The shock and outrage of Las Vegas is simmering down to a
useful conversation in Montana, even Big Horn County. If any regulation of
ordnance weaponry happens, it will accompany a recovery of an old civics class
concept I learned in my one-room country school in the early 50’s: “…That
government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish
from the earth.” The rise of military ordnance weaponry in citizen hands in the
United States has been accompanied by a morphing of our nation’s proud principle
into something sinister: our government gone awry. With alarming increase in
mass shootings nationwide, our collective awareness has grown that we people have
a government out of our control. Control of our government is at the center of
many of us who would love to see America great again. What’s getting in the
way?
I remember a hunting season in the 50’s when my father used
proceeds from our custom sheep shearing to buy lifetime membership in a
national citizen gun-owner group. My brothers and I got benefits: discount
coupons for ammo, mailings on gun safety family promotion, a subscription to
the American Rifleman magazine, and (get this) piles of targets on paper. I quickly
graduated from a Benjamin BB gun to a single shot 22, and practiced as much as
my dad’s dribble of coins to me allowed me to buy 22 shorts ammo at the Trenton
General Store.
A few years later Dad revoked his life-time membership. It
happened like this: One snow-bright December Sunday morning on the way to
church, he had stopped our Studebaker at a bend in the gravel road. There in
the snow beside the road was a large area of dark grey. A pile of dead rabbits
and quail. “See that?” he asked. “Someone was using guns to go crazy. Guns have
a purpose: to provide for the family table.” He alluded to our neighbor friend
who had one of the new semi-automatic rifles and a Winchester revolver
advertised in our magazine. “Guns like this lead away from God. We shouldn’t
buy guns made to kill people. These guns are built not for good, but for
evil.” He didn’t know we had partially
succeeded converting our friend’s automatic 22 into fully automatic. We had enough
success to track the puffs in the snow right into a running rabbit until the
gun jammed and we couldn’t fix it. This didn’t end my gun ownership, but it ended
our fun shooting spree, and our fascination with that citizen gun ownership
group. That group became a guns-for-people-killing industry in our nation. With
it’s world record rise in citizen weaponry sales revenue has come our nation’s
most rapidly rising incidents of mass shootings.
Way back then, in the fifty’s,
did my Dad know what he was talking about when ending his lifetime membership
with the National Rifle Association? I suspect his only surprise would be how
long it has taken to get to Las Vegas. When will we have the sanity to apply
similarly sensible regulations for other lethal man-made materials like cars,
pharmaceuticals, explosives, pocket knives, etc, to guns? A big difference is
this: none of these other materials are specifically designed for mass killing
of other human beings. How could our cognitive disconnect get so huge? How much
money was poured into this disconnect over the last decades for whose profit?
What was predictable then was and still is preventable. But
it takes all of us citizens to return to our nation’s greatness, repeating the
words of Abraham Lincoln, “… government of the people, by the people, and for
the people...”