Me (Circa 1986) carrying a M-16A1 Rifle/M-203 Grenade Launcher
These two words, gun control, can cause a friendly conversation to devolve into a name calling verbal fist-fight. A topic that almost caused me to leave this site about a year ago due to the vitriolic nature of comments on a post, since removed, that I had written about the issue. Gun control is a topic that I wonder if we will ever be able to discuss as reasonable people. In the aftermath of the Aurora shootings I have watched, read and listened to many people discussing the horrible tragedy that day from both sides of the gun control debate.
I realized while sitting in the movie theater that Friday afternoon watching “Dark Knight Rises” with my son that the movie going experience for me was forever changed. My eyes kept wandering over to the exit door in the front of the theater. I ran through my head what I would do to protect my son if a shooter entered the movie theater, things that were inconceivable to me just the day before.
One of the arguments often heard in the aftermath of the shooting is that if one person had had a firearm they could have stopped the shooting earlier. This is of course, utter nonsense. The shooter, I refuse to name him, was in full body armor, was wearing a protective mask and had tossed in either smoke or tear gas. Add in the confusion of a darkened movie theater and people screaming and running to get out of the way of the shooter and even the most hardened and well trained shooter would have been hard-pressed to get off a shot without causing even more confusion or more loss of life let alone having one shot hit the shooter in a vulnerable area.
To some a firearm is just a tool, to others it is an extension of themselves; in some cases it gives the carrier an enormous sense of power. The power I felt while carrying any number of weapons while I was in the Army is the reason I will never carry a firearm. The knowledge that I could take a life with just the smallest amount of pressure on a small piece of metal was far more than I wanted to contemplate.
I lacked the will to shoot to kill, I knew it the first time I fired my M-16A1. I think it was further driven home when I was an M-60 gunner and was throwing rounds downrange at a blistering pace. Carrying a firearm, any firearm was not something that would be a part of my life. I knew that at the age of eighteen. It was just too easy to end someone's life with a rifle or handgun.
Firearms are a part of our culture. Violence is also a part of our culture. The two do not mix well together. The questions become, how do we fix the problem? How do we make people not want to kill each other? How do we prevent criminals from getting firearms? How do we become a less violent society? I do not know the answers to these questions; however, I do know that we, as a nation, must address these issues. The answers will require both sides on the gun control issue to make compromises. If we do not we will continue to see massacres of innocent people like the one in Aurora.