He was rated sharpshooter on the M1 Garand rifle. Here’s how he feels about guns now
The calamity happens so often, you might think it was dreamed up just to mock the gun lobby, with its infamous slogan: “It’s better to have a gun and not need it, than need a gun and not have it.”
Not better for two Lawrence men — Zachary Michael Sutton, 22, and Monty Ray Amick, 53 — who in road rage folly May 17 reportedly drew pistols and shot each other dead. The more guns, the safer we are — so the National Rifle Association tells us. Had there been only one gun here, it seems likely that the single gunman would not have fired. Why would either of these men kill the other over baloney and spend the rest his life in prison?
But a face-off with two guns is different. It’s a duel. It’s gunfight at the O.K. Corral. This confrontation by terrified humans inflicted the death sentence on both.
It’s heartbreak waiting to repeat itself, every time we go out with a gun, and with every police stop on the streets. The officer agonizes over whether his subject has a gun, the man himself so fearful of being shot that he just might reach for his completely legal weapon. And be killed for that offense.
Why? Because pretty much all guns are legal to own by all but convicted felons now. They’re even legal for those with serious mental illness. Even the Glock pistol — which has no external safety and can blast out 18 lead slugs in nine seconds — is legal. Or the mass killers’ favorite: the AR-15 assault rifle, with its 30-round quick-change magazine and high-velocity bullets that mince human flesh and bones. Well over 11 million AR-15 style rifles are owned across America today. Why do we sell, and buy, such deadly weapons?
Good question, particularly given that in past times NRA members loved wildlife so dearly they backed legislation requiring magazine plugs in shotguns. Even today, this limits waterfowl hunters to three shots at ducks and geese. That’s just three at waterfowl. In Uvale, Texas, 19 children and two adults were gunned down at a school in a classroom in late May. It took far more than three shots.
Last November, hours after a jury acquitted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of two shooting deaths during anti-racism protests, a Florida gun dealer published an image of the boy brandishing an assault rifle, with the slogan: “BE A MAN AMONG MEN.” Bushmaster manufactured the rifle used in the Buffalo, N.Y., massacre last May. Earlier they had featured a photo of their weapon in an ad stating, “Consider your man card reissued.” So it takes a gun to make a man?
Two-thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth offered different advice which, I admit, is perilous: “…if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…If any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles…Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
This is hazardous doctrine. Still, it just might help us move away from what happened when two armed men faced each other in a parking lot.
I will admit that in mass shootings, when all else fails, heavy weapons may be the only possible response. Nor am I a gun pacifist.
At age 9, I started with a Christmas Daisy BB gun, then at age 12 acquired a birthday Harrington-Richardson 16-gauge shotgun. With that weapon I’ve shot 1,000 or so cottontail rabbits, Canada geese and bobwhite quail. They made lovely meals. In the U.S. Army basic training in 1956, I rated sharpshooter on the M1 Garand 30.06 rifle, the best infantry weapon available during World War II. But my buddies and I never believed guns made men of us.
As a Kansas City Star reporter writing civil rights stories in the 1960s, I received threatening phone calls. So I laid that 16 gauge on my closet shelf with ammunition close by — a wasted effort, since nobody then, or in decades since, has chosen to attack me.
I still own that shotgun. What will I do if a burglar breaks into my home? I tend to believe the Jesus creed will lead me more safely than dictates of gun enthusiasts and the NRA.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com
