the issue was not personal…