Our family’s ties to guns stretch over eight decades—or more. My birth dad grew up in rural Vermont and started hunting as a young boy. Mom remembered, not long after they were married, the two of them going into a wooded area where they hung targets on trees and shot at them with both .22 caliber hand guns and rifles. Mom had never handled a fire arm before, and many of her shots went wild. When she finally managed to hit the target several times in a row, Dad called a halt, they emptied and cleaned the weapons, packed them away, and got back into their vehicle to leave.
The road went around the woods, and they quickly found a little country store where they stopped to get a soda for each of them. The clerk appeared to be very upset, and Mom, being a caring person, asked what was wrong. The woman explained that apparently someone had been shooting not too far away, and several of the slugs had hit the wall of her house behind the store, and one came within a foot of hitting her young son. It was the first time Mom realized the terrible responsibility involved with using a fire arm.
My birth dad died when I was still a baby, and about a year later Mom remarried. My stepdad appeared to be a typical redneck in many ways. He, too, loved shooting, and when we were very young he used to load his own shells out in the garage. He had several .22 rifles and two revolvers, both .45s, as well as a shotgun. They were kept carefully up, out of easy reach of us kids. When Mom realized that my older brother, encouraged by his friends, was becoming more focused on the weapons, she and my stepdad agreed we needed to learn first hand just how dangerous weapons can be, so we enrolled in a shooting group sponsored jointly by our church and the NRA. Now, this was in the days before the NRA became a political action group. We learned how to handle rifles properly, how to care for them, and how to shoot them safely and accurately. If the story of the woman’s son nearly being killed impressed my mom with just how dangerous weapons are, what impressed me was the day our sister’s Mossberg jammed. The two instructors kept it pointed down range as they struggled to open the bolt, expecting to eject the bullet from the chamber. The rifle misfired as the bolt finally broke free. The slug hit high on the side wall, about twenty-five yards down the shooting range, and the amount of concrete it took out of that side wall of the armory’s range was impressive. This was with a relatively small Mossberg .22 caliber rifle, loaded with a single shot. What a larger caliber weapon loaded with a large magazine might have done I shudder to imagine.
We met on Saturday mornings at the National Guard Armory. My stepdad and older brother were both excellet marksmen, and the instructors hoped to train both to be instructors themselves. But then the atmosphere within the NRA began to change, with more emphasis on members joining militias with increasing talk of “protecting from enemies both from without and within.” At that, my stepdad decided to step back, not liking the growing paranoia he was sensing within the organization.
Dad had constructed a shooting range on our property, with a backstop designed to stop bullets far larger and more powerful than those shot by our twenty-twos. We were constantly reminded that the backstop was the only protection others within a mile or more of us had from the killing potential of our weapons. The day my brother casually shot at a robin that lived in our garage and managed to kill it, he stopped shooting for some time, having not imagined he might actually have hit the poor creature.
Dad was a Republican in the days when no resident in the state where he and Mom met would admit to being such a creature. We were all proud when Dan Evans, a Republican, was elected Governor of our state, Washington being a decidedly Democratic state in nature. I was proud to be a Republican when Dan was our Governor, as he was able to get both parties working together and constructively. Nixon hated him, however, once Nixon finally entered the White House, because Dan was basically honest and ethical, neither of which was true of Richard Nixon. He feared the idea of Dan Evans possibly being set up as a Republican candidate opposing him, but Dan didn’t have that kind of ambition.
Learning the truth of Nixon’s nature caused me to begin closely questioning the type of person one should vote for as President of the United States. I stopped voting for Republican candidates for President when Reagan ran, not feeling he was the kind of person I could vote for in good conscience. And they’ve gotten worse from that point to the present.
I officially left the Republican party in the days of George W. Bush, and now am totally divorced from the Republican agenda. When I was a kid the Republicans were the moderates for the most part; I laughed when I heard it being said that Bill Clinton could out-Republican the then extant Republican party. Now I am utterly repelled by it.
Assault weapons NEVER belong in the hands of those who are not actively engaged in fighting wars with hostile nations. And after seeing how many innocent, unarmed people are shot by unprepared and poorly trained officers supposedly of the law, I am coming to believe that most in law enforcement should also be armed with nothing more lethal than a taser or night stick, although those, too, can kill.
And I am both terrified and shocked to learn that the NRA is accepting money from Russians. What is the world coming to?