I grew up with guns. My dad was a hunter and my brothers were often his companions. As a young girl I clamored to join this male bonding to be with my dad. He finally took me along on a hunting trip. When he had to club a rabbit to death to put it out of its misery after being wounded, not killed by his shotgun pellets, it was clear that this sport wasn't for me. I never went again, but it didn't stop the men in my family. My brother took the shotguns home after my dad and mom went to an assisted living facility.
When I was a teenager, I came home to find my mother trying to put a shotgun together in the living room. She wanted to kill herself. She had no clue how to assemble the gun so I found her alive trying, but not dead blown to bits in our house. She got help and I never had to come home to that again.
When I was a young women, I lived with an ex policeman who owned two handguns. We lived in NY where it wasn't legal. We were broken into several times in our Bronx apt. and in one of the breakins the burglars found and stole the hidden handguns. I lived in fear of when the police would come to interview us regarding the use of a handgun that was registered in Louisiana, fearing the news that they had been used to kill another person.
This is my personal history with guns. So no, I don't much like them but I'm not afraid of guns themselves, rather the ones who use them scare me greatly. Each time a horrific gun incident occurs, I think we as a society will finally come to our senses and realize that guns don't make us safer, they allow others to intimidate and attack us, they provide an easy way for the unstable in our society to kill themselves or others. Most of us don't want to be in a position of drawing down a bad guy to protect our lives and most of us would probably shoot the innocent if we had to try. However, each time, the gun lobby gets stronger. I just don't understand. Now we have concealed weapons in bars in Viriginia [but the carrier promises not to drink], and the national parks and trains. These were off limits for all the years I was growing up and since. But now, after Columbine, and Viriginia Tech and 99 mass shootings in the last year and a half, we are expanding the availability of guns. One gun a month isn't enough for the Virginia legislature, which is considering a repeal of that law.
During the anniversary of April 19th, the day an unstable but fanatic gun nut killed 165 people, people gathered in a national park under the runway for national airport to demand their "rights" with their guns strapped to their waists and slung over their shoulders. They were "peaceable" "non-violent" protesters, exercising their 2d amendment rights, protesting the imminent confiscation of their guns in a park which only recently, under the same President they fear, had those rights yet again expanded so they could carry guns in a national park.
Right wing radio hosts and others decry the idea that the words of support they provide, and the encouragement to hate and violence and fear that they dish out in a stead diet are the basis of any of the crimes against the innocents mentioned above. But it is those words that make people like Tim McVeigh believe that the government is trying to take those guns he loved away. It is those words and the support of others like him that made him beleive that he should kill 165 men, women and children to protest the "tyrannical" government. He thought it was a perfectly acceptable eye for an eye for Waco. This was where a gun crazed self-identified prophet, who molested children and raped women he chose as his chosen, preached about an Armageddon that he and his followers would ignite and ascend to heaven. And they did ignite it when federal agents, after a wait of almost two months, moved in again to arrest the child molester, rapist, killer [yes, when you kill someone in the process of a lawful arrest, you are a killer under civilized laws] and, yes, stockpiler of guns (hundreds or even thousands of weapons were in that compound). He and his followers then killed their fellow cult members, including woman and children, rather than let them surrender and very probably set fire to the compound to produce the Armageddon that Koresh had "predicted". [I didn't think you got credit for predictions that you created and then made come true]. And these cultists become hero's and victims to a segment of our society egged on by the talkers, as though they bore no responsibility for the actions of the government. [Whatever the tactical failures of the raids on Waco, only the most devout would dispute the need to stop Koresh from abusing his followers, especially the twelve year old girls he would take as his "wife" until they grew up a little and no longer interested him.
It's funny but the conflagration in Los Angeles some fifteen to twenty years before when law enforcement justifiably tried to arrest members of the Symbionese Liberation army and the hideout went up in flames, I didn't see them becoming cult heroes. Perhaps it was because of their color or their politics? They didn't have an echo chamber to "carry on their legacy".
If anyone should be protesting, it is the many people who believe we have too many guns in our lives. These guns which are available to every nut case, child killer, wife killer, and outlaw in America. And instead of trying to take those guns off the streets of our nation, we are spreading them like its Tombstone 1889 and the law just isn't up to the task of keeping the citizens safe. There has never been a national effort to stop hunters from hunting, but if you listen to the rhetoric, you would thing that these hunters have been hounded into submission, their guns on the verge of disappearing. And yet, the gun rights movement is so much more than protecting hunters, it protects automatic pistols, it protects machine guns, it protects concealed and open carry guns, it protects stockpiles of hundreds of guns and ammo. And when the NRA finally has its way, there will be no protections for those of us who would really prefer to have their coffee in peace and not be threatened by their gun toting neighbors, waiting for the spark that will set the guns ablaze because some idiot poured coffee on another idiot's boots.
