I have conflicting feelings about guns. I was raised in a family of hunters. In the 1950s my Father was a logger and we were financially struggling. The deer that my Father and my Uncles killed during hunting season each year were an important part of our diet. The family would often spend a weekend or two at my Uncle's little tree farm just outside of Grants Pass Oregon where the whole hunting experience became kind of a family gathering. They were good times in my life but this warm fuzzy memory covered a darker reality that I would not be told about until I was fourteen.
This dark side of my family came out when my parents finally explained why my uncle had only one arm. We had been told for years that he had lost it in a hunting accident but the reality was far more disturbing. As it turns out, back in 1930 my Grand Father, who suffered from mental illness and alcoholism, had gotten hold of a shotgun and tried to kill the entire family. He killed my Grand Mother and my Uncle fought with him but was nearly killed. He ended up losing his right arm and struggling for many years with bad health from infections caused by the buckshot and fragments of his coat that were embedded in his side. As my Grand Father reloaded my Father, who was five years old, escaped from the room. Even as an adult he could still remember the sound of buckshot hitting the wall of their screened in porch when he ran into the yard. My Grand Father then killed himself. It was quite a shock to learn all this. We were one of those family tragedies that you see on the TV news and we hadn't even known it but my journey with guns wasn't over.
Around this same time other events conspired to change my feelings about guns and blood sports generally. First was the death of my Sixth Grade teacher in a hunting accident. A member of his own hunting party shot him. Then a few blocks from our house a young boy accidentally shot and killed his brother while playing with loaded gun. Another boy in my math class committed suicide with a hand gun. All of these events and more were weighing on my mind but it was a relatively small thing that revealed to me how much my feelings about guns were changing. I shot a robin one day with pellet gun. I knocked it right out of a tree and as I picked it up to inspect my prize the poor little thing pumped it's life's blood out into my hand. That day I stopped wanting to kill things. It's impact on my life was profound, perhaps because the bird was so small and helpless, I'm not sure why exactly.
The warm fuzzy memories of my childhood had met the cold hard reality of how very dangerous guns are and I found that my interest in guns and blood sports was over. So I can understand the appeal of hunting and even collecting guns. I have a cousin who collects antique guns but I feel guns should be much more carefully regulated in the interest of public safety, like cars. Our current laws have so many loopholes in them that we have developed a very large prosperous black market for illegal gun traffickers right here in the United States and these guns are flowing through our gun shops and gun shows. Why do you think the NRA fights so hard to protect the sale of assault rifles with 30 round clips and a dysfunctional background check system? It's not for hunters or home protection or even to protect our civil liberties, it's to make sure that U.S. gun manufactures can continue to sell into this black market. How do you think the Mexican drug gangs get most of their arms? Estimates are as high as 90 percent of their weapons come from the U.S. I suspect they aren't the only ones buying their guns on our black market. We need to stop this!
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