Aurora!
Our first experience with guns occurred well into our youth when our aunts husband insisted that we, in order to become a man, needed to go hunting with him. We had never used a gun before but he insisted that we needed to shoot a rabbit in order to prove our manhood. We shot the poor thing and only wounded it and it began to scream as only a rabbit can. Instead of taking the gun and putting the poor thing out of its misery, he insisted that we do it ourselves, which we reluctantly did. We have never been hunting again in our lives and we tried our best to stay away from this manly man for the rest of our life. All respect for him was permanently lost and we retain an unquenchable distaste for him to this very day even though he died several years ago.
They say that people kill people, however, people with guns also kill people, and, they do it in large numbers. If you don’t believe us, just look at what happened out in Aurora, Colorado just a week or so ago. To think that a man with a knife could have killed twelve and injured fifty eight is beyond the pale of imagination. Guns are intimidating and they are meant to be that way. George Zimmerman felt no fear when he hunted down Trayvon Martin because he had a gun tucked away in his belt. Do we think that he would have been so bold if he hadn’t had this thing. Out in the old West in the nineteenth century, otherwise abject cowards stood in the open streets and gunned down otherwise law abiding citizens because they had spent hours and hours practicing to learn to fire a six shooter very, very fast. It has been said that
George Washington, as our first president, required every male citizen to own a firearm. The National Rifle Association(NRA) likes to spread this bit of history around despite the fact that there were no weapons that fired over one bullet at a time and required close to a minute to prepare to fire once again. Out at the Century 16 theaters in Aurora, last week, the shooter, one James Holmes, changed the lives of seventy people within the space of less than four minutes. However, the last we heard from the NRA was that they needed to know all the facts of the situation before they would comment. It is interesting to note that Colorado is a concealed carry law state that allows people to conceal weapons on their person but not one of the over 200 people in the theater seemed to have one that they were willing to use to stop this carnage as the seconds turned into nightmarish minutes and more and more people were gravely wounded and died. But the NRA will readily tell us that guns prevent crime!
We do not know if Colorado is one of the 26 states in this union to have a stand your ground law, however, we do know that Florida is one and that George Zimmerman is trying to use it to justify killing a seventeen year old unarmed black male walking by himself in the rain with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea less than 200 yards from his residence. They say that in order to carry a concealed weapon in the 49 states that allow one to do so, most of them require that a person doing so go through a firearms course, probably sponsored by the NRA for a fee, so that they have a rudimentary knowledge of what they are doing and that what they are carrying might be dangerous or deadly to use. We still live in the state of Illinois, the last state not to allow concealed carry and we are very proud of that fact.
We once owned a gun and it was never fired once in the thirty years before we got rid of it. It got to the point that when we contemplated that if we ever needed to use it, that it might not even fire anyway because of disuse. My father owned an old pass me down rifle that he never even kept any ammunition for and that we never even saw him ever take it out of the closet where it was kept. What the NRA doesn’t like to publicly talk about is that so many of their clientele firmly believe that they need semi and fully automatic weapons like the AK 15’s and the AK 47’s and the thousands of rounds of ammunition that seem to come with them is so that they can protect themselves when the social fabric of this nation finally gives way to the armed insurrection that so many of them believe in on the way. So many of these people belong to organizations that have banded together to fight as one when this apocalypse descends on all of us. As far as it goes for us, we told our wife when we were still married that if it ever came to that point in our lives that we would simply go out into the open street unarmed as a family and begin to walk up it until someone simply took aim and blew us all into oblivion. We simply do not want to live in a world like what people like the NRA lobby for, and, we are sure that we do not want to live in the world that would surely come about after the anarchy that what we have described occurs.
We grew up under the protection of the greatest generation and they knew the power of guns and that most of them did not care to be involved with them and the things that people who are involved with them care to try to foist off on the rest of us. We watched last week as president Obama stated that AK 47’s belong in the hands of the military and not criminals as he spoke to the Urban League and while Mitt Romney pandered to the Veterans of Foreign Wars by saying that no gun laws would change anything that went on out in Colorado. And we watched the prelude to the Olympics over in Great Britain where the statement was made that only 3 percent of the law enforcement personnel there would even carry any weapons at all.
We grieve for this nation that has subordinated the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to the second amendment right to keep and bear arms. In Colorado last week, as in so many places in this nation in the past, seventy more people paid the price and lost their liberty and many their lives and it is just such a shame that they and all the others like them can not speak from the grave to tell us that there is a better way to go before it is irretrievably too late to do so.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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