A Gun Owner

...Richard weighs in

Jun 07, 2022

Column by Richard Gilbert

The Second Amendment

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The 27 words that comprise the Second Amendment to the Constitution have been getting a workout lately as yet another wave of mass shootings continues. (I use the present tense because I fear it's not over yet.)

Richard at the Marine Corps Quantico Virginia firing range, during an executive tour

I started thinking of tackling the issue in this space right after the massacre of Black people in a Buffalo grocery store, followed by the little kids and their teachers being blown to smithereens in Uvalde, Texas. What struck me then was that while the horror was going on inside the school, what I'd have to call the Uvalde version of a "well-regulated militia" was not coming to the aid of the little kids dialing 911 because there was a danger these 'good guys with guns' might get shot.

So now the usual blame game is going on.

'Good guys' with guns are defenses against bad guys with guns.

Schools need to take a cue from the airlines and have a 'hard' door between the kids and shooters, just as pilots in flight are secure from their passengers. (Oh, right, I should also mention authorities prohibit bringing your gun on the plane. TSA folks on the federal payroll run you through a scanner first to make the point.

As school kids long ago, we had a 'get under our desk drill,' not for the likelihood of a shooter, but how we'd survive a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union. Luckily for my generation, we beat those odds. Exposure to radiation from microwaving popcorn turned out to be a more significant threat than the Russians. Not so good for kids today. Getting shot is now the number one cause of death in this country for school kids.

My parents gave me my first gun when I was 12. It was a J.C Higgins .410 single shot shotgun from a Sears catalog. A rite of passage. I got instructions on gun safety from dad with two memorable takeaways: 1. Always treat a gun as if it is loaded, and 2. Never point a gun at another person or yourself. If every gun owner obeyed my dad, it would have gone a good way towards reducing gun deaths.

Even though gun safety was drilled into us, bad things happen. One of my high school classmates died in a hunting accident. He attempted to climb a barbed-wire fence while holding his rifle instead of handing the weapon, barrel up, to a companion on the other side. The gun went off as he climbed over, the bullet striking him in the chest. Always ready with a quip, his last words were: "S**t, I think I just killed myself!"

My gun was for hunting. The killing was not a sport; it fed my family in rural Wayne County, IA. Later I sport-hunted, tramping through corn stubble in freezing weather, hoping to flush pheasants. I also shivered in a blind on Southwest Iowa's Forney's Lake, waiting for geese to come over the Missouri Flyway.

I took up hunting deer with a bow and arrow in my 20s because the Iowa shotgun deer season was short, and I had little time off. The Iowa bow season was longer. I soon learned shooting deer with an arrow was harder than it looked in the movies. I did shoot one deer with my bow, and it left a blood trail for me to find its carcass after several hundred yards of tracking. Seeing what I'd just killed didn't feel very sporting, perhaps because my first movie was Walt Disney's "Bambi."

In this legislative session, Iowa joined 28 other states, making it legal to hunt deer with semi-automatic, high-powered military-grade rifles. The rationale for a deer season for AR15s is that deer have become a nuisance. That's what was said about the buffalo as white men took over the plains from the Native Americans. It didn't take long for the Bison to become an endangered species.

I still enjoyed collecting guns after giving up hunting. Gun shows were fun, and I had friends who liked strapping on a handgun in a holster as they wandered through the show, looking at all the 'good' stuff for sale.

While attending a gun show in Southeast Iowa, I realized that a used handgun for sale on the table could become the weapon used in a drive-by shooting in Chicago. Buy a 9 mm Glock in rural Iowa, and after a five-hour drive east on I-80, sell it for five times what you paid for it. You could also buy a bump stock to convert your semi-automatic assault rifle into a fully automatic machine gun at the same show - for only 30 bucks!

After I took up ocean sailing, I got a Mossberg "Persuader" 12 gauge shotgun for defense against boarding at sea by pirates. (Set aside the fact that the pirates did most of their plundering in the Red Sea or Indonesia). My two favorite ports of call were in Bermuda, where a sailor clearing customs had to give up any weapon, including the rubber-band-powered spear gun used in snorkeling. The other was entering the Bahamas, where guns were heavily regulated. Eventually, I quit carrying the weapon on board because the salt air was causing a lot of corrosion.

Gun collectors love their guns. They clean them regularly, even if they rarely shoot them. They hang them on their walls, display them in gorgeous furniture, and store them in special rooms.

Hunters love their guns so much that they even name their dogs after them. A dear friend named his beloved purebred hunting dog "Benelli," a manufacturer of quality shotguns. The dog answers to "Ben" for short.

There are something like 350 million guns in the U.S. today. About 18 to 20 million are the infamous AR15. The rest of the world scratches its head when they think about our love of guns.

For many of us, owning a gun was synonymous with being a citizen and becoming a man. Only one in five gun owners belong to the NRA. But most fear a slippery slope to any law that would change the status quo.

The way to a gun reform legislation is through the vast number of gun owners, not around or over them.

We are the same people who support causes like "Pheasants Forever" or "Ducks Unlimited." We've been on the front lines of conserving our wildlife and our other resources.

Everyone I know, including gun owners, is sickened by the murders of innocent people, especially the children,

Some folks think there is momentum towards "sensible" gun laws. Perhaps there is. But unless support comes from the millions of responsible gun owners, forget it.