Get rid of the weapos that make mass destruction possible.
More than 1,000 people had squeezed into that beautiful auditorium, my friend and I among them, before the choir began singing “Silent Night, Holy Night.”
Then I started glancing around us at the many levels of seating, the many entry and exit doors, the hundred or so rows of seats packed with people.
I could not help but ask myself, what if a gunman with an assault rifle and a pistol with its extended magazine walked in through one of those doors. With his AR-15 rifle he could fire 100 kill shots from a drum magazine, and 28 from the pistol. In 60 seconds he could reload and start over with fresh magazines. Many dozens of us concert-goers would be shot dead before we could struggle out of those crowded rows.
It could happen today in any American church, synagogue, mosque, Hindu temple, classroom, public square, community center, movie theater, hospital, country concert or crowded workplace. All the the shooter needs is those weapons and a trapped congregation of people. It has already happened many times, Las Vegas so far topping the list with 58 killed and nearly 500 wounded.
But there is no need to ban any gun. Guns were common in America long before the 1776 Revolution and will remain so.
What we must ban instead are the huge cartridge magazines that make mass murder possible. It shouldn’t be hard, since our hunters (including me) already operate under a federal law forbidding shotguns that can hold more than three shells. Feeling such compassion for ducks and geese, we should also do that for men and women and children: But we don’t.
That’s because during the 1970s, the good old historic National Rifle Association underwent a tragic personality change, pushing it into paranoia. It then managed, with the Supreme Court’s help, to twist the meaning of 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.
I have been part of that well-regulated militia, in 1952 as member of a college ROTC rifle team, in 1955-’56 as an Oklahoma National Guardsman; in 1956-58 as a U.S. Army soldier qualified as sharpshooter on the M-1 Garand rifle, with a final two years as a U. S. Army Reservist in Kansas City.
My service is not what the NRA means by “militia.” Their definition drops the “well-regulated” part. It includes pretty much anybody with a gun, including any half-wit with a grudge, any drunken wife beater whose woman has locked him out, any religious fanatic ashamed of his sins, any life failure who wants to die and get even by taking a lot of people with him. It includes “patriots” eager to protect us from “government tyranny.”
This means they must arm themselves to fight battles against our real well-regulated militia: the police, the National Guard, the U.S. Army and Air Force and Navy and Marines. That’s why today the NRA demands huge cartridge magazines and tomorrow will want rocket-propelled grenades. Their “militia” includes any paranoid, self-dramatizing zealot who, like one NRA president, raised a simple hunting rifle high above his head and proclaimed:
“I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”
Nobody wants to take away his damn gun, or any gun like it. Shotguns, rifles, pistols have always, will always, be legal in America. We need to keep them. Except for use in a true well-regulated militia, we do not need assault rifles with 100-round magazines.
“No honest man needs more than 10 rounds in any gun,” William B. Ruger told Tom Brokaw of NBC News in 1992.
Ruger, who died in 2002, founded the Sturm & Ruger arms company. In a later letter to Congress, Ruger asked that body to ban all large-capacity magazines. Americans should keep all the guns they own. But let the nation buy back at taxpayer cost every large-capacity magazine, providing free of charge one 10-round replacement. Just one reloadable magazine is enough.
Contact Charles Hammer at hammerc12@gmail.com